Boats, Bandits and Birdseed

Let me start this off by saying that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing when it comes to photography and even less about photo editing. I just love doing it. One would think that after doing this hobby for over a couple years now that I would know something about the craft. If someone were to ask me technical questions about my camera settings, or how I go about choosing the lighting or colour scheme during my edits, I would mumble something incoherently, urgently point and scream about something random behind the person speaking to me and while they were distracted, I would run the other way, thus avoiding the need to explain my creative process. I mean, I still shoot in automatic mode on my camera – AUTOMATIC! I don’t even know why that’s undesirable, but I get a lot of boards on Pinterest suggesting I switch to manual mode.

One of the issues is that I don’t know anyone who does photography professionally that I could go to for help. There are, of course, many photography stores in my area I could go to, but meh. Even the odd YouTube video would be helpful, but for some reason I haven’t done that either. I did apply to a local community college to take professional photography, and am very excited for the opportunity to learn what I clearly have a passion for. Though, I worry that I rely too heavily on my edits that I’m not sure I can get in with my originals alone.

Everything I do as far as photography goes (though this isn’t necessarily specific to photography) I do instinctively, and at times impulsively. I try to take at least fifteen photos a week and most of them are landscape and nature photos. I love to spend time in the wild and my ultimate dream job would be to become a wildlife photo journalist. I don’t know why I shared that as it’s really only interesting and specific to me, but I have an idea as to what I want to communicate through my photography, which is my love of nature and all things wild. I want to show people what I see and feel when I experience the world outside my office cubicle and remind people how beautiful, yet significantly fragile it is. My brother had his first baby just over a year ago and I lose sleep at night worrying about the state of the planet when my nephew gets to be my age.

I’m digressing and need to get back on the subject of my creative photography process. I struggled to find a photo that showed off my photo editing skills and ended up picking a photo that had a better story behind instead. The photo I picked is one I took last summer: July 31, 2020 to be exact. This juvenile racoon and I surprised each other that evening, not just by me stumbling upon it, but rather how photogenic it was.

My family and I are fortunate enough to own a couple cottages that are off-grid and only accessible by boat. My grandmother found the original cottage, the one that now belongs to my brother and I, in an ad in the paper and ended up buying it for $10,000. She passed it on to my father, who passed it onto my brother and I, as he built a new and improved cottage next to the old one.

As I mentioned, our cottages are only accessible by boat and since the pandemic I’ve been spending most of my weekends since spring down at the cottage. This particular night I was there on my own and was a little late getting there. I loaded up the aluminum boat and headed over. It doesn’t take too long to get there fortunately, and when I arrived, I tied the boat to the dock at my parent’s cottage. By now I had about 20 minutes of daylight left to get to the cottage itself and once I was docked, I needed to bring the stuff I brought from the new cottage to our old one, which would’ve taken me four trips or so. To get to our old cottage from the new one, I have to walk across the deck that is attached to the dock, which wraps around the front of the new cottage. At the other end of the deck there is a set of stairs that leads down to a path, which we take to get to the old cottage.

Dad attached a birdhouse to the railing heading down to this path and had filled it with birdseed last time he was up - against my mother’s wishes I might add. When I came around the corner carrying a bunch of stuff in my arms, my vision partially obscured, I heard a loud THUMP, followed by a scurrying noise. I jumped back and nearly dropped what I was carrying. I only got to see the tail of the animal before it ran off. At first, I thought it was a porcupine, and for obvious reasons didn’t want to investigate too closely and decided to back off, drop my things and take out my flashlight.

After looking for some time and not being able to see anything, I gathered up my things and continued onto the cottage. I came back to grab another load of stuff and low and behold, there was a little racoon wedged inside the birdhouse, face stuffed with birdseed. It was definitely aware of me, but it seemed to not want to give up its prime feeding spot. I figured I could risk running back to the old cottage to grab my camera and run back to snap a few pictures, which luckily for me, the little racoon was there when I returned.

The same racoon stayed there eating the birdseed for three more trips back and forth between the cottages, letting me get within a couple feet of it. Maybe I got a little too close looking back in hindsight, but I figured, since it had it’s back to me where I was going up the stairs, it wouldn’t be able to immediately squirm out from the birdhouse to attack. There were several occasions when I was making trips that I saw the racoon wondering around other parts of the deck, sometimes climbing up a tree to watch me go back and forth. After my last trip the racoon had left only a few seeds and I didn’t have to worry about freeing this slowly fattening animal from a bad situation.

Later that evening, when I was beginning to unwind and head to bed, I heard a number of squeaks coming from the shore in front of the cottage. Got the old flashlight out again and saw four little racoons in single file, all heading up the beach towards my parent’s cottage. Throughout the rest of the evening, I heard the four of them squabble over the few remaining morsels of birdseed that was left in the birdhouse. Fortunately, there weren’t any racoons stuck in the birdhouse when I checked first thing in the morning, only a couple sunflower seeds shells.

The original picture was taken on a Nikon D60. I’m looking at the info section on the photo itself it is showing as: f/5.6 1/60 55mm ISO200. I have no idea what any of that means, and I clearly shot it in a setting that wasn’t meant for night photography.

I upload all my photos on Google Photos and use their editing tools to do almost all of my edits. They have several filters, which I use as a base to start, and do the fine tuning from there. I used the Modena filter for this photo. It is a filter I find I use more and more as I like the old, weathered appearance it gives my photos. From there I adjusted the light so that you could actually see the colours of the racoon’s fur. I dulled the blacks and shadows as the original was already pretty dark. I also added a vignette to help highlight and draw the eye to the racoon in the center of the photo. Aside from adjusting the sharpness of the picture, there isn’t really much else I did as far as editing goes. I think if I had a proper photo editing program I might have more to say about it, but Google Photos is all I use for my edits. I plan on upgrading my skills and software gradually over time. I currently do all my edits on my work computer, which my bosses are not aware of as far as I know.

A few people have told me they like my photos, but they’re mostly close friends and family, and no one has ever purchased a photo of mine, which might say more about my photography than the photos themselves. Either way, it doesn’t matter much to me as I have grown to love photography and just enjoy going outside and exploring places I haven’t been to before and looking at familiar places with a new lens, so to speak.