Samburu village, Kenya
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The Art of Seeing
I just love it when people respond to one of my photographs with “Wow, you must have a nice camera”. That is exactly the message I am trying to convey.
OK, so maybe not. If the only reaction a photo evokes is “this guy spends a lot on equipment!” then I have failed pretty miserably in any form of artistic expression. And while I get enough positive reinforcement from my photos to keep me going, I still get asked about gear far more often than I get asked about technique or creative vision. I have been trying to figure out why.
People love to have the biggest and the best. We like cars that can go three times faster than we will ever drive them, and we like cameras that produce images that can be blown up to the size of a house. Twenty five megapixels you say? Great, I’ll take it. And I will admit it, I am a sucker for that sugar rush of having a new toy to play with, and salivate at the sight of a new canon L series lens.
But photography is a blend of science and art. With more emphasis on the importance of gear than the importance of seeing, the art of photography gets drowned in a sea of megapixels. We all want quick fixes and immediate results. We want to improve our photography NOW, and the best way to do that is to get an expensive camera and lenses longer than your right arm, right?
I’m not so sure. For over two years I used an entry level DSLR and shot jpegs. Post-processing was something you did to cheese and RAW meant uncooked meat. Why would I want a “fast” lens when most of my subjects weren’t moving? A professional-grade camera and expensive lenses would have been wasted on me. The simplicity of a basic camera and one lens forced my creativity. I really had to think about composition and light. Without post-processing I had to get everything right when I clicked the shutter. I tried to figure out what worked well and what didn’t (mainly by doing the latter) and spent a lot of time studying the kind of images I wanted to be taking. When I looked at a scene I would ask myself “how would I paint this?”. It forced me to think about what was really important in the composition – what was the strongest way of seeing, as Edward Weston put it. It challenged me to think about how I wanted to represent the scene or the subject rather than simply lifting my camera to eye level and recording it as if to say “I’ve been here”. I thought more about mood and emotion, about composition and quality of light.
As my eye developed I started to feel the limitations of the camera and lens I was using and my curiosity led me to invest in a wide angle lens. A new world of creative opportunities was opened. I captured the image below when the combination of scene, light and moment coincided and it was the first image I had taken that I felt really captured the mood of the moment. That lens was stuck on my camera for the next six months. I went a bit bonkers with it.
And then came my first portfolio review with National Geographic Natural History Photo Editor Kathy Moran: “you might want to go easy on the wide angle”. I realized my obsession with the wide angle had closed my mind to other, potentially more powerful, interpretations. This challenged me to find new and different perspectives that did not rely on the “wide angle effect”. I invested in a zoom lens and learned the power of isolating and compressing elements of the landscape for more abstract images. I learned the art of simplicity.
So, what’s my point again? I guess my point is that, while equipment is of course important, while we all succumb to the allure of the nice new camera with gazillion megapixels, the most powerful images are those that resonate emotionally – and for now, at least, that is not something the camera will do for you. It will tell you the “right” exposure for a scene, but it won’t tell you the creatively correct exposure for your interpretation of the scene. It won’t tell you what lenses are right for your creative vision. Enjoy the journey of creative discovery, hone your art through carefully crafted compositions, experimentation and happy accidents, beware of the wide angle traps and challenge yourself to see the world in different ways. And please don’t ask me what kind of camera I use 
Story Behind the Shot
Story Behind the Shot: Zebra in Ruaha National Park, Tanzania
I was in Ruaha National Park in Tanzania, a rugged Park of arid rolling hills dotted with bulbous baobab trees. It was early afternoon and the blazing sun was high in the sky. The light was harsh, but given that I only had 24 hours in the Park, I wanted to make the most of it and went on a game drive. My attention was grabbed by groups of Plain’s zebras – they looked as if they had been painted by hand – and I wanted to get a nice portrait shot to highlight this striking pattern. Getting close enough to the zebras to get the shot I wanted proved a challenge, however, as they definitely weren’t keen on sticking around. And then we came upon this one. As we neared it that stopped for a split second, looked directly at me, and then turned and ran off in a cloud of dust.
