Hunting with a Camera

Over the years I've spent a great many hours in the field hunting...deer, quail, ducks & geese, squirrel among others.  As I have grown older, I still do some of the traditional type of hunting, but more often than not I hunt with a camera.  The challenge to photograph wildlife is basically the same as the techniques required to do the other kind of hunting. I discovered early on that doing so can be very difficult as the lighting conditions are usually not in your favor for such endeavors, and the wildlife rarely cooperates.  Regardless, I've found it to be quite rewarding and fun.

On one arm of Barren River Lake not far from home, I discovered a few years ago that Kentucky has a good population of Greater Sandhill Cranes that migrate through and even winter over.  They are an ancient bird standing almost four feet tall with a wingspan of almost 6 feet.  They migrate from southern Canada and the northern United States by the thousands through Kentucky. Their cousins the Lesser Sandhill Cranes, migrate across the central plains states from areas a bit further north along the Artic circle.

The Greater Sandhill species were almost hunted into extinction by the early part of the 20th century and were down to only about 25 or 30 mating pairs at one time.  With protection and migratory bird treaties their numbers have rebounded to around 40,000.  The Lesser Sandhills number into the hundreds of thousands.

They are a difficult bird to photograph as they are extremely wary and have excellent eyesight.  The middle of December will find me donning full camo and heading out to find the birds as they work the cornfields in and around the lake area.  They tend to like using the same locations and will fly in and out during the course of the day.  If you can catch them  early or late when a large group of them are flying in, then your odds of getting some good photographs improve.

What I normally do is find a field I know they like to use, and then station myself along a fence row or tree line, hide amongst the cover, and wait for them to start coming in.  Sometimes I wait in vain, but usually I will be rewarded for my efforts.  I use a 50-500 mm zoom lens as you need a lot of reach.  It's great fun to observe them by the thousands circle and settle into a field.  Their chattel like honking is very distinctive and sounds nothing like anything else in the wild.

Hunting with a camera can provide much of the same kind of rewards that traditional hunting offers.  Both activities require stealth, perseverance, a knowledge of the natural history and tendencies of your target, and a lot of luck.

Keith Bridgman

Simplicity of Purpose

A few years ago I drove to a location a few miles from home hoping to catch one of those fabulous Kentucky sunsets.  At that time I was still shooting film...which by the way is a great learning tool when it comes to photography...so I was in the mode of thinking through every shot for fear of wasting valuable field time and expensive processing costs.  One thing I noticed back then was that many of my photographs all looked the same...there just wasn't enough variation in them to generate much interest.  Over time I began to more seriously evaluate what I was doing and why I just wasn't capturing the photo's I knew were possible.

I studied other photographers work and compared them to mine.  What I noticed was simply quite revealing, in fact, simplicity was one of the major elements that separated the 'professional' images from my snapshots.  Simplicity of Purpose as it pertains to photography means that everything seen in the photograph should be there for a reason.  Nothing should be in the image that detracts from the story you are trying to show or tell. It doesn't mean that the image lacks for complex details, just that all the details that are there contribute to the image story. When I began to evaluate my images, I realized I was ignoring the context of simplicity in my compositions.

An artists begins with a blank canvas and adds the elements that eventually becomes a work of art.  A photographer on the other hand, begins with a full canvas, and must through effective use of composition and light, remove all the elements that don't belong.  It may require a different lens, or different position or perspective.  It may require that you change the angle or orientation of the camera.  It certainly requires that you have a command of how the camera see's light and how the exposure process works...even with the auto exposure capabilities built into cameras now a days.

On that day I was reaching the end of my last roll of slide film and only had one exposure left.  I didn't feel all that confident that I had captured anything of quality, but as the sun lowered to just above the shallow hill to my west, I noticed there was this one single Queen Ann's Lace standing just inside the fence line.  The sun was a great ball of orange, so I thought I'd try to place that wildflower between me and the sun and see what would happen.  It was a difficult shot for several reasons...one of which was because I couldn't get into the position I needed and had to bend low under the barbed wire and lean way out.  With it being my last shot on that roll, I also had to think about what the brightness of the sun would do to the exposure...and compensated a full stop higher than what the meter reading wanted to use.

When I had the slides developed, as I was afraid, most of the roll just didn't work...but that one shot of the Queen Ann's Lace stood out...primarily because of its simplicity.  It is still one of my favorite images today.

Keith Bridgman

Look Beyond the Obvious

I spent a few hours this afternoon hiking over on Long Creek, a scenic little creek characterized  by clear water, gravel bottom, long pools, lively ripples, and an abundance of natural beauty.  As always, I took my camera and camera pack.  Most of the fall leaves had already fallen, but a few were still lingering that provided at least some photo opportunity.  As I wandered along, I snapped a few shots of this and that, but nothing really seemed to work.  All the shots were rather cliche'ish.

The obvious photo's included shots of the trees along side the creek, some looking across, some looking up or down its length.  Although they weren't bad shots, I've become a lot more critical of what I produce.  As I shuffled through the images on the camera's viewer, I knew I just wasn't getting the shots I wanted...in spite of all the natural beauty that surrounded me. When that happens, I'll often challenge myself to quit looking for the obvious and start looking for the subtle things that might not ordinarily be readily visible.

Floating in a shallow portion of the creek were some recently dropped leaves.  Photo's like that create a different kind of challenge for the photographer, for now the image becomes all about shape and form and color.  It's not as easy as it sounds, because it takes an artistic eye to find the right combination of shape and form, balanced by color.  It's a matter of building the composition to create a visually appealing image.

Keith Bridgman