Waiting for the Cows to Come Home

When you want a dog to head your way, you would typ­i­cally say some­thing like “Here, boy!”

When you want a cat to come in for the night, you’re likely to sing the refrain “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!”

But what do you do when you want a cow to come your way? This is a dilemma I faced while record­ing my lat­est video train­ing title, Time-​​Lapse Pho­tog­ra­phy Work­shop. We had been dri­ving around through the moun­tains, hop­ing to find either some nice cloud devel­op­ment or cows graz­ing in a field. So I felt incred­i­bly lucky when we drove around a cor­ner through a val­ley to find both in the same place.

As we approached, the cows were right up against the fence, and they seemed very curi­ous about what we were doing, milling about and moo­ing in our gen­eral direc­tion. I eagerly started set­ting up my tri­pod with a wide-​​angle lens, get­ting every­thing con­fig­ured for my time-​​lapse. But since I would be record­ing a train­ing video I didn’t imme­di­ately start cap­tur­ing the frames of the time-​​lapse — I wanted the viewer to see me doing that on camera.

We set up quickly, and I started intro­duc­ing the topic — but after a cou­ple of sen­tences, a loud trac­tor approached to turn the hay in a neigh­bor­ing field. It was too noisy, and we had to stop record­ing for about ten minutes.

And of course, dur­ing that ten min­utes the cows decided they were no longer curi­ous about the crew and all of our equip­ment. They also decided they had enough to eat for the time being, and it was time to gather in the mid­dle of the field (far from the fence), to lay down and digest. The great time-​​lapse I antic­i­pated was no longer what I envisioned.

We started record­ing any­way, and I ini­ti­ated the time-​​lapse cap­ture, hop­ing that dur­ing the period of about 45 min­utes when I would be cap­tur­ing frames, the cows would get curi­ous and approach our posi­tion again. A few did, but most didn’t. The time-​​lapse was still cool, but I think it could have been so much cooler!

The les­son? Some­times the pho­tog­ra­phy really has to come first. Even though I was about to go on cam­era to demon­strate the tech­nique of set­ting up and cap­tur­ing a time-​​lapse video, I should have started the time-​​lapse as soon as I got set up in front of a cool sub­ject. On cam­era I could have always explained to the viewer that the scene was just too good to pass up, and that I had already started cap­tur­ing my frames. Then I could talk about the set­tings I had used for the cap­tures, while the cam­era kept shoot­ing all along.

You would have for­given that, right?

Tagged as: photography, Tim Grey, time-lapse