What’s riding shotgun while you’re driving?

Posted on 08. Jul, 2009 by Paul Burwell in Everything, Techniques, Wildlife photography

It’s summer here in the northern hemisphere and it is a time when a lot of people decide to take a road trip of one sort or another.  Summer’s a time when I too spend a lot of time on the road and I recently got home from about a 3,300 kilometre (~2,000 mile) road trip.  Usually when I’m travelling my timelines are fairly tight and I don’t have a lot of time to take a meandering path or wander too much.  But, regardless of where I’m travelling, there is one constant about the trip, and that’s what’s sitting in the seat beside me riding shotgun.  For those of you unaware, the term “riding shotgun” usually refers to the person riding in the passenger seat.  The term is supposedly derived from the old American west where there was a person sitting beside the stagecoach driver with a shot gun to help protect the coach from robbers.

Anyway, my camera is my constant companion when on I’m any sort of a drive outside of the city where there’s a chance, even a remote chance that I’ll come across wildlife.  And I’ve almost always got a telephoto lens mounted on it with batteries charged, memory card formatted and everything else ready to go.  I used to think that if I spotted something interesting, I could just stop and retrieve my gear from the back of the vehicle and still be ready to go.  This approach proved ineffective and I abandoned that technique after a drive in the country with my buddy Marty a couple of years ago.  We were cruising some roads around the area he grew up, looking for possible photography locations.  Suddenly, as we drove down a road we spotted a fox cross the road where it than jumped onto a row of hay bales where it proceeded to hunt the mice living amongst the bales.  My camera was in the back of the vehicle, but fortunately Marty volunteered to climb over the seats to the back where he was able to retrieve my camera for me.  That helped me get some shots I would otherwise have missed.

The real problem with relying on a stop and retrieve technique is that it is entirely likely that stopping and getting out of the vehicle would scare away most potential wildlife subjects.  Many critters have learned through many thousands of years of exposure to the human form to be afraid of said humans.  They’ve learned to associate humans with bad experiences and generally don’t hang around to see how things are going to turn out.  So now my camera gear usually rides shotgun in the passenger seat or if there is an actual passenger along with me, I have the passenger camera strapped to the rear passenger seats where it is still easily retrievable.

And the whole point of this information is to share with you some pictures I made while driving to one of my workshops in Montana.  It was pouring rain while I was driving through the Kootenai National Forest when suddenly I spotted what first appeared to be a large wet dog walking along one of the gravelled road-side turn offs.  However, as I zoomed past at the legal highway speed of 65 miles-per-hour (104 K/PH), I suddenly came to the realization that what I was seeing was a yearling brown coloured black bear cub.  Fortunately, the highway isn’t heavily travelled and after a quick glance in the rear view mirror I was able to hit the brakes and make a quick U-turn that allowed me to quickly return to the road-side turnoff area.

As I arrived the bear scampered into the surrounding woods, but I was reasonably confident that if I was patient, the bear would return.  As the bear scampered for the woods, I could also see that I was probably right about it’s age (about 15 months old) and I surmised that it was probably recently separated from its mother.  Black Bear Cubs are often “encouraged” to leave by their mums during the middle part of June in this part of the world.  It seems that 15 months of putting up with a youngster is about the limit for most Black Bear mothers.

I’d been waiting about five minutes when I saw some of the brush moving seemingly on its own accord.  I got my vehicle positioned and turned off the engine (this is critically necessary for making sharp images), grabbed my saddle-shaped beanbag to support my camera and waited.  Sure enough, the bear peered through the brush to see what was going on. (Remember you can click on the thumbnail to see a larger image)[singlepic id=14 w=320 h=240 float=center]

You can see that my little Suzuki SX-4 worked great as a blind here giving me a great height for photographing the bear.  I made a few images and continued to wait.  Eventually the bear decided I was no threat and decided to come to road-side again to do some more exploring.  This allowed me the opportunity for a couple of more shots…[singlepic id=15 w=320 h=240 float=center]

[singlepic id=16 w=320 h=240 float=center]

Each and every time a vehicle, or train of vehicles came along, the bear scampered off into the woods.  I’d wait a couple of minutes and the bear would re-emerge.  This repetition allowed me to make my favourite image of the set, an image of the bear just exiting the underbrush with a serious look of intent on its face.[singlepic id=17 w=240 h=320 float=center]

All of the above images were made with my Canon 5D Mark II along with the Canon 70-200 F2.8L IS lens supported on a saddle-shaped beanbag.  The images were shot at ISO 400 wide open at F2.8 to help give me decent shutter speeds for the dull overcast rainy day.

I hope you enjoyed the images and that the story above adequately illustrates the usefulness of allowing your camera gear to ride shotgun.  Do you have some similar stories to share?  Have some feedback on the images?  I’d love to hear from you.

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Tags: 5D Mark II, 70-200 F2.8L IS, bear, black, blind, car, cub, drive, driving, riding, roadside, shotgun, yearling