Since most of my diminished travel time this year has been taken up by Yellowstone stuff, I was looking for something different to post today. This is from my 2016 Australia trip, an image from my favorite wildlife encounter that we had. I spent nearly three hours on my belly (the leeches were fun!) in Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain National Park trying to land a few decent images of a short-beaked echidna. It was quite challenging, given how much time this animal spends with its face buried in the ground… or hidden behind grass.
For those who aren’t familiar with this animal, it’s one of only three monotreme species—egg-laying mammals—on the planet, along with the long-beaked echidna and the platypus.
What a fine portrait of a little critter I remember seeing BW pictures of when I was VERY young. The foraging brings the little guy to life.
You have some cropping choices available …
Remove some of the sky, as bright white and blue draw eyes from everything else
Remove some of the left side, as that does not add much to the portrait
I wanted to burn areas around the subject in an attempt to keep it the center if attention.
If you can go back to the raw file it might be possible to recover some detail in the top center cloud.
But what a lovely environmental portrait. Getting down low really paid off - I love that we can see one of its feet up off the ground, showing those long claws.
Thanks Bonnie. That reminds me that you can get a view of the odd “backward” hind feet in this photo. The way the echidna’s claws are arranged (theoretically to help with stabilization while digging), their footprints make it look like the animal was going in both directions at once!
Thanks, Ryan. It’s definitely a shot that has a few options (including not centering the animal, since the 3/4 view would work in the traditional “thirds” composition), but like you I preferred to show a bit more of the surrounding environment as it waddled down the hill.
Never heard of an echidna, so a treat to view. I’m a sucker for wide angle wildlife shots, so I prefer the first. The mammal looks sharp to me, and I really like the green vegetation in the foreground. Only slight critique is that you could attempt to move it more off center.
