First off, I hate writing posts like this because they make me really sad.  I have a habit of becoming emotionally attached to the horses I work with.  I’ve been criticised for this  but in my defence getting emotionally involved with the horses I photograph means I to do a better, more thorough and complete job.  The horses are the reason I get up in the dark at Stupid O’Clock and drive for 90 mins to photograph a horse at trackwork or the beach (or drive 1500km to a stud farm laden with equipment).  It’s why I run back and forth from mounting yard to horse stalls on raceday, even when my feet, neck and shoulders are aching from carrying heavy equipment.  Why I sit for hours researching bloodlines and race records, and why I get up early and stagger in the door after midnight when doing a day trip flying between Melbourne and Sydney, or Melbourne and Brisbane. When I got an email from one of my favourite people in the industry telling me the stallion we al...

It seems like forever since I have sat down at my computer (or my iPad) and written on this Blog.  To my regular readers I'm sorry.  To begin with I guess things just seemed to be sailing along so nicely that I almost forgot about writing.  Or at other times I think just keeping up with everything meant that I was wasn't devoting that 30 minutes or so most days to writing.   However in August it became apparent to me that all wasn't well with me.  For someone who's always been well, and the only 2 times I've been in hospital was for the birth of my two children, this came as a bit of a shock.  But then I guess "The Spanish Dancer", or "The Big C", or pure and simply cancer, is always going to be a shock.  I think it's one of life's real cruelties that a girl had to get cancer to get loads and loads of really beautiful and cool flowers. I won't go in to too many details here, but suffice to say that I have been extremely fortunate...