Having always wanted hares and jackalopes in my portfolio of art (mainly for my own wall, though Moon Hare is one of my best selling prints!), finding myself staying next to fields of wild hares in Norfolk back in 2022 felt promising – look how beautiful it is.
Turns out my lenses are all fabulous for humans and close up work, and absolutely useless for anything properly far away (especially if it’s fast and small and far away!)
Yes, that is the best I could manage even with my 135mm, a tiny crop in the centre of my frame. You can see it’s a hare, but it’s about the size of a postage stamp.
So the following year as we were returning to the same place, I hired a properly long lens, repacked the car to make sure it would fit in its huge protective case…
And headed out to look for hares!
(Flattering selfie angle as always! You’d never guess from my phone pictures what I do for a living, honestly.)
Lens was so ridiculously big & heavy it had to use its own attachment for the tripod so it didn’t snap off my camera:
And then I waited and watched, and cursed the farmer and his quad bike and his five dogs who seemed to be everywhere at once every time I had sight of a hare.
Did also get to know some other critters as I walked past their fields each day:
Objectively a better photo of the horse, but missing the birds of prey who snuck in!
At last I had peace and quiet and the hares came out to play – there is one in the shot on the right, I promise!
And I got the shots I wanted fairly quickly after that.
