Revelations of Trail Cam Photography in Winter

February 1, 2016

Revelations of Trail Cam Photography in Winter

Back in early December, I put up a Browning Strike Force trail cam at the intersection of two paths that I had cut 15 years ago through the back of our New Braintree property. The trails meet close to the edge of Mason Pond, a small natural stream impoundment. Over the years, beaver families have come and gone and have further dammed the pond's outlet, thus raising the water level and making it safe for winter skating and for various wildlife to walk across the frozen surface to our wooded shore.

The Browning camera can record not only color images, given sufficient ambient daylight, but can also capture night footage as well through on-board IR illumination. The IR beam is almost invisible, does not spook wildlife (unlike incandescent camera flash), and uses very little energy to trigger. This is particularly helpful when the camera's batteries are subjected to the extended cold of New England winter evenings. Of late, I've been playing with the rig's multi-shot mode which can be set to rapidly fire 2 - 8 shots once the camera's motion detector (also IR-based) is triggered by a passing creature. With these images, I've created a few interesting time-lapse videos in Lightroom. Here are some of our regular guests...

As can be seen, the camera creates informational banners below each image that include temperature, moon phase, date, and time.

This is a great feature that could be made even better if these data points were also written directly into the JPEG images' own embedded metadata structure* rather than by simply forming part of the actual image's pixel real estate. With embedded data you could then sort your images by say temperature range and/or moon phase in order to do some nice rough aggregations in Lightroom or Bridge without having to manually enter this same information yourself. Or, you could even do more sophisticated statistical analysis off of these fields to track species behavior based upon the correlations of your choice. As is, the camera still opens up an interesting window on the ghostly, nocturnal world of animal behavior after dark. Over time I'm getting a better feel for the device's potential as I hone my talents at placing it along our trails for best results...

...because you never know what will show up when you pull the camera's SD card and download the images. Take this one, for example...

*UPDATE (2/2/16): After poking around further, I've now discovered that the camera actually does embed the banner's information. Kudos to Browning for doing the right thing all along. The reason why I didn't notice it at first glance is due to the manner in which these details are stored in the file. For instance, all of the data points are written into a single IPTC Core "Description" field in one concatenated, colon-delimited string:

It's hard to blame Browning for doing this, since there are no pre-existing IPTC fields for things like moon phase and temperature to neatly slot into. Nevertheless, a few incongruities remain worth noting. While the time stamp appears in the image banner using the 12-hour clock convention, it is embedded in the file utilizing the 24-hour clock or military time convention. Additionally, the date conventions differ slightly between banner image (mm/dd/yyyy) and embedded metadata (mmddyy). Finally, where the moon phase is represented as an icon in the banner, it is instead recorded with its corresponding numeric value in the metadata. In any event, the information is there to plumb once you understand the conventions by which it is embedded.