Look for shapes. Don't look for colors. Animals in the wild, even the urban wild, are camouflaged. They don't want to be seen. Nor do they move, unless you drop almost on top of them. Wild animals you can see are called "food." The best way to spot these animals is to walk quietly and look for shapes.
I did this yesterday with my son. We were at Riverbend Nature Area, also known as Goethe Park, stalking these urban wild animals with a camera. Jack-rabbits were every where, frozen, then scared, running this way and that. We weren't looking for jack-rabbits.
Out in the wild, hundreds of yards from civilization, we turned a corner, around a stand of old oak trees, and there they were. Can you see them? Click on the picture for a larger image. Use the Back key to come back to the blog.
If you want to photograph nature you have to train yourself to see. It's too easy to walk through a place making so much noise you scare everything away. An hour after we took the above image we were walking home. To our right was the bike trail and a road. Bicyclists whizzed past, heads down, concentrating on getting somewhere -- fast. On the road, tired pick-nickers and noisy partiers drove out of the park, some hanging out of car windows, obviously drunk. To our left was this:
Some are so self-absorbed they refuse to see what is around them.
Gerald F. Ward
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