Capturing the Moment in the Concrete Jungle

Following these animals at night when everyone's sleeping and seeing what they do has totally changed my perspective. Everywhere I walk now, I just see animal holes, bent fences, traces of animal hair. I've had to become an animal detective to be able to do this assignment. I was a skateboarder growing up, so I looked at urban landscapes and thought, “Can I skate that concrete ledge?” Now, when I walk down the sidewalk, I wonder: “Could a coyote have dug that fence hole?”

This was a big learning curve for me because I had never used camera traps before this project, and there was a lot of trial and error. If the sensors weren’t positioned perfectly and shutter speed wasn’t planned for the amount of ambient light, then the subject would be blurry or out of focus. I had plenty of decent shots where the animal’s face was out of focus, but the tail was perfectly sharp! To prevent that, I tried shooting with a smaller aperture to bring more of the frame into focus, but then the shot isn’t quite as interesting because everything is sharp, and there isn’t as much depth. So I was always trying to find a balance.

Sometimes a camera trap would sit for four months to get the shot I was looking for.

Click below to view a few of Arnold’s camera trap outtakes.

I learned how incredibly close these animals’ dens were to busy urban areas. We found a black bear tree den just a few feet from a major highway in Asheville, and coyotes often made their dens inside urban cemeteries in Chicago. And of course, raccoons love attics and crawl spaces.