Be prepared
This weekend I finally managed to photograph an Otter. Actually, I even got three (1) of them in a single shot/video! I have been trying to snap a picture of one for over a year, but they have always eluded me until now. I have usually seen them from a window, and then I have rushed to grab my camera and when I got back it was nowhere to be seen. We are talking about a time window of about 30-60 seconds here. I can honestly say that I am hooked permanently now on nature photography. It is so rewarding, and when you live in a place like we do, it is all but mandatory to get a tele lens and learn photography. My wife told me that there are only around 2000 Otters in the whole of Sweden. They are super rare. That means that I have just documented a significant part of the entire Swedish Otter population. They are so rare that you are supposed to report sightings in Sweden (which I just did).
Saturday morning began with a magical bloodred sunrise, and the otters were playing around outside our dining room window while we were having breakfast. The otter family were having breakfast too with fresh fish that they had just caught. It was wonderful to witness such a rare occasion. I felt very happy. My venture into nature photography started about a year ago on a similar morning like this one. The sun was rising above the horizon and the sky was red as blood with amazing colors and reflections in the snow and clouds everywhere. And on the horizon where the sea touches the sky, a moose was walking towards a little island. It was a one in a million shot. And all I had was my smartphone. The picture was a nice sunrise with a black pixel (the moose) in the middle. That’s when I decided that I needed a telephoto lens. I first considered buying a simple clip-on solution for my phone to just get a little bit closer, but after reading a bit I remembered that my wife had an old DSLR Nikon that was collecting dust in a drawer. I then started to scan the 2nd hand market for a reasonably priced tele lens that would fit this old camera. That’s one very good thing with cameras. Optics age gracefully and will last for a very long time if taken proper care of. A perfect 2nd hand buy then. About a week later my first tele lens arrived.
Since then, I always keep the old camera charged and with the tele lens mounted on a shelf, ready to go at a moments notice. It has brought me so much joy this past year, but this weekend it finally hit a home run. That’s the thing with habits. You have to keep on doing them for quite some time and then finally you will hit a jackpot. As if it weren’t enough, just minutes after the Otter show, a fox walks by our house, and a little while later a pair of beautiful Sea Eagles land on the ice and sit there for about 20 minutes, giving me plenty of time to fiddle around with the camera and grab some nice pictures. Around lunch time, the Otters came back again for a second and much closer visit, resulting in even more quality shots. On Sunday, there was yet another Otter show with better light. This time I tried to sneak up on them as quietly and close as possible. I think I managed to get up to around 20 meters from them. And this is when I was really hooked. I knew exactly where they were and that they would pop up any given moment, so I had to be ready with the trigger. I can imagine that a hunter can feel something similar.
The moral of this story is that you must be prepared to produce magic. The photo opportunities are quick – really quick – and if you don’t have your equipment properly configured way in advance, you can forget about any good shots at all. You don’t have time to change lenses and you cannot store it in a bag. Every single thing needs to be prepped and ready to go, similar to a fire extinguisher. And that’s valid for just about anything in life. Be prepared. You can achieve so much more when you can give full focus to the task at hand just when you need it.
Eliminate the startup time and get ready to hit the ground running.