Camera Trapping: I’m not very good at it, but I love it.
/Is it an obsession? My old art professor would always say: “ If you have to ask, you already know the answer.” So yeah camera trapping is a bit of an obsession for me. Within my yard and just up the hill behind my house I’ve placed several cameras to capture the comings and goings of local wildlife.
I’ve been able to watch a family of four bobcats grow from kittens to adults. Coyotes have stolen my cameras and used them as chew toys. The only trick is, I’m really not very good at camera trapping, at least by the standards I hope to reach. Lemme explain. I want to get Nat Geo level shots, not fuzzy security camera footage.
I have a wonderful career telling visual stories through the medium of animation. For a lot of people it’s a dream job and don’t get me wrong I love it. But if I’m being honest I always wanted to be a wildlife artist and photographer. So to that end every few weeks I scramble, stumble and crawl up our hill to set up my remote camera to live out that fantasy.
An example of the typical camera set up on the hillside.
I use Camtraptions, a cool company in the UK that provides all the gear necessary to convert an SLR camera into a high end trail camera. However, it takes a lot of parts: receivers, transmitters, sensor, housing, flashes, batteries, battery ups and solar chargers. If there’s a failure at a certain transmitter, the entire set up won’t trigger. On top of that I have to dial in the settings with the flash to hopefully work in all weather and light conditions. I attach a security video camera so I can see how the camera trap performs.
I thought this was the perfect capture. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Let’s just say I do the best I can. More often than not what I thought was going to be the perfect shot, is over exposed, or under exposed or a battery failed and the camera missed the shot entirely.
What I love is, even with my imperfect and hopefully improving camera trapping, I’m able to see the hidden lives of wild animals. It’s not just coyotes and bobcats, short lived possums, raccoons, skunks, squirrels, wood rats, even the rare mule deer have wandered in front of my cameras. Ground dominate birds like California Thrashers, California Quail and even the occasional road runners have also made appearances. There have been sightings of bear and mountain lion nearby, but I’ve never caught either on camera. But maybe one day I will. It’s a little like playing the lottery. You might get a great shot, you probably won’t. But there is a chance. Most of my pictures and footage leave a little and sometimes a lot to be desired. While I know I’ll never be at the level of a Nat Geo photographer, the journey, the quest to get “the shot” is fun and rewarding.