Luck. It’s one of those things I’ll openly scoff at right up until something happens that can only be explained as luck. I like to think you make your own luck, you’re the only person who can choose to do or not do things to lead you up to whatever moment you decide is lucky. But sometimes it really is just a right place right time.
I had gotten out the cameras a bit over the last 2 months since the cosplay photoshoot. Nothing particularly noteworthy, I think I set up a light box out of a cardboard box I cut all the sides out of and covered the holes with an old white undershirt. It worked on a basic level for me to play around with product photography.
But around the beginning of March I packed my camera bag and drove to an actual forest. Protected by the Georgia Wildlife Resources Division. I had done some research on google maps looking for the closest forest to me that I could actually get in without trespassing. There is not a lot of areas where you can still go that isn’t owned by someone and counts as trespassing. At least not anywhere around me, I have spent many nights just driving around looking for places to try and see wildlife without getting in trouble for being there. I don’t think I’m in the best location for that, maybe somewhere with a lot less people. Alaska sounds nice.
So I drove up to this forest, went as far as the road through would take me and then parked and started hiking. Mostly following a marked trail until that came to an end.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @60mm - 1/50 Sec - F4.5 - ISO 250
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @30mm - 1/40 Sec - F4 - ISO 100
There was also an unfinished and abandoned bridge structure crossing a river. This provided a good few minutes of looking over the metal beams and wondering how long they had been there. This was also where the trail ended, as I wasn’t about to try and wade through that river. So I did something I’d never done before, just started walking. Along the river but not following a trail of any kind.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @28mm - 1/50 Sec - F4.5 - ISO 100
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @28mm - 1/30 Sec - F3.5 - ISO 100
This was the view from the river looking up, which was a fairly steep hill leading down to the water. As I had been walking alongside the river it hadn’t posed any kind of problem. Until I ran out of riverbank to walk along and I realized I was either going to turn back and go all the way back to the unfinished bridge, which was like a half an hour walk. Or scale the hill.
Without any kind of hill scaling training, and encumbered by a heavy backpack of camera gear. I did manage to make it to the top, huffing and puffing and falling and slipping and cutting my hand on a rock. But I saved the camera when I fell and I only had like 3 panic attacks from a fear of heights and falling directly backwards.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @33mm - 1/40 Sec - F4 - ISO 100
Really didn’t want to fall down this. Having the tripod helped when shifting weight between desperately clinging to these smaller trees. Would not recommend doing this to anyone else. But at the top of this hill, was the road. I was maybe 50 feet away from it the whole time. Just couldn’t see it because of this massive unscalable but somehow scaled by a complete hiking novice, hill.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @ 135mm - 1/50 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 100
What lined the edges of the road and sat atop the hill was a lot of these huge chunks of shale, with veins of quartz running through them. I was really interested by them, enough to take a few pictures.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @30mm - 1/100 Sec - F3.5 - ISO 400
And then I turned to the trees.
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @28mm - 1/125 Sec - F11 - ISO 400
Canon 5D Mark II w/28-135mm @35mm - 1/320 Sec - F3.5 - ISO 100
The last thing I did before I left was heading back towards the car. I noticed this concrete structure that boggled me. Why was it in a forest. Why is it so overgrown. Where can I find out more about this?
The internet was the answer. Turns out this forest was home to Lockheed Martin, and was a site for them to test nuclear powered aircraft in the 60’s. Before being bought by the Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory. Now it’s just a forest and they say that radiation levels are only slightly above normal. But I also found on some far less credible websites, stories of albino deer and animals with extra eyes. Still hoping to see anything like that.
Or any wildlife for that matter. I had been at this forest for a half day and hadn’t seen so much as a songbird. What’s up with that?
Slightly frustrated I headed home. This was a Saturday and I figured if I couldn’t see any wildlife I may still do something productive and I set to deep cleaning my car back at the apartment. Brought out the vacuum, dusted the inside, got into all those little cracks and corners. Anyway, the whole talk about luck at the beginning of this post wasn’t just adding to a word count. But I was quite literally 10-15 feet from my front door. I had to be so the extension cord would reach for the vacuum. I look up and what do I see…
Well something that made me drop everything and run inside to grab the camera.
Canon 5D Mark II w/75-300mm @300mm - 1/250 Sec - F5.6 - ISO 160
LUCK.
Couldn’t believe my eyes at first. I did a double take, maybe even a triple take. A beautiful red shouldered hawk was on this branch right across from me. As I mentioned in a previous post, right out the front door is the road. And on the other side of the road is a small body of water. Maybe 5 feet across, more of a large puddle. But there are fish in it, as was evident by the hawk checking out the water. So I ran inside, grabbed the camera and swapped on the telephoto real quick and briskly walked across the road taking pictures trying not to spook him. He only hung around for probably less than 2 minutes all in all. But that was enough. This shot came out the best of the ones I shot off as quickly as my camera would allow.
I can only chalk this up to luck. Right place at the right time. Even after a whole morning of not seeing a single bit of wildlife, I managed to end the day with one of my all time favorite pictures. Doesn’t hurt that I also sent this one to my dad for a bit of bragging. What I didn’t expect was him to show it to his photography teacher, because he had enrolled in a class at his local community college. The teacher raved about it according to my dad. Called it a one in a million shot. Wanted to know if I was professional, how long I had to wait to get the sunlight just right. Apparently he had my dad put the image up on the big screen so he could use it as an example for the whole class. That’s a bit of an ego boost right there I’m here to tell ya. Luck is a funny thing, and as much as I’ll shrug it off and talk about making your own luck. This was just plain lucky, nothing else about it.
