19th Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest Natural World
Fruit and bat

We always miss the things Which are near and chase things that are far from us. But, this pandemic made me do things that were never observed by me. Being a photographer observation is of core importance. Just one night sitting in my balcony I was observing a tree with full of fruits in a backyard. I saw some bats were wandering around,“BAT” a thought that came in mind was where whole world cursing bat I decided to observe them and capture them. At First day I observed the behaviour and clicked hardly 4-5 images Bats were coming frequently to eat fruits. I have never done camera trap photography so I had no equipment like an infrared sensor or any other camera trap equipment the only thing I had was an external flash, but after spending few days and some observation I got to know that it is more than enough to click bats. I must say bats have some awesome characters to shoot. I spent almost 3 weeks with them and after some point I started predicting their behavior in mind. Example-today this fruit is ripe so to eat this fruit on this branch bats will prefer this way.

Photo Detail
Date Taken: 10.2020
Date Uploaded: 10.2021
Photo Location: Badlapur, India
Camera: NIKON D750
Copyright: © Sitaram Raul