By MICHAEL PERKINS
I AM NOT THRILLED WITH THIS PHOTOGRAPH.
However, it could have been a whole lot worse, in that it might never have been attempted at all.
We talk about "no day at the beach", but on the day this was shot, that's all I really wanted. My mood found me with no camera on my shoulder, a condition so weirdly rare that my wife, in her very New York sense of sarcasm, asked, "whaddya, sick?" Indeed, it's not often that I go out photographically inert. I had a camera, but it was in a parked car, a quarter of a mile away from where we were walking. Then I spotted Mister Man here.
The cabled-off area you see in the top shot protects recovering sand dunes (they are living things, trust me) at California's San Buenaventura State Beach from visitors who might otherwise tramp through them en route to the surf, which faces directly opposite. The approved entrances to the sea breach this dune "wall", and we had walked through one of them from the parking lot just to walk off some tension when Marian's binoculars picked up, not your typical gull or sandpiper, but a gorgeous peregrine falcon, apparently scanning the coast for a shot at lunch. "Can you get him?" she asked, even though she knew I was bare-handed. My heart sank. My telephoto was all the way back home, and the Nikon Z5 in the car was only fitted with a 28mm, far too wide for a proper portrait of the raptor. However, after a bit of fussing that the ideal was not possible, I opted for the real, walking back to the car to salvage what I could with the wide-angle.
More "crap" than "cropped", but you can't blame a gal for trying...
When we had been near the falcon beforehand, he seemed spook-proof, absolutely rooted to the spot. Passersby and beach patrol wagons had both failed to make him take flight, and, sonofagun, upon our return, he was still there, not flinching so much as a feather. I got as close to him as the steep bank of the dunes and the shifting sand would allow, inching within about twenty feet. Of course, in the view of the 28mm, he might just as well have been in the next county, but I took my shot (that is, about thirty of them). Better to have loved and lost than never to have blah blah blah.
The narrative of the shot, which even at a super-sharp f/16, could not be cropped enough for a really detailed portrait, shifted now, to be about the bird as the sole feature of interest in a wide, rolling terrain. And I can live with that. The old photographer's advice to A.B.S. (always be shooting) sometimes translates to A.B.W.T.B.S, or "always be willing to be shooting". No, I am not thrilled with this picture. But I am thrilled for the chance to have made the attempt. Any good batter knows that hits are a consequence of a huge-number of at-bats, most of which result in pop-ups and strike-outs. To get to the good stuff, you just gotta keep stepping up and taking a swing.
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