Photographer Captures Storybook Fox Photos Using His Homemade Camera Trap

Fox Caught on DIY Camera Trap by Ross Harried

Capturing photos of wild animals can be tricky. A camera trap is one way that photographers snap stunning pictures of the creatures in their environment without disturbing them with a human presence. Photographer Ross Harried recently unveiled a series featuring an inquisitive fox that had wandered close to his homemade camera trap, and the results are beautiful. The images look like they are from a storybook.

Based in Wisconsin, Harried built the DSLR camera trap in 2022 and had only used it a handful of times before capturing his fox photos. To create his DIY setup, he used an old Canon T3i with a lens and flashes he picked up either secondhand or bought on eBay. He outfitted it with camera trap triggers and receivers and housed everything in weatherproof cases.

This setup doesn’t last too long when the temperatures dip below freezing, but it was enough to snap the recent wildlife images. It was successful, in part, thanks to Harried's research. “I had scouted the area on a tip two days prior and saw five different foxes in the area,” he tells My Modern Met, “and I was familiar with them as I had shot them in the summertime.”

Harried followed their tracks in the snow. He used that knowledge to position the trap to face the rocks, all in hopes of getting the creature walking between them. “I had no idea the flashes from the trap would capture the fox's intrigue and it would pose so beautifully on the rocks. Compositionally I couldn’t have composed the image/animal better myself.”

Harried was ecstatic when he saw the results. “These photos went way above my expectations,” he explains. “I had built this thing over a year ago and only got ‘snapshots’ to say the least. To come away with this set of images, a mere hour after I left the trap in the wild still blows my mind. The curious fox was clearly watching me, or at the very least stalked/knew about my presence and my reward was some stunning images!”