It wasn’t an easy task to make the photos I show you today. There was a reason why I never was able to make any decent shots of the Horned Lark here in Iowa before. They live and breed in the open country, where no tree or bush can hide a desperate photographer ;-) I have seen them in a field just outside of the Green Island Wetlands many times before but never came close enough to make the image work. Yesterday evening I found a pair of Horned Larks foraging along one of the levees that separate the ponds in the wetlands. I maneuvered the car, which as you know serves as my mobile blind, several times in position. Many birds seem to accept the presence of a car quite often, while opening the door and getting out of it, may spook them away immediately. The two larks didn’t show much interest in me this time, but getting close was only one problem I had to overcome.
Most wildlife photographers are familiar (or at least should be) with using the peak of action, the short moment between movements, for the shot. It has been quite often best described with a bouncing basketball. The brief moment when the ball reaches its highest point and the speed is zero. This is the moment when you have your chance to make a sharp shot, no matter what your shutter speed is. The only way to make this work for your photography is trying to predict this moment a tad before and then use the ability of the camera to shoot several frames per second (the Nikon D300s does 6 fps). The Horned Lark gave me a hard time. Both were foraging, head down, and with high speed and intensity. Yes, there was peak of action but it occurred very irregular. Sometime the birds didn’t stop for more than ten seconds. Other times I thought I nailed it, but the lark had their eyes closed. Well, as you can imagine I had my good share of misses yesterday evening…
The good thing was that the light got better with every minute while working with the birds. You may ask why some of the grass and background looks black. The DNR (for my German friends: Department of Natural Resources, similar to Naturschutzbehörde) had a controlled burning in the area the week before. This is a way to keep prairie and marsh land in good condition. Wild fires have always played an important role for the health of these ecosystems and landscapes.