The hounds, in high-definition (video included!)

WE admit it. We are behind on our hound posts. But it’s not for lack of working. The houndbloggers have been collecting video footage of the hounds at work and also recently attended the Lives of Dogs symposium at the National Sporting Library, which featured speakers (including noted hound man Ben Hardaway) on a variety of foxhound-related topics.

We’ve been asked not to share video footage of that event online, though as we understand it DVDs will be available from the NSL via inter-library loan. But we are writing up our coverage of several of the speakers whose topics most related to hounds, and we hope to have that posted in the next few days, probably over the weekend.

We’re also busy working away on a longer video of some highlights from the cubbing season, which ends when the formal season begins on the first Saturday of November with the Blessing of the Hounds. While you’re waiting for those, we’d like to introduce you to Flash, our new Canon high-definition camcorder, which is pretty wow. Or at least we think so.

Flash the HD camera made his debut this morning at the Boone Valley meet, where the scenery is spectacular and nature further obliged with a little romantic fog. You can see the results in the video above. Because this HD camera does not have as much zoom capability as our older Panasonic non-HD camcorder, we’ll continue to use the Panasonic (aptly nicknamed Zoom, for those of you who are keeping track of such things) for videoing any distant hound work we happen to be in position to see. But for the closer stuff, we’ll try to stick to HD as much as possible.