Getting Closer

With a powerful zoom lens, it’s tempting to get as tight a shot as possible when encountering animals in the wild, especially as you can give them the respect and distance they deserve. And to some extent, that’s been fun to experiment with this week at Point Reyes and Corte Madera Marsh State Marine Park. But I’ve found that zooming out a little and showing them in context is more interesting. You can see how perfectly adapted they are to their surroundings, and suddenly, the importance of the whole ecosystem makes sense. In these four shots, each bird (a northern harrier, a yellow-rumped warbler, a snowy egret, and a red-tailed hawk) vastly differs from the last, but they all have specialist skills to survive in close proximity. That blows my mind.