The Matador

I had the camera set up for the tree. It was an aspen with beautifully textured bark and a few leaves still clinging on, and I wanted a stitched frame that held every bit of that detail. The cardinal wasn’t there when I started shooting.

He flew in partway through and I didn’t even register him on the first pass — my shutter was too slow for a bird and he came out soft. With the camera already locked down on the tripod and everything else set, I raised the shutter speed and reshot that section of the sweep with him in it. What you’re looking at is the full stitch, thirteen frames, with one of them containing an uninvited guest.

Snow had come through either overnight or early that morning, a late-season squall of the kind that doesn’t last, and by the time I was there it was already too warm for it to hang about much longer.

The name is for the red against all that white, and for the way he’s puffed himself up — there’s something almost swaggering about that posture.