Hello people! This is my first blog post, so please bear with me on my journey to fox pictures and a blog post!
A few words about myself first, I'm from Germany and my main hobbies are mountainbiking and drawing, but end of april I also got interested in taking pictures to get creative. I got myself a entry level Canon DSLR and a few lenses to jump right in. The last lens I bought end of may was the EF 70-200 f/2.8 IS II which got me really excited to test this new focal length and this is also how my journey to these lovely fox twins started.
After shooting a few birds and insects I got really excited to search for my favourite animal the fox. I knew where a fox hole was five years ago when a friend showed it to me and my best bet was to just check there again. With my camera backpack and my mountainbike I explored the area and was able to find the fox hole close to the one from five years ago.
Luckily for me I also saw quite narrow fresh trails in the surrounding area and so I took on the waiting game after positioning myself behind a pile of dirt. Around an hour later, when I was looking into the trees I suddenly realized that a small head popped out of the dark for a few seconds, but I was not able to take a sharp picture in this short time frame (which was a problem for me in general with my lack of experience).
Either way this first sighting made me really happy and I didn't care too much about the missed opportunity, I saw a young fox!
I struggled a bit to find good settings for the mixed light conditions and also thought to myself I should maybe start with a higher aperture like 4-5 for a better chance to get atleast some sharp images. Another problem were young trees and branches right in front of the fox hole which made it hard for the autofocus to hit and impossible for me to find a better position where I was still hidden. After waiting for another hour the young fox came out again, but this time he was not scared anymore and the more shy second fox also came a bit later. Here are some of the photos I then took on the first day.
The first day came to an end and I was beyond happy to find these cute foxes and also to see a few nice images back at home, even though I don't like the positions I took too much. A few days later I came back to try again. Hower I still had no better strategy at this point for a different perspective and had to rely on similar positions for myself to get the following photos.
So the second day of visitting the fox hole came to an end and this time I had an idea what I could try next. Still very new in this whole photography thing I already bought quite a a lot of gear to test all the things I was so interested in and saw the remote control in my backpack that I used to take images of the night sky. My idea was to sneak up a bit closer to the fox hole from a different angle at noon when they are sleeping and setup my camera there on a tripod with the remote control activated. Hoping for the best I got back to my usual position and sat down with the remote in my hand. I was a bit scared how they would react to the camera and especially the loud noises of shooting in burst mode, but after looking a bit skeptical they just ignored it! And so I was able to take the following photos.
What I learned from the last day was that I should have used a limited auto ISO instead of auto exposure time. When I was setting up the camera there was enough light to get a quite fast exposure time with the f2.8 and ISO 200 I used, but I underestimated how long I would have to wait this day. For the last photos of the day the exposure time got up to 1/30, which was the reason I missed a lot of nice shots when they were playing. But I'm still really happy how these last photos turned out and how much I learned with trial and error. I can't wait to learn more and improve myself!
Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed the photos of these sweethearts!