ADVENTURE PHOTOGRAPHY

with Cathy & Gordon ILLG

PHOTO TIPS

A boat trip is what we really had in mind, so we chartered one on a different body of water in the same general area, hoping it would make up for the one we had planned our trip around. And there were indeed birds, but they were not very tolerant of photographers. Birds that will casually stare into the barrel of a lens from a few feet away in places like Ding Darling were too skittish here for anything but the most mediocre snapshots. It was another disappointment. The captain however, told us about some cranes that could be found in a wetland near a retirement community. "What kind of cranes?" I asked. "Whooping cranes, I think," he replied.

Now our spirits were picking up a bit, even though we weren’t sure the captain could tell a whooping crane from a construction crane. We located the retirement community easy enough, and lo and behold there were cranes...but they were sandhill cranes. Around another corner though, there were indeed a pair of whooping cranes. At first we were worried about scaring them. Then they started foraging in someone’s yard as the homeowner got out of his car and walked past the cranes calling them by name. The birds recognized their names better than our cat does (all that means is that the cranes looked up).

Although it was incredible to be so close to these endangered birds, photographing them in someone’s yard wasn’t an ideal situation. We hardly had time to wish "if only..." before the birds wandered over to the wetland. Here the birds foraged, preened and danced, sometimes so close we couldn’t focus on them. I don’t want to get into a debate regarding if it’s in the birds’ best interest to be this tolerant of humans. All I know is it was an incredible experience being accepted as members of the flock--ungainly, uncoordinated flock members. And being able to spend some time with these birds turned a day that we had already written off as a disaster into a wonderful experience.

There will always be trips that don’t go exactly as planned. Either the species that you want to photograph isn’t cooperative, the weather you want to photograph the species in never occurs, or any one of a hundred other possible scenarios could happen that force you to either change your plans or return home with lots of unshot film or unused memory cards. If we had not been willing to change our plans and expectations, we would have had a very uneventful day. Be open to alternatives, both locations and species. There are a lot more things going on in an area than most photographers, especially visiting photographers, are aware of.