Picture, picture time – frozen tundra edition

So one of the trickier aspects of putting animals into spring auctions is getting great promotional photos of them in the middle of the late winter or early spring. The choice for backdrop in northern New England this time of year, is usually either snow, mud, or maybe the best of both worlds: muddy snow!

Some times with our marketing efforts, we get lucky though. For last year’s Parade of Champions sale, for instance, I had somehow had a premonition and had decided to take some shots of our lone eventual entry, CCNF Fleur, the previous September on lush, green grass. I mean, who doesn’t love a beautiful animal on green grass, right? Sigh. Well, I can assure you that that showed a remarkable ability to, um…plan ahead on the part of yours truly which is, quite frankly, sorely missing this time around.

Fun fact: did you know that the temperatures in the state of Vermont did not go above 32 degrees for the entire month of February? Winter of our discontent, indeed. While this made the good folks at the local ski mountains positively giddy, it means that here at the farm in the final weeks of the winter, we are most surely not shooting pictures of our auction animals on any grass — lush, green, brown, or otherwise — but a very respectable base of snow. That’s really saying something, given that we are a south-facing exposure here at CCNF. As those that have tried taking alpaca pictures in these conditions elsewhere can attest, it can be a challenge. Too much sun and everything just whites out, too little sun and it looks like you’re shooting on the set of a goth nature documentary: everything looks just sort of gray and melancholy.  Then of course there is the always challenging aspect of getting said would-be auction females to stick their #@*%& ears up!  After having a go at this by myself yesterday with some limited success, I called in the cavalry today, in the form of Sammy and his quad-copter drone. While the girls were able to ignore yesterday’s hooting, whistling, clucking (yes, I clucked, got a problem with that?), and the occasional desperate tossing of my hat, the presence today of a large and relatively loud mechanical mosquito with flashing lights, got their attention in a hurry. As the photo at left can attest, ears were up all around! Now if we can just work on getting some of that green grass…

Follow me on Twitter @CCNFalpacas