border collie conformation and structure

I recently joined a border collie structure group on Facebook...the group was set up for people with border collies to join and then post stacked pictures of their dog for structure evaluation from the other members...it turned out to be a very interesting group of people...in the short lifespan of this group, there were some pretty flaming posts and very ugly comments that went back and forth and unfortunately, there were a couple of members who used the group as a means to attack each other and so the group was shortly deleted because of the animosity that ensued...seems as though there is huge contention in the border collie world between the "conformation" people and the "working dog" people and there are some pretty strong feelings and opinions about what is correct and what is not in the breed...conformation breeders were bashing other conformation breeders and working/performance dog breeders were bashing conformation breeders and conformation breeders were bashing performance dog breeders, etc etc...it made for some very interesting and entertaining reading but it also made me somewhat uneasy to post any pictures of my own dogs...it was then that I actually realized I had not one picture of Triumph standing still, all of his pics are that of some kind of agility action shot :)

So I attempted to take some...ha!!!!  Getting Triumph to stand still and stay in a "stacked" position while I backed up and took a picture of him was no easy feat!!!!

I did manage to get a couple pictures...pictures taken on an iphone do not make for beautiful conformation shots and I also quickly realized that this would be a two-person job!


In the pic below, I hung a toy from a plant post so that he would have something to look at and I told him to stand and stay!  He does have a very nice topline but he was having a bad hair day so his topline looks like there's a hole in it - there is not!  And to me, he looks fat in this picture but he is far from fat!

In the below picture, he was watching Nancy and Rudy work and was peering around a tree - he was just free-standing and this was not a stacked picture

But hey, we don't care what anyone on some Facebook group thinks about his structure...in his humble opinion, he is absolutely gorgeous...and in my opinion, he is perfect!