[Photography] Shitty Snapshot Saturday: Photos of the Hawk that Shat on My Car

in photography •  8 years ago 

I am a terrible photographer. On top of that, the camera on my mobile phone is a piece of absolute crap. However, this doesn't stop me from taking pictures. It's in this spirit that I've decided to launch #ShittySnapshotSaturday, a chance for all of us awful amateur photographers to show off just how useless our talent and equipment truly is!

For this, the inaugural installment of #ShittySnapshotSaturday, I bring you the tale of the red-tailed hawk that shat on my nice clean car.

I live in the Adirondacks, a massive state park in New York that encompasses some 9,400 square miles of beautiful mountains, lakes, and defunct logging and mining towns that are borderline abandoned. As a result we get to see lots of nature. Deer in our backyard is a constant, as we have a small grove of apple trees, and if we don't put our garbage in the shed overnight the local black bear carries it off for us and leaves a trail of it down our driveway to the road (worst garbageman ever).

We've got a lot of birds too, but in the three years we've lived here it's mostly been songbirds, ravens the size of pitbulls, and songbirds. Well, that changed today - we saw our very first red-tailed hawk!

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Here it is, perched on the birch tree right outside our front door. You can see my car on the left.

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Here's a much blurrier version, thanks to my Samsung Galaxy J3's awful 4x digital zoom.

You can kind of see, if you squint, the distinctive black-and-white mottled breast and the rust-red tail feathers that give the hawk its name. He didn't sit still for long, though. Soon he was on the move, flapping curiously close to my car.

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Totally him flapping. The undersides of the red-tailed hawk are cream-colored.

Hey buddy, what you doing over my nice clean Prius? Yeah, that's right, he dropped a big, wet, smelly shit and flew off, perching on my daughter's swing set in the back yard.

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This time it wasn't the phone camera at fault. I'm just a lazy housekeeper, and my bay window is always dirty. I've got a three-year-old - what do you want from me?

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Here's a second, even blurrier shot, where you can sort-of plainly see the dude's crazy-long taloned feet.

Thankfully he didn't take a second dump on the swing seat. He did, however, see something tasty in the grass, so he swooped down for an early lunch.

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Swooping is bad.

Whatever he found down there, he made quick work of. I watched him grab something with his talons, strike out with his beak, tear something off, and then shake it vigorously back and forth. I continued eating my turkey sandwich, nonplussed.

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I love this shot, because if I wasn't a shitty photographer with awful equipment, you could have really seen the swoop of his curved beak. It's how you can tell falcons apart from hawks; a falcon beak has a notch to it, while hawks have that dramatic curve.

Finally, he had gotten his fill, and decided to swoop off. The shutter on my phone camera failed me, so all I have is out-of-focus blurs as he zoomed away.

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With a mighty flap of his blood-soaked wings, he took to the sky...

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Look at that wingspan! Yes, there, down in the lower left! Almost completely out of frame and impossible to distinguish!

As you can see, I am a true master of the craft of shitty photography. I challenge you to do worse! Show me what you've got!

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LOL
I'm sorry I'm too clever to take part to the competition

It is honestly not the worst I have seen. Some people are incapable of taking a good shot with a phone (I am one of them) - I think it takes a particularly steady hand to do it.

Honestly I miss my old ghetto DSLR. It was pretty bad, but it did have a 10x optical zoom that made nature photography a lot of fun.

Plus even the worst DSLR optics are infinitely better than a phone and you can hold steady more easily. You should get one if you like taking photos. Just get a second hand one.

That's a good point. Time to visit the local garage sales.

Love the post! :D Looking forward to next weeks #ShittySnapshotSaturday!

Thank you! I will try my best to be just as awful next week as I was today!