For the past seven years, my friend Greg has gone to the Pooch Party in Nampa to take pictures of dogs. He’s invited me every year, but somehow it always fell on a football game, a band thing, or something else involving the kids. This year, for the first time, I was finally able to go with him.

And now I understand why he looks forward to this day so much.

The Pooch Party happens on the last day the pool is open for the season. They let all the dogs come in and take over the pool for the day. There are pet vendors, a giant foam area for the dogs to play in, and dogs EVERYWHERE.

Greg says it’s his favorite day of the year because he loves seeing the pure joy in every dog.

After going myself, I have to agree.

It really is pure joy.

Dogs were running, swimming, jumping, chasing balls, playing with each other and just having the absolute time of their lives. Some would launch themselves into the pool, come running out, shake water everywhere and immediately do it all over again.

There were SO many dogs.

And somehow, despite having that many dogs all packed together, they were incredibly well behaved. I didn’t see any dogs trying to fight each other or even barking at other dogs. They were just happy to be there.

I only saw two dogs poop in the pool.

LOL.

I’m not sure what that says about my observational skills, but I was keeping track.

Of course, I was there to take pictures, and I quickly learned that this is not exactly my strong suit in photography.

I really wish I would have changed my camera settings and used a less shallow depth of field. I had way too much blur. When I look closely at some of the pictures, a dog’s nose might be perfectly in focus but its eyes aren’t. Or I’ll have one dog in focus while the dog standing right behind it is completely blurry.

It’s one of those things you don’t always notice until you get home and start looking through everything.

I also had a hard time figuring out exactly what kind of pictures I wanted to take. Did I want close-ups of individual dogs? Dogs jumping into the water? Dogs shaking water everywhere? A whole group of dogs together? Action shots? Just funny faces?

Apparently the answer was: all of the above.

I spent quite a bit of time hanging around a big group of golden retrievers. I mean, come on. Golden retrievers are just adorable, and there were SO many of them. I could have stayed there taking pictures all day.

Even though I’m not thrilled with some of my photography from the day, I had a great time.

I think that’s part of why I enjoy going out with other photographers. You can come home with photos that aren’t quite what you hoped for, but you still learned something. Next time I’ll know that when I’m photographing a bunch of moving dogs, I don’t necessarily want that super shallow depth of field I’ve used for some of my other photography.

And I’ll probably spend less time worrying about whether every photo is technically perfect.

Because watching all those dogs having the time of their lives was pretty dang fun.

Now I understand why Greg has been going for seven years.

Pure joy.

And maybe a little poop in the pool.

My friend Greg in action.