The stars were still twinkling, and a slim crescent moon hung over New Jersey as James Sengul got in his car and set out, camera stowed, to drive two hours to Union Lake Dam before sunrise. He needed that precious twilight window to position himself.
He would need the sun at his back. Favorable tides meant shallow waters where the stars of his photoshoot, nesting osprey and great blue heron, could ravage the fish they followed upstream after an exhausting migration to cooler climates from South America.
Experience taught Mr. Sengul, 58, a former sports photographer from Turkey, it all added up to big action on the water.
You can never predict what wildlife will deliver. People don’t expect to see the images he manages to capture and can’t believe it. He knows finding nature’s most private and surprising moments is all about getting to know who hunts whom, what their habits are, and how to turn it around to be in the right place at the right time.
It’s planned chaos, he says.
There is luck involved “but sometimes you create your own luck too,” he tells The Epoch Times.
Today, Mr. Sengul knew what he was going to capture through the 600mm lens of his Sony A1 before it happened. Give or take. He got to the dam, and the minute sunrise hit, the osprey were active.
It happened in a flash. The great blue heron made a move. The osprey dove. Feathers exploded. Water splashed. Mr. Sengul let his shutter fly at 30 frames a second, and it was over in three seconds—he saw none of what happened and had no clue what he had captured.
“You’re expecting it,” he said, but in the end “you get the best pictures when you don’t remember how did you get the pictures.”
The great blue heron had hung its life on a line that day by going after the osprey’s seafood meal while it was hunting, running up against razor talons and curved beak that tears animals apart for a living. “He took that chance, because this is wildlife, it’s survival of the best,” Mr. Sengul said, going on to speculate the blue heron’s thoughts: “I know he has sharp talons, but I have to try.”
The osprey kept his prize. The heron kept its life. So go the spectacular dramas hidden behind mother nature’s curtain.
Even being in the right place at the right time is no guarantee.
“I might be looking somewhere else, not that direction,” he said. “If I was there five minutes earlier or later, I won’t see it happen, I’m saying it’s incredibly rare.”
