Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

Author's Comments

I came here skeptical. The word museum on a place that is half zoo and half botanical garden made me think I would be making zoo photographs, which is to say photographs that always look like what they are. I was wrong, or at least partly wrong. The ninety-eight acres are stitched into actual desert, and if you arrive at opening and walk fast to the far end of the property before the crowds, there are stretches where the enclosures recede and the saguaros and the ocotillo and the light do most of the work. The raptor free-flight is the reason to come with a long lens. Hawks and owls released into open air, banking low over the creosote, sometimes passing close enough that two hundred millimeters is more than you need. It runs in the cooler months and twice a morning. Get there for the first session. The light is lower, the birds are sharper, and the audience has not yet thickened into a wall. Beyond the raptors, I find the detail work more rewarding than the wide shots. The texture of a prickly pear pad in side light. The face of a desert tortoise. The way a cactus wren holds still for exactly long enough. Winter mornings are best - the air is clean, the shadows are long, and the animals are awake in a way they simply are not by ten in the morning. Bring water. Bring patience. Accept that some of your photographs will look like zoo photographs and that a few of them, if you are lucky and early, will not.

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