Wildlife Photography While Pulling A Trailer Isn’t Easy

When we leave one of our favorite Montana camping spots for the long drive home it means almost 30 miles of extremely dusty dirt/gravel roads through prime bird and wildlife habitat before we hit pavement.  We nearly always leave at sunrise in case there are photo opportunities on the way out – typically those opportunities include raptors on posts, poles or in flight, songbirds, elk, deer, pronghorn – even badgers.

If the roads are good (as they are this year) that drive takes at least an hour when I’m pulling my camping trailer but if we find wildlife, as we often do, it can take two hours or more.  And believe me, photographing wildlife while you’re pulling a trailer is a bit of a challenge (we always shoot from inside my truck – if you get out, or even crack a door your subject vamooses, without fail).  Some of the problems include:

• noise – the trailer and pickup rattling over the rocks and bumps can be heard for miles on those still, quiet mornings so you simply can’t sneak up on your subject
• light – I’m driving west so the sun is behind me.  Trying to maneuver my pickup on the road (with the trailer behind) so we get a good light angle on the subject while shooting out the windows without spooking the quarry is darned near impossible.
• traffic – thankfully, other vehicles on this road are rare – especially at that time of morning.  I sometimes travel the 30 miles without passing another car.   But if I’m on a curve or a hill I don’t dare try any creative maneuvering to get the shot, which has caused me to miss some potentially extraordinary images.
• dust – dust, dust and more dust…

I took this shot of my own dust at 6:18 AM on our way home on July 26 of this year.  When there’s no breeze the dust simply hangs in place for what seems like an eternity.  Imagine trying to photograph a raptor on a fence post through this stuff.  If there’s a breeze it can blow the dust away from you or straight toward you from behind.  In that situation it never seems to clear out in time.

1/1250, f/5.6, ISO 640, 500  f/4, 1.4 tc

This shot was taken 33 minutes after the previous image.

Elk spend most of their time in the mountains to my left (going out) but occasionally they’ll graze in the pastures to my right during the night and if you’re lucky you can catch one out there early in the morning.  As I came over the top of a hill I spotted this cow to my right and far ahead and I knew she’d immediately head for the mountains when she saw (and heard) me.  My goal was to catch her jumping over the fence to my right as she did so (if I waited until she crossed the road and jumped the fence on my left I’d only get a butt shot).   The trick was proper timing.  I had to anticipate where she might choose to jump the fence, be close enough for good detail at just the right time and place, stop my pickup on the far left side of the road so I’d have room to turn sharply to my right and get an angle on her so we could photograph her through the left side windows.  Oh, and I had to allow time to turn off the engine to prevent vibration.

It almost worked.  By the time I located her through my lens and got sharp focus lock, her prime position as she cleared the fence was gone.  This was the first truly sharp shot that I got.

I’m sure that this is much more than most of you want to know about photography strategies and problems while pulling a trailer but writing this has been a bit of a catharsis for me.  Typically, by the time I hit the pavement and turn south I’m moaning and groaning about the shots I missed on these trips out (on this morning it was 3 beautiful, juvenile Ferruginous Hawks on the ground close to the road that we simply didn’t see in time).  And I relive them time and again over the next few days, wondering what I could have done differently.

Ron

PS –  my pickup is so full of dust when I get home that my cleaning strategy is to open all four doors and use the air compressor to blow out the worst of it.  Looks like a dust storm when I do…