This past weekend in Florida I was on a mission to photograph armadillos. Contrary to what a lot of people think, they aren’t just in Texas. Florida is full of them. In fact, their range continues to grow each year because they don’t really have any natural predators and they’ve even been spotted as far north as Indiana. I saw quite a few on Merritt Island, about 45 minutes east of Orlando, but even so, they proved to be one of the hardest animals I’ve ever tried to photograph. The problem is, once you find one, it never seems to lift its head up from the ground and it constantly moves around searching for grubs and other insects like ants. They are virtually blind, but have a great sense of smell, so as soon as one would smell me it would lift its nose into the air for about a second and then scurry off into the bushes. To get decent shots I needed to be face down on the ground, at eye level, at the instant one of them lifted up. I captured a few shots like this with the armadillo on its hind legs with its nose high in the air and I’ll send one of those in a future post. In the meantime, I really liked the shallow depth of field of this one with the blurred foreground and background, and the range of colors.

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