How One Curious New Photographer Shot the Pictures Of A Lifetime
News | By Stephan Jukic | May 4, 2024
Sometimes novice photographers just get lucky with opportune shots that pros might struggle for years to capture. This is what spectacularly happened to one.
Michael Sanchez is a 41-year-old hobby photographer from Vancouver, Washington who only bought his first camera barely a month ago.
Then, just a couple weeks later, while giving it some of his first experimental use, he shot a few simple, casually snapped photos that have sparked a frenzy.
The musician and school band coordinator-by-profession was exploring the Hug Point coastal area of Oregon state in the U.S.A several days ago for the sake of some hopefully nice dawn shots of the rocks and shore.
Then, almost randomly amidst his landscape shots, he noticed and captured what looked like nothing more than a little dark bird hopping around the rocks and sand.
It was dim in the dawn twilight and the tiny creature’s real appearance didn’t register fully until he looked more closely at those particular photos a couple of days later.
It was only while using Adobe Lightroom to more closely examine the RAW image files taken with his newly-bought Sony a6700 camera that Sanchez realized how unusual the little bird really looked.
Instead of simply being dark, it actually had a striking blue upper body coloration over an almost rusty brown chest.
Thinking the appearance of the starling-sized bird to be pretty cool, he posted some of his images online.
Later, a friend of his passed these along to a serious bird watcher they knew and from there a fairly heavy media frenzy ensued.
Soon, the photos were being shared across the web, through online birding communities, local news outlets and later, even by major publications such as the Guardian and NPR.
The reason why is simple enough. The little bird he saw and photographed that morning is called a Blue rock thrush, probably of the Monticola. s. philippensis subspecies.
More importantly, though not uncommon in its native breeding range throughout areas of Asia and Europe, this particular avian had only been spotted in North America twice: The first time in British Columbia in 1997, and the second time by Michael Sanchez during his early morning photographic expedition.
Blue Rock Thrush breeding and resident ranges are shown in light and dark green respectively. Blues show migratory range.
It’s also worth noting that the 1997 sighting hasn’t even been officially recognized due to insufficient data, making Sanchez’s very clearly documented encounter a solid candidate for having been singular. (a few days following Sanchez’s photos, another sighting was documented further south in California, possibly of the same bird)
Mr. Sanchez himself has described the last week or so as an “uproar” that he hadn’t at all expected.
Because of his surprisingly clear, crisp images, the entire Pacific Northwest birding community has gone into a frenzy and others have even started going out to find a live specimen of their own.
Sanchez explains that when initially sharing the photos he thought, “Oh, well, this is something different, for sure”, but not much more.
He clarified to the website PetaPixel, “I’m just a beginner photographer, and I wouldn’t consider myself a birder at all,” Sanchez also added, “I always watch [birds] when they are out, and I even had some pet birds years ago, but never thought I’d be diving headfirst into something like this.”
While Michael Sanchez’s photos apparently haven’t yet obtained official verification as a documented sighting of the Blue rock thrush in North America, they’re almost guaranteed to.
Anyone giving them even a passing glance can see that they show what absolutely looks like a specimen of this particular bird species.
Sanchez is even working with the Oregon Bird Records Committee to provide as much information and visual evidence from his photos as possible.
If he’d somehow doctored the photos themselves, it would likely be detected very quickly considering the scrutiny they’re receiving.
It’s also very hard to believe that he’d have gone as far as to obtain one of these little birds from elsewhere just to release it along the Oregon coast for the sake of a few photos and media attention.
While some photographers are certainly capable of pretty serious efforts at faking their work for the sake of exposure, in this case nothing about the idea rings likely at all.
According to Sanchez in his comments to PetaPixel, he’s just a graduate of YouTube University when it comes to practicing photography.
He added that so far, he’s only devoted occasional time to going out and practicing his new hobby.
Even his morning trip to Hug Point was something he did only because some photographers in an online forum had recommended the place when he mentioned wanting to visit a nearby beach.
Michael Sanchez certainly got lucky, but novice or not, one observation he gives to other would-be photographers is definitely a sound thing to keep in mind.
The newly-minted photographer explains,
“We live in a beautiful world. We have beautiful birds, beautiful landscapes, and so I think if this encourages people just to take a little bit of notice of what’s going on around them, and whether it’s a little bird or something else, I think that’s a great thing,”
For finding unique subjects and fascinating compositions, I can’t think of much more essential advice.
Photos: Michael Sanchez, Wikimedia Commons
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Stephan Jukic is a technology and photography journalist and experimental photographer who spends his time living in both Canada and Mexico. He loves cross-cultural street photo exploration and creating fine art photo compositions.
