Photography became fun when I stopped listening to social media talking about the latest equipment. I have what I need and when I need to replace something that’s worn out, I will then look for it. This opened up my imagination, to get better I needed to put in the time. No matter what perfect brand of equipment you have, it has limits, but our imagination has no such limits.
Second thing is, I don’t use filters or software to create the colourful backgrounds that are often in my wildlife images, including this one. When I have time, as I did when I came across this Townsend’s Solitaire perched on top of a four meter tall spruce tree. I know the limits of my equipment, the chocolate induced mind did the rest.
I was hiking up a slope to look for landscape opportunities. I heard the call of the solitaire among the juniper berries. The trail went around and then above them. When I was above, I stopped to get the pictures of the valley below. The bird popped up and perched about ten meters in front of me. I knew if it stayed there, I would get a nice focused image of the bird with a soft background. I took that image and then started moving left, right, up and down to get the blurred fall colours as the background from the valley bottom in the image. The warm colours are of the balsam poplar and trembling aspen trees, the blue greens colours are from the spruce trees.
The subject, the bird, perched on top of two different trees for a couple of minutes, gave me a couple of different shots. But moving around, each background provided a different opportunity. There are several brands of equipment that can help us get the same picture of the bird, but it's our imagination that can help us get something unique.
