The animal parade continues, and choosing wasn’t easy. Ingrid Taylar presents a National Geographic-like menagerie of beasts and birds that captures character and detail. Self-titled “Happy Hour”, which she shot on May 31, 2013, takes the Day for being interesting. How often do you see something like that? Ingrid used Olympus OM-D E-M5 and Panasonic Lumix 100-300mm lens, because “my workhorse, the Olympus E-3 is in the shop”, she says. Vitals are not available.
From San Francisco, Calif., but living in Seattle, Wash., Ingrid is what I call a “lifer”. She joined Flickr in August 2004, about six months after the service was founded. Her blog, “The Wild Beat” is a real treat,
Ingrid says about her photography:
I’ve had a camera in my paws since I was five years old—an Instamatic, a Polaroid, an SLR. While volunteering at a wildlife hospital, I started seeing my camera as a conduit between us and ‘them’—a way to bring the wild animal’s experience closer to our own by framing in the lens, their joys, their complexities, their sorrows, and their pure loveliness.
I try to paint in pixels how it all feels—that heart-stopping moment when ten thousand Snow Geese take flight overhead; when an old elk bugles under the season’s first snow drops; when a pod of Orcas glides past the boat, sharing the pulse of the ocean. Through the intimacy of my lens, I hope to promote love and respect for our fellow beings—working toward a world where we no longer view other species as objects for our use or harm, but rather as peers in this existence.
Our Day taker is in some ways not representative of the motion, and emotion, that Ingrid captures. But there is implied movement, eh? The stack looks ready to topple any second.
I nearly selected self-titled “Raccoon Trio“—aren’t they drop-dead cute—but Day 128 features an adult and the series has yet to present turtles. I also passed on the little bandits because the best shoots are All Rights Reserved (hehe, like this one). But for a great backstory about the coons and insight into Ingrid’s right attitude about derivative art, read “From Backlit Raccoons to ‘Tres Banditos’—Photos as References“.
Photo Credit: Ingrid Taylar