While we are enduring another battering from yet another storm, I thought I’d do a post about how I go about getting my reflection images of various animals. People often tell me I must be lucking to get certain images, or witness certain things, and yes, sometimes luck does play apart. But most of my images come about through planning. When I decided I wanted to get images like these, below.
I went about creating a reflection pool. The construction is easy and can be quite small, I would imagine if it’s of interest to you, most gardens could accommodate one. Mine is made out of a single sheet of ply, image below.
As you can see, our land is on a slope, so I dug one end of the pool into the hill side and levelled the sheet of ply at the other end with a pair of legs. The up stands around the pool are lengths of 3x2” and then lined with a pond liner. At the far end, under foliage now, is a bit of dry stone walling to create habitat for small mammals. The far end of the pool also has a layer of pebbles to just under the surface to allow small birds to drink and bath in the pool. The advantage of being able to dig the pool into the hillside is that it allows access to all sorts of animals, not just birds. For instance, each year frogs spawn in the pool, hedgehogs drink from the pool and virtually all my polecat photography has been done at the pool. Hopefully, this might give you a few ideas if you are interested in getting this sort of imagery. I’ll finish off with a few more images from the pool. I should note, these images are all wild animals that visit the pool and the photographs are either taken from a hide and long lens or in the case of the Polecats, a DSLR camera trap.
