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Photographing Harvest mice
Harvest mice are by far my favourite mice and are great fun to photograph, they even seem to enjoy the experience as much as I do, still free warm lodgings and good food for a day doing what you would anyway can't be bad. The good thing about the Harvest mouse is that it doesn't jump far and from my experience are quite happy being in the presence of humans and behave quite naturally, in fact you have to watch putting your hand in the tank when moving props as they will come and run up your arm, and boy they can move fast. My setup is based on a glass tank about 3 foot square and 1 foot high
in the centre of this I place a large jar or tin about 3 inches round
then on top of this I place my prop, bramble corn etc, this stands the
prop above the glass sides so you don't need to shoot through the glass
as with some other species, some bramble or wood is then propped against
the jar allowing the mice to climb up. The tank is set up on a table about
5 feet long the background is then positioned behind the tank to give
a nice out of focus backdrop.
Also in one corner of the tank I place some crumpled up dry grass, this gives the mice somewhere to rest which they like to do about every 30 minutes or so, this also gives me time to review what I have taken and have a mug of tea and a smoke! Also while the mice are resting it's a good time to change props and
backgrounds ready for the next period of activity, I try to get all the
shots that I want in say an hour and a half session after this I let the
mice go where I found them. My next project is the Wood mouse I have a mouse box fixed to a post down the field some times in the winter it gets full of mice, for this session I took the box off the post and put in the tank and when finished the mice went back in the box which I put back on the post. No open tank for this chap he can jump for England. I only got this one image in a 2 hour session with 6 mice in the tank.
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