As many readers will know by now, I really do like walking in the
desert, for all kinds of reasons. I’m
not the world’s greatest animal lover and I certainly don’t go to the desert
specifically to look at the wildlife, but even so, if you tread carefully and
quietly it’s amazing what you can see.
Still, it seems you rarely get close enough to take a really nice
picture, unless as in the case below your faithful companion actually manages to (very,
very gently) pick up the thing.
That’s a horned toad, and certain species defend themselves by shooting
blood from their eyes, but I guess this one was from another species, for which
I was essentially grateful, though it must be quite a thing to see.
And recently I came across this from Popular Science, March 1931:
Arthur N. Pack, I discover, was a very serious and highly respected
naturalist, but even so, I couldn't, still can't, believe that anybody could see him in this cactus costume without falling about laughing. And
in any case I wasn’t sure how it actually worked. It struck me that both walking and seeing
would be fairly difficult inside of that thing.
I assumed there had to be eyeholes but they’d surely give you a very limited
view of the world. And I had even less idea
how you’d wield a camera.
Anyway, the Internet being what it is, I found this article (above and
below) about Mr. Peck’s desert walking and photography, in an issue of Modern Mechanics and
Inventions, As with Popular Science, the magazine seems more interested in the
apparatus than the end result: the cutaway image shows you more detail of how
it supposedly worked.
I still think it’d be pretty hard to take pictures from inside a
fake cactus, especially since the camera looks to be fixed and immovable, though it does seem that Mr. Pack managed to take some pretty good, intimate photographs of
desert critters. But I absolutely don’t see
how he could have taken those photographs at ground level. Maybe he had a faithful companion, who
perhaps dressed as a rock.
