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!
Here it is, perched on the birch tree right outside our front door. You can see my car on the left.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
With a mighty flap of his blood-soaked wings, he took to the sky...
Look at that wingspan! Yes, there, down in the lower left! Almost completely out of frame and impossible to distinguish!
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!