I’ve so far covered cat, dog and even insect photography. This entry will be a collection of miscellaneous animal photography that I’ve taken. I actually haven’t taken as much animal photography as I’d like to take and this is something I hope to change for 2014. Most of these photos were shot at the Grindstone Marsh in Burlington, Ontario. It’s a nice place with a diverse set of fauna, but the animals are limited in size.

I have seen deer in the Royal Botanical Gardens and Grindstone Marsh, but it’ll be difficult for me to capture them on camera since I try to not use telephoto lenses when I shoot wildlife. I find that most people who go out to shoot wildlife tend to have the same type of lens, sit in the same spot and are therefore walking away with the same photos. I remember sitting in the snow for around an hour once. I wanted to take a photo of some Canadian Geese, but they didn’t like me getting too close to them. Patience, as always, won. The geese eventually became accustomed to me freezing in the snow beside them. I managed to take a shot of a goose about arm’s length away from me, with my macro lens of all things, and the sense of accomplishment no doubt felt greater than if I were sitting in a lawn chair with a telephoto lens. That’s how I like to shoot wildlife, but a deer is much more timid than a tempermental goose. We shall see if I will land a deer photo this year. I’ll hopefully succeed.

I love my macro lens. Macro photography enables the photographer to get close to subjects that would otherwise be very difficult, if not impossible to, properly document. This new perspective results in a new way of seeing things that I’d otherwise not even notice. I remember one of the first photographs I shot with the lens was of three thumbtacks I had sticking in the underside of a wooden bookshelf. It was something that I had passed by thousands of times before, but given it no attention. The photo I shot managed to transform these benign thumbtacks into something that looked very different. I mean, they were still just thumbtacks and weren’t that interesting in their own right, but the lens enabled me to shoot them in an otherwise unobtainable perspective and that itself was what was interesting. The subject being so close is what transformed things from boring to interesting. It was as if I had been shrunk down to the size of the thumbtacks.

Inanimate objects are one thing, but insects are a completely different matter. It takes more patience to compose a shot involving a butterfly or something else that is timid and fast. Focusing with a macro lens takes more time than a regular lens and light, especially when you have a moving subject, is a necessity. The attached gallery is a collection of my favourite insect photos taken with the macro lens. I think that the transformation between otherwise ignorable to fantastic is best illustrated with insects. The butterfly photo, for example, looks as if the subject is in an alien landscape due to the magnified flower petals. The detail of the spiders or the eyes of the dragonfly look striking when viewed up close, in contrast to the loss of detail we experience when seeing these creatures from out larger, day to day, perspective. I remember the damselfly the most. I wasn’t quick enough to shoot the damselfly and a mosquito started to annoy me by buzzing next to my ear. The damselfly proceeded to take flight, swoop next to my head, catch the mosquito and then land back where it was. A simple thumbtack will never have such a backstory.

And, yes, the category insect photography contains spiders. Deal with it.