Dunedin’s police dog section star on the front cover of latest edition of the annual Police Dog Trust Calendar.
Further photos of the dogs are interspersed throughout the calendar, including one taken at sunset at the Mosgiel racecourse.
Senior Constable Jane Dunn is a police forensics photographer and has taken photos of crime scenes for 10 years. She started doing the dog calendar seven years ago.
She said the life of a forensic photographer could get pretty tough, so turning the camera towards their canine companions was a great mental release.
"We photograph a lot of death and destruction, so it’s quite nice to be able to look through the lens and photograph something that’s not," Snr Const Dunn said.
But photographing police dogs was far from easy.
While dogs were very well trained, the dog handler played a vital role in guiding their dogs and understanding their relationship to the animal, to ensure everyone was safe.
A standard issue police dog toy could also come in handy.
She was lucky Dunedin’s police dog handlers had such a great relationship with the animals and it made her role as photographer easy, she said.
Even if a photo didn’t make it into the calendar, the handlers had photos of their dogs they could keep forever, which was especially poignant in the case of dogs that died in the line of duty.
She hoped her photos in the calendar captured the strong and loving bond between dog and handler.
Dunedin dog section head Sergeant Mike Calvert said the calendar was good publicity for Dunedin’s dog section and came down to Snr Const Dunn’s skill with a camera.
"It’s shining a good light on the work that the dog handlers here in Dunedin do."
