Double Exposure Read Online Free PDF Page A

film.
    Remington wasn’t in pursuit of a record, but art. His traps were configured to take the pictures the way he would if he were there snapping them himself.
    When he first got interested in trying camera traps, he researched what other photographers had done, read about all their problems with batteries blowing up, flashes melting, animals eating cords, and all the wasted film. Those early devices were too sensitive, capturing thousands of empty frames.
    For the early adopters, the pioneers of this process, the project was so labor intensive and inadequate that many of them gave it up—but fortunately for Remington, a few persevered and finally figured out what worked.
    Using cameras and strobes that hibernate when not in use to conserve batteries, programmed to wake once an hour to recharge so they’re ready if an animal trips the infrared beam of the trap, the earliest practitioners began to capture spectacular images impossible to get any other way.
    Like the mavericks before him, Remington finds places animals frequent and sets up a camera trap on the trail with an infrared beam. Checking the traps less than once a week, he reduces the likelihood his scent will scare the animals away.
    It’s taken some experimentation, because full auto is not an option, but knowing roughly where the animals will cross the beam, he’s been able to set up the strobes, focus, and exposure for that distance, skewing his exposure for dusk and dawn—the times of greatest activity.
    By the time he reaches the trap, the last feathers of the flamingo sky have floated away. Now, only the tops of trees are illuminated, their empty, craggy branches black, backlit by a faint smoke-gray sky.
    R emoving the memory card from the camera trap, he places it in his new camera and drops to the thick leaf-covered ground to view the shots. Pressing the display button, the first image appears. Spinning the selection wheel, he scrolls through the eerie images.
    E ven on the small screen, the burst of light against the dark night gives some of the frames an otherworldly quality.
    Moonlight.
    Overexposure fading to faint pale pallet.
    Ghostly.
    G lowing red eyes.
    Odd angles.
    Necks craned.
    Sand-colored streaks, leather-colored flashes.
    Night. Beyond the slough and its track-laden muddy rim, deer passing by trigger the trap, their eyes glowing demonically in the flash.
    Day. Leaping, turning, darting deer break the infrared beam, leaving blurs of buckskin behind. Too fast. Ill-framed. Unusable.
    The distant deer the camera captures are too far from the slough to do anything but trigger the trap.
    B lack spots.
    Red-gray coat.
    Triangular ears.
    Short, stubby tail.
    Dusk, and the small cat prowls about, slinking, skulking, stalking. Head down, facing the frame, green slitted eyes staring into the camera.
    Unlike the rare, endangered Florida panther, the Florida bobcat is much more common. Just three times the size of a large house cat, the sleek feline is stealthy and secretive, difficult to photograph, the kind of animal the traps were made for.
    The bobcat shots are stunning. Simple. Subtle. Natural.
    C ircle of light, dropping off to dark woods.
    Empty frames.
    Flutter of wings.
    Dash. Slash. Smear.
    Of the eighteen species of bats in Florida, only one isn’t found in the panhandle and four are found only here. Swarming like nocturnal butterflies, the blur of bats in the pictures troll the night skies for food, cupping their wings and scooping insects into their mouths at a rate of up to three thousand a night. No more than a few of the images are more than black blots against a bolt of bright light, but those few show the night-feeding creatures in astonishing action. Darting. Dramatic. Dazzling.
    B eyond his expectations, the digitally-captured animals are rare, wild, wondrous to behold. If the next spin of the dial doesn’t bring with it his fabled Florida panther, his disappointment will be tempered by the euphoria over the photographs he did