Wildlife photography is mostly waiting, which everyone says, and which tells you nothing. Waiting for a crane is not the same activity as waiting for an eagle. One is patience. The other is closer to reaction time.
Six days in Hokkaido in February taught me the difference in an order I would not have chosen.
Cranes: waiting for something that may not happen
Red-crowned cranes on a snowfield do very little for long stretches. They stand. They walk. They stand again. Then, with no warning I could read, two of them turn to face each other, lift their heads, throw their wings out and call.
You cannot anticipate it by watching the birds you are already pointed at. By the time you see the head go up you are late, and the whole thing is over in a few seconds.
What works is the opposite of concentration: keep the camera up, keep the exposure set for white snow and a black-and-white bird, and watch the wider group with your other eye. The pairs telegraph it to each other before they do it. They just do not telegraph it to you.
This was at Kushiro, in the open rather than from a hide, which means the birds set the distance and you work with whatever they allow.
Foxes: waiting for nothing at all
Then there was the fox.
It came out, looked at us for a while, decided we were not interesting, curled up in the sun and went to sleep. There is no moment to catch and nothing to anticipate. The only question is whether you are patient enough to keep working a subject that is doing nothing, because the picture is the sleeping, not an event interrupting it.
I stayed an hour or so, mostly changing my own position rather than waiting for the animal to change his.
Swans: the morning that did not clear
Some mornings the weather is the subject, and you have to accept that late.
Mist on the water, swans appearing and disappearing in it, no light to speak of and no chance of a clean frame. I spent the first half hour trying to photograph swans and the second half hour photographing the mist, with swans in it. The second half hour produced the pictures.
Eagles: reaction, not patience
The drift-ice boat out of Rausu is the opposite of the crane field. Sea eagles come in fast, from behind you as often as not, and land on ice that is itself moving. There is no waiting involved. There is a cold hour of nothing and then thirty seconds in which everything happens at once.
Two things mattered. A shutter speed high enough that a wing tip at full extension is still a wing tip. And a decision, made before the birds arrive, about which frame you are trying for — the single bird landing, wings up and feet forward, or the moment when two of them cross and the picture becomes about the space between them.
You cannot chase both. I chased both for the first twenty minutes and got neither.
What the cold actually costs
Less than I expected, is the honest answer. The camera and the batteries gave no trouble all week.
What cost something was the wind. The coldest I was all trip was on the drift-ice boat, out on open sea with nothing to stand behind, and that is a different kind of cold from a still morning at minus whatever on a snowfield. We were travelling as a group and we had come dressed for it — proper windbreakers, warm jackets — which is the whole difference between working out there and simply surviving the hour.
Which of them I would go back for
The cranes. The eagles make the more obvious photograph and the fox is the one people smile at, but the cranes are the only subject where the picture depends entirely on having stood in one place long enough to deserve it.
The full Hokkaido set is on SmugMug.