I only made one shot in that split second, and looked at my LCD screen to see if I had what I wanted, and it looked as if I had – although with the head filling the frame in such a tight crop I was lucky I hadn’t lopped any of it off. I was using a 400mm lens on my Canon 5D Mk II at f/5.6 and a speedy 1/3200 second exposure.
I didn’t think this was a great shot at the time – I was just happy I had managed to get a portrait of the zebra looking face on. But when I started playing with the image later in Lightroom, first converting it to black and white and then bumping up the contrast, I realized the harsh light actually lent itself well to a high key image. I effectively blew out the overexposed background and deepened the blacks of the zerba’s stripes. I selectively overexposed some areas of the background so as to remove any distractions that detracted from the shot. Nothing you couldn’t do in the darkroom. I ended up with an image I liked for its bold simplicity stripped of everything but the essential elements. I also liked the shadow of the zebra in the background as it provided a hint of depth.
Story Behind the Shot: Solomons Eyelash Frog
I was recently in the Solomon Islands visiting a project site on Kolombangara. On my list of things to see was the weird and wonderful Eyelash Frog – Ceratobatrachus guentheri. As night fell we donned our headlamps and headed out into the forest to begin our search. It was quiet – a little too quiet. We walked for some time, ears cocked in the humid air, before we heard it – almost like a dog howling in the distance. The eyelash frogs were out.
I walked slowly, crunching dead leaves underfoot when a beautiful orange-brown frog betrayed its presence by hopping across the carpet of leaves. My first eyelash frog!
I dropped my camera bag and lay down in front of the frog. Pretending to be a leaf – something these frogs do remarkably well – the frog lifted its head and, well, looked leaf-like. I wanted to give the frog presence within the frame, so I lay on my belly to get as low as possible in front of the animal. I wanted to capture the sharp angles and angular outline and decided this would be best done with a low, frontal view well lit against black background. I decided to rig up two off-camera flashes with softboxes to get a diffuse light that would bring out the color of the animal. I use a Canon 580EX strobe attached via cable to my camera as the master flash and a 430EX as slave. It is a slightly cumbersome setup and I usually end up in various contortions, with camera in one hand, the master flash in another and the slave propped up close by. I try to place flashes as close to the frog as possible without getting them in the frame so the light is as soft and harsh shadows are avoided.
Now to the settings on the camera. I almost always use the camera in manual and set the flashes to manual for macro shots. This allows me to tweak the settings with more control. I closed my aperture down to f/32 to get all of the frog in focus, and set the shutter speed to 1/200th second to block all ambient light, enabling me to fully control the lighting of the shot with flash. I played with the power of both flashes and ended up with both around 1/2 power in both the master and the slave. I wasn’t worried about distracting backgrounds because I had simply blacked it out, so with both flashes angled directly at the frog, this was all I needed to worry about lighting. A couple of test shots to get the power of the flashes right and then click, my first Eyelash Frog photo.
Equipment: Canon 5D MkII, Canon 100mm f/2.8 lens set to f/32 and 1/200th second
Story Behind the Shot: Fly crash lands on snake’s head
A fly crash lands on the head of a Cope’s vine snake, Oxybelis brevirostris, in the Choco of Colombia.
Story Behind the Shot:
We came across this vine snake in the rainforests of Choco, Colombia. The way the snake was sitting, head up and alert, body coiled behind on a green and yellow leaf, offered the perfect photo opportunity. I lay down on my belly in front of the snake and composed the shot so that the eyes were on a level plane and in sharp focus, and the head was framed by the curled body behind.
I set the aperture to f/10 to blur the background but retain enough depth of field to get the eyes in focus. At this close range, depth of field is usually especially narrow so it is often a compromise between depth of field and getting a fast enough shutter speed. As I clicked the shutter a fly decided to use the head as a landing pad for a hot second. At this point I had to try and keep my composure and get the shot. One shot, and then the fly was gone, but luckily I had managed to freeze the moment.
Equipment and settings: Canon 5D MkII, 100mm f/2.8 lens at f/10, 200th second.
Kenya Photo Safaris
Join me in Samburu, Kenya this September/October for a photo safari in one of the most spectacular locations
