I have ideas now and again for prop photos.
On one photographic site I used to frequent, there was this one really gifted contributor who made these extremely weird, interesting photos out in a dark forest somewhere. They generally involved structures made of sticks and twine, some kind of smoke, and a single human figure in some sort of ominous, inhuman-looking makeup and costuming. I used to dream of trying to do something in the same mood. There are junkyard sites and dumps in remote places that might serve, but actually some of those have become conventionalized sites for photography like Old Car City in Georgia. I had this idea for trying to shoot an abandoned major appliance—an old-style TV or toaster or something like that—with lighting inside of it in the middle of the woods or wilderness at dusk.
But basically that’s kind of a hassle—it’s a bit beyond my energies and my capabilities. And I suspect the idea is a lot harder to pull off than it seems in my head, especially with something heavy. There’s also the fact that generally if you’re hauling a heavy, obsolete appliance into a wild area, anybody who sees you is going to assume you’re dumping something, not staging an interesting photograph.
This is one of the few modest attempts I made to do something like this. We have this little frog prince metalwork that normally lives outside our front door. It’s fairly lightweight so I thought I’d take it into a state park nearby and look for ponds where I typically found actual frogs. This pond had some frogs in it—one jumped off that rock as I approached. I set up the camera on a tripod with a shutter control cord and sat down to wait. I was really hoping that a few of the frogs might come back out and maybe—just maybe!—one would get in frame with its metal doppelganger.
I waited about thirty minutes and that was enough. Art was going to be denied this particular day. This was a consolation shot.
Five minutes later, of course, as soon as the frog prince was back in my backpack:
Where he would have been in frame.
I’ve mentioned this point before, but when you see fantastic shots of animals in the wild, especially doing really interesting things in relationship to plants or props, generally one of three things is going on. 1) The photographer has set up to make the background of the shot look like pristine wilderness but they’re shooting a captive or trained animal. A lot of owls and raptors in flight are flying to a trainer, for example. 2) Some of the really cute shots with large insects, amphibians, reptiles and very small mammals are shot with dead or stunned subjects; if they’re doing something like dancing under a mushroom in the rain, it’s because they’ve been posed with thin wires that the photographer has then taken out of the shot. About the only benign form of this is with insects, where you can put them in a freezer for a short while without hurting them and then take pictures on a light table or in some other controlled setting—the cold slows them down for a minute. (You can also put sugar water on plants and many species of otherwise fast-moving insects will pause to drink it down.) 3) The photographer has a hellaciously big and expensive zoom lens and a lot of patience.
There are a few wild animals that you can get good shots of without extraordinary equipment—you just have to have patience and know about their habitat and movements. Birds most notably, amphibians and insects. Sometimes lizards and snakes, and of course always turtles and tortoises if you know where to find them. Some mammals if they’re common (deer) or you’re in a wildlife reserve that concentrates some species in predictable and visible places. There’s plenty of other animals you’re almost never going to see in conditions that allow for a good photograph, though. When I’ve been in game parks in southern Africa, I’d almost rather see small mammals, reptiles and birds than the “Big Five”, but many of the mammals are nocturnal and most of the ways you travel around a reserve mitigate against seeing many smaller organisms period.