Bird is the Word
Wildlife and nature are the primary reasons I ever picked up a camera. When I was kid, every summer my parents packed my brother and into a minivan and drove the 12 hours to South Carolina where we spent a week resting on beaches and biking through salt marshes. I credit these trips with instilling a lot of my passion for environmentalism and conservation as I’d beg my parents to have us go out on naturalist led gator walks, ocean seining and crabbing where they’d teach us about the ecosystem of the beach, barrier islands and all that was in between.
As I got older, I wanted a way to document the alligators, dolphins and natural world I loved so I picked up a camera.
On one of those trips I had my parents sign me up for a nature photography class where one of the guides took us out with our point and shoot cameras and laid out the basics of photography while showing us techniques to capture the natural world.
“If you ever want to practice shutter speed and moving targets. Go to the beach or a field. Watch the gulls. It trains you track better,” she said, as we watched some egrets roosting.
The natural world is still one of my favorite things to photograph, but I’ve focused a lot more on travel and street photography in the last few years.
I was cleaning up Lightroom last year when I realized the last time I went out to shoot was back in the fall to catch the foliage and needed to remedy that. So, the first nice day in April I grabbed my telephoto lens and headed down to Sandy Hook. I’ve always been told that harbor seals can be spotted, but have yet to spot any myself, so sand plovers and oyster catchers it was.
What I like most about this photo is that I can tell my tracking has improved from even a couple months beforehand. I’m lucky in that a large, ecologically divers park is not too far from my work campus and during the summer and fall, can go out and look for snakes, turtles, frogs and birds (there are a lot of hawks in the area.) All of those lunch breaks leaning into reeds and trying to follow the flight path paid off as I could keep pace and just about guess where all of the seabirds were gliding too.
But also, I can say that it is a pretty decent wildlife shot. It might not be the most artistic or striking, but oyster catcher is in focus, the water is blurred, and I think it capture the feeling of flying pretty well – or at least what I imagine to be.