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The Story Behind the Shot
Photo by Will Sooter
If you haven’t seen the results of the 2010 Audubon Magazine Photo Awards, what are you waiting for? The winning shots are featured here, and the top 100 photographs here, for your perusal. It’s difficult to imagine just how much effort it collectively took to produce such a stunning body of work. Photographers, we know, often go to extremes to get their best shots, sometimes observing their subjects for days, weeks, or even months at a time. But for Will Sooter, a prize-winning photograph was years in the making. Here's his story:
| When Will Sooter semi-retired eight years ago, he turned to the beach, running long distances barefoot along the wrackline beneath the rugged sandstone bluffs of La Jolla, California. “I was living by the rhythm of the tides,” Sooter says. Then, out for a jog one day, he spotted another athlete—a peregrine falcon gliding by the cliffs. He slowed his jog. He stopped to watch. The next day he ran back, with binoculars, to do the same. Then Sooter decided to go every day—all day—carrying a disposable camera in his gym shorts pocket. A month later he bought his first digital SLR and zoom lens, and jogged up and down the beach with his gear, having swapped the rhythm of the tides for that of a falcon. This has led to eight years of study, invaluable observations, and, most recently, an award from Audubon for a stirring photograph: a willet, mouth wide, being whisked off to its death.
Every winter Sooter starts again, living in “bio-synchronicity” from February through June with La Jolla’s peregrines. During his first season, he watched a single male, a tiercel; it would disappear, a speck disintegrating into the Pacific distance, and return with prey its own size, birds almost heavy enough to drag it into the waves. The City of San Diego lifeguards came to know Sooter—he was like a piece of driftwood on the shore—and in his third year of peregrine watching, they drove up on the sand to tell him that there was a mating pair of falcons three miles up the beach. They gave Sooter a ride to the more remote location, a spot with fewer beachgoers and an active aerie. He’s watched this nest since then, camera in hand. Read more |