There’s something I’ve been grappling with for a while now.
What I love most about wildlife photography is the unpredictability. I can spend a day out shooting and come back with the best shots of my life, or nothing at all. It’s not up to me what appears, where it appears or what it does. Moments are often fleeting with limited chance for strategy and adjustment. It’s not within my control.
For a control freak it’s both a surrender and a curse. Both a challenge and a suffocation.
Once upon a time I started my journey in photography as a landscape photographer. When I had this conversation with a landscape photographer friend he quipped to me ‘well you can’t exactly pick up a mountain and move it.’ While that’s true you pick your light, your time, your position, as well as all the other technical aspects of your image. You can take your shot, tweak your settings and keep trying. And the mountain isn’t going to run away from you.
With wildlife you can pick the light, the time, the position, and nothing shows up. And if you aren’t ready to fire off that shutter when the moment arrives, it’s gone.
It’s become a question I ask every presenter at every workshop, seminar or presentation. How can you be creative when the rules are so defined for you. How do you produce something different to what everyone else is doing?
The answers are never the same. A National Geographic wildlife photographer said ‘but do you have to? Or is it enough to do it well?’ An art teacher at photography club suggested playing with the process if the outcome isn’t certain. One of my best friends who creates incredible photos tells me often that art is subjective and what does it matter what anyone else is doing or thinks.
I am in a constant competition with myself, not only to capture those creatures I haven’t yet, but to do it better, differently, stave off the boredom and continue to grow.
Growth doesn’t happen in your comfort zone.
This year my focus is upon learning all I can, trying different things, learning new skills and techniques, in the hope it adds more to my toolbox to enhance my wildlife photography. That it helps me shift to seeing myself as creating rather than just capturing.
Long before I thought of myself as a photographer, I was a writer, and it’s been a very long time since I blogged in the truest sense. This feels like a journey worth dusting off the old blogging hat. I realise that it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, or maybe anyone’s even, and that not everyone still consumes content in this way. This isn’t a shift away from the usual content of the site, it will just be a new space there for whoever wishes to share in what I’m sure will be many failures, and hopefully a few successes and things learned along the way, and a space for me to share the other work I play with.