Butter Wouldn't Melt...

Over the years, many of you have come to know Mutt - my trusty photographer-assistant and to look at her now you would think butter wouldn't melt.

Sadly, the old girl is now nearing 15 years old, and with it has come traits that one would expect from a puppy. The long and the short of it is, she has a form of doggy-dementia. She has started bin dipping (ugh!), redistributing the contents of the recycling box and recently, she was caught stealing a sandwich from the work surface in our dog-sitters kitchen - oh the shame of it! She has never done this in the 14 years she has been part of our family, just as she has never run into the main road when walking her on The Common...until last week. Now that was a heart-stopping moment! However, one of the things she has always done is, if we leave her for a spell, she would find something of human ownership, often a slipper, and carry it off to her bed - her little den. This was quite an endearing trait of hers, although on one occasion it was himselfs phone, and another, his wallet, both manageably moved and yet both undamaged. On both occasions there were some perplexed expletives as to who had moved them?

Mutt asleep next to my camera bag - so tired after her little escapade!

Roll on to this morning and I had had to leave her downstairs whilst I carried out some tasks upstairs for about an hour. On returning to my study, I found mutt happily asleep on her rug which is snugly situated between my desk and the radiator. I noticed she had chosen to make a pillow from my lovely leather and canvas Olympus camera bag, which also happened to be temporarily next to my desk. I jokingly passed comment to her that it surely couldn't be very comfortable (Yes, we do talk to our dog!!) and I thought nothing more of it.

Time had now come for me to sit back at my desk to tackle the edit from the theatrical shoot I'd had in London yesterday, firstly loading the few hundred images off the memory card from my Olympus E-M10, then the memory card from the Olympus E-M5ii...wait! Where was my E-M5ii?!! It wasn't in my camera bag, where I thought it should be...maybe I was suffering temporary dementia? Had I left it on the kitchen table? As I walked into the kitchen my heart sank. There, next to mutts little doggy-den was my E-M5ii + 40-150mm f2.8 Pro lens - all 1.5kg (and £1.5k+) of it! Eeeek!!!

I had presence of mind to snap a pic of it to show himself later, as he probably wouldn't believe me if I told him, and then I swiftly scooped it up from the floor, checking it over for teeth marks - not one!! The only mark I could find was a scratch on one edge of the lens hood, consistent with it being dragged the 10 metres or so along a quarry-tiled floor. I can only assume she had carried it with the strap in her mouth (she does something similar with her own lead too). A quick switch on and everything appeared to be in order - thankfully.

All I can say is that Mutt the Assistant must also be delighted with the lightened load that the OM-D offers - I couldn't have seen her managing my DSLR equivalent in the same way!  Tomorrow I fly back to Ireland to host my last West Cork Photography Break of the spring season. Gone are the days of the whole of my hand luggage allowance being used up with my much larger DSLR kit. I will travel, as I often do, with just hand luggage. This will include all of my OM-D cameras and lenses, as it has done for the past year or so since switching kit.  My back is loving the much lightened load and the bag has room to spare.