Photographers love to travel. We love to go explore the wild places of the planet, the wildlife hotspots, the epic landscapes of Alaska, Patagonia, or the Himalayas, and rightly so. However, it is possible to forget the opportunities to photograph wildlife and natural scenery within our own backyards, parks, or even suburban open spaces.
Right now, I’m visiting my family in the suburbs of Denver for a few weeks leading up to the holidays. Their home sits at the edge of one of the prolific housing developments that encompass the southwest metro Denver suburbs. The front yard looks over a quiet side road to a major thoroughfare where cars are constantly passing. Out the back however, lies a pond, a backwater slough, some cottonwoods, and (if you look carefully) over to a fairway of a golf course, some 300 or 400 meters away.
The semi-natural habitat back there, despite its compact size is home to coyotes, foxes, cottontails, well-fed squirrels, and thousands of Canada Geese, Mallards, Red-winged Blackbirds, a pair of Cooper’s Hawks, and several individual Red-tailed Hawks which hunt the aforementioned waterfowl, rabbits, and squirrels. South facing, this time of year (winter) it’s also a perfect place to watch both sunrises and sunsets.
While the view here is pleasant, it isn’t in anyway unique. Most suburban neighborhoods in this part of Denver have something similar, if not out the back door, then a short walk away.
Photographing in these places can be a source of the hidden beauty that lies close to us, a place to create images of landscape and wildlife, and serve as a reminder that the wild can persist, at least a bit, within the narrow confines of the places we leave behind.
Suburbia is by no means an adequate substitute for untouched places, but for many photographers, these pockets of habitat are certainly more accessible, and shooting within them can keep our photographic chops up between wilder adventures.
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