Stuffed Sheep and Talking Trees

So Camera clubs’ far and wide still consider lambs and nudes good photographic subject matter for their competitions: lambing and modeling – who are we to judge? Camera clubs can judge for themselves - award rosettes to the tastiest lamb or nude. Here’s some advice (from a “black-list” of nudes) on what to avoid if you’re thinking of entering (fancy your chances in) the ‘nude category’.

But have you considered entering a sheep? Or what happens when two fully-grown men - photographers – stuff a camera inside a sheep and deceive other wild creatures? Or have you given a thought to a young model – Ricky - a mere child who speaks because he’s got Jesus inside him?

Some notes on the Stuffed-Sheep Camera:

A stuffed sheep could be made useful to photograph birds living on moors and mountains. It had been " set up lying down," and a hole left in the chest for the lens of the camera to peep through. Finding a sandpiper's nest in the bottom of a lonely little ghyll far up in the heart of the fells, I placed the camera, minus the legs of the tripod, on a flat stone in front of it, focused, put a plate in position, and, attaching about fifty feet of pneumatic tubing, extended its full length in the direction that would give me the best view of the bird's nest. After carefully placing the sheep over the apparatus and tying the wool on the chest back, so that none of it should wave in front of the lens, I erected my little hiding tent at the opposite end of the pneumatic- tubing, covered it with rushes, and retired inside, to wait the home-coming of my " sitter." I had not been concealed ten minutes before a shepherd arrived on the top of a steep hill above me, and began to send his dog round the stuffed sheep with the intention of herding it. When it failed to move my animal, the old man broke into unprintably hard terms concerning his canine assistant's lack of intelligence, but the poor, libeled brute knew more than his choleric master, especially when he came to leeward of the sheep, and caught the aroma of the stuffer's workshop.

I once used a hollowed-out tree as a changing-room (see Dropped Trousers, 19/11/09); but beware of artificial trees – tree-trunks containing photographers. But there’s a worse kind of tree than a tree that can see: trees that talk too!

Geraldine and Dave have a little boy Ricky and they teach him how to play golf and they talk with him a lot.

She must be a great mother because her Ricky is always talking; and all the time he’s talking, he’s smiling! She even asks him: “Ricky, how come you’re always so full of words and smiles”? And instead of answering: “because trees talk too” Ricky smiles and says: “Because I have Jesus in me”.