You take the most beautiful pictures in Brabant, of course, the aerial photographer Mignon van den Wittenboer from Heeswijk-Dinther knows that too. On the day of the shoot, she shares a story about a very young fox looking through the lens of her camera. “I sat in a tree for hours waiting for something to happen.”
The intention, Mignon van den Wittenboer says of her encounter with the little fox a few years earlier, was actually to capture a completely different image. “Foxes are often photographed in the dunes. They are fed there and then you get pictures of the foxes coming to you,” says the hobby photographer. As a nature lover, Minion finds it more exciting to raise animals as faithfully as possible. “I wanted to photograph a fox in the nearby woods where they live.”
“I thought: soon he will bite my camera!”
And so she placed her wide-angle camera on the ground, so that you can also see a large part of the environment. “From afar, I hid quietly against a tree, hoping the foxes would pass by my camera.”
But this little creature had other plans, he seemed more curious about the camera itself. “When I saw him, I thought, Oh no! I was afraid he was going to chew up my camera,” Minion laughs. “But he just looked at it and sniffed it a little bit. I had another camera handy and took a picture of the fox looking through my camera.”
“Foxes have poor eyesight early in life, so you can hide very well as a photographer.”
Mignon works in everyday life as the director of the Maashorst Nature Centre. So she likes to be in nature. “If you are always involved in nature, you gain a lot of knowledge and know where to find certain animals,” she says.
This knowledge, plus a good portion of patience, is useful. “For example, I know foxes have poor eyesight at first. So if you don’t move around a lot, they won’t stand out and you can picture them as they really are.”
Patiently, Minion waited for the foxes to appear. “The way to the picture, the look, the wait, that’s what I like best. These kinds of pictures are a nice bonus.”
Not only the fox portrayed by Menon produced a stunning image. This shopping squirrel by Albert Beukhov has gone all over the world.
Read also: squirrel with a shopping cart: Albert’s pictures go all over the world.
