Chickadee

This image has been added to all of the PRINTS galleries.

     Sunflowers randomly sprouted in our backyard due to the birds at the feeders and their sloppy feeding habits. I thought it would be fun to let them grow and be subjects for photo opportunities, but I was unaware of how much the sunflower plants would be used for supplementing a pair of Chickadee’s diet. As each sunflower head matured, the Chickadees would take turns flying in to pull a seed out the head, and then fly off to eat it. They kept at it until the head was stripped of all its sunflower seeds. This happened every day, while supplies lasted, for about a week.

     And as fate would have it, the Chickadee’s daily stripping of sunflower seeds coincided with the second nesting of Bluebirds in our Bluebird house. It had been so much fun sitting and taking photos of the Bluebirds, coming and going to the house. But I wanted to try to get something new. So, I purchased a remote shutter release for my camera. I would set the camera, with the remote shutter release attached, on a tripod and position the tripod in different places. I wanted to try and get different angles of the Bluebirds flying up to the house. I had a lot of fun taking pictures of the Bluebirds, standing inside my kitchen and looking out the window, or sitting in a chair twenty feet away from the camera, using the remote shutter release. Ultimately though, I did not get anything from these Bluebird photo shoots that stood out among the rest.

     But one day I decided to turn my focus on the Chickadees and their self serve sunflower host. I set the camera equipped with the remote shutter release about five feet away from the sunflower head the Chickadees were eating from. I also lowered the height of the tripod so that the camera was looking up onto the sunflower head. In this image, the Chickadee has just removed a seed from the sunflower head and is preparing to fly off with it. I never would have been able to capture this level of detail in this image if I had been standing farther away and using the camera freehand. Nor would I have been able to capture this image from that angle, using the camera freehand. I love my telephoto lens and the image stabilization function built into it, but the remote shutter release equipped camera mounted on a tripod, made all the difference in this image.

     There was a very small part of me that wants to complain and say that I cheated because I removed myself from the intimate relationship between the subject and myself. The camera feels like it becomes an extension of me when I hold the viewfinder up to my eye (yes, I am old school, haha!, and this is also the inspiration behind the name “Bugeye Visions”, one eye closed tight and the other stretched wide open). Sitting twenty feet away from the camera removed that sense of intimacy. I did not “see” what I was taking a picture of. But the better part of me said, “Get over it!”. I captured an image that I really love. I got to play with a new toy, sit down on the “job”, and enjoy the great outdoors in the shade on a hot summer day. Most importantly, I had fun too. That is what makes this image even more special for me. So yeah, I am so "over it".