There is a tiny wooden bench and a podium sitting in the middle of my backyard, and nobody will go near it. Six squirrels are sitting on the fence. All of them staring at it. None of them are getting down. It has been like this for two days.
I should back up.
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I have a theory about what makes a photograph great. Either the subject is extraordinary, in which case even an ordinary photo of it looks great. Or the subject is ordinary, and the photograph has to be extraordinary. The light, the composition, the moment. Something has to do the heavy lifting.
I've shot both kinds. Tigers are the first kind. Squirrels are very much the second. I mean everyone has photographed a squirrel at some point.
And for the better part of two years I've been throwing everything I have at the second kind. Squirrels in rain and in snow. In summer greens and fall colors. Surrounded by flowers. Backlit, sidelit, soft light, harsh light. If you open my Lightroom catalog, the most photographed subject in it isn't a mountain or a night sky. It's squirrels. Tens of thousands of times over.
At some point you run out of weather.
There is only so much you can do with light and a squirrel. So the only thing left was to get creative. Props. Scenes. Squirrels doing things. A harvest basket in the fall. A little winter village in the snow. Every one of those started the same way, with a squirrel refusing to come down from the fence.
That's where game night comes in.
I host game nights fairly often, and every single time my friends come over, the squirrels steal the show. They show up right outside the door, everyone abandons the table, and for ten minutes the game is squirrels. Then someone asks the question that always gets asked. What else could you shoot them with?
Here's the dangerous part. My friends are somehow good at this. Somebody throws out an idea half as a joke, and by the time they've gone home it has become my new hyperfixation. How do I make that happen? What do I need to build? How many peanuts is this going to take? And it's not just me. Whoever came up with the idea is now fixated on it too, texting me prop ideas, offering to build things, thinking through the logistics of a shot that exists only in a group chat.
Erika's idea came with hardware. She had a bench and a podium her dad built for her when she was a young girl. Tiny, wooden, perfectly squirrel sized. She brought them over the following week and handed them to me like it was nothing.
Props acquired.
Which brings us back to the fence, and the six squirrels who want nothing to do with my bench.
This is the part nobody tells you about working with the squirrels in your backyard. They notice everything. Put out anything new and the whole yard goes quiet. Nobody eats. Nobody comes down into the yard. They line up along the fence, all of them, and they stare. A jury of squirrels. Deliberating. Nothing happens until the jury decides the thing is not a threat, and only then does the verdict come in and someone climbs down.
So a photo like this is not an afternoon. It's more like a week.
Day three, one of them finally drops in. Circles the bench at a distance. Grabs a peanut from the far corner of the yard and eats it with its back to the whole situation. Day four, someone walks right past it. Day five, the bench is officially furniture. Not a threat, not interesting, just a thing that lives in the yard now.
Fine. They trust the bench. Now how do you get one to actually sit on it? Facing the right way? Paws on the podium? Looking like it is about to deliver a closing argument?
It's not like they understand English.
You come to me, the squirrel whisperer.
Just kidding. The real answer is time. And peanuts.
There's a lot of getting it wrong first. They sit on the podium. They sit behind the bench. They eat standing up. They take the peanut and go eat it on the fence, out of spite. One of them tips the podium over and looks at me. Every attempt, the peanut moves an inch. A little to the left. A little higher. Then you go back inside, wait, and come out to try again.
And then one afternoon, after enough patience and exactly the right peanut placement, everything lines up.
The bench. The podium. And a squirrel who has clearly been waiting all week to say something
Every time I show these to someone, I get the same first question. Is this AI? Is this Photoshop? What's the trick?
There is no trick. It's one frame, straight out of the camera, and a very patient squirrel. The only thing composited into it is a week of my life.
As for what's next, game night has already decided. There's a bank vault full of nuts that a squirrel is going to try to break into. I haven't figured out how to build a vault yet, but that has never stopped a hyperfixation before.
The squirrel supper, on the other hand, is done. Thirteen squirrels around a long dinner table, straight out of The Last Supper. That one deserves its own story, so it will have to wait. But here's a sneak peek.
If you know the painting, you know exactly which seat he's in.
