I was at Lindsay Parson on Friday morning. This is usually a fairly slow time of year for me. It’s hot, the baby birds have grown up, and the vegetation makes photography more difficult. But I just can’t stay home, it’s not an option for me. As the gray shadows of early morning slowly faded away a Great Blue Heron came gliding in and landed on a log in the water about 40 yards away. Perfect. Far enough away for a good composition but close enough so I wouldn’t have to crop excessively. Now I just had to wait for the light to come up and for the bird to start fishing. Well, this bird must not have been listening when his parents taught him how to fish because he was terrible at it! In two hours of watching this bird fish he only managed to catch one frog! He also didn’t understand the concept of deep water because he twice stepped off the log into water that was over his body. The first pic below was just after he managed to get back onto the log after taking an unexpected dive. You can see the cool blue light on the bird but right behind him you can also see the Sun beginning to peek out. I knew I would only have a narrow window of good light Click on the images to enlarge.
Not a happy bird.
Shortly after the previous pic he finally caught a frog!. And this is where the photo gods began to harass me. Instead of staying on the open part of the log to eat, he moved over two steps and stepped behind a small dead tree. What would have been a very good image turned into a ‘delete’. I couldn’t move because he was close and there was no cover between us. And moving a 400mm lens is not that simple.
Zoom in to see the frog
But I thought, well just sit tight and he will catch something else. Forty five minutes later and he was still hungry. And the light was getting very harsh. So I stood up to leave thinking he would just fly away. Nope, he sat there and watched me while I packed up my gear and took off my Ghillie suit. This was the dumbest GBH I had ever encountered! Finally he decide to take off and I got a couple of pics of his departure. The light was very harsh but I massaged them in LR and at least made them presentable for a blog post.
And the bird? He flew into a tree about forty yards away and watched me walk out of the woods. The moral of the story? Never trust the photo gods……