Take a few minutes to watch the video above or, if you’re more of a written word person, keep reading.

It’s not uncommon for me to come home from a trip with thousands of photographs. On a wildlife trip I can average 1,000 photographs a day, which is really easy to do when you’re in a moving boat, excited about bears and your cameras are set to shoot 10 frames a second. Even when I’m not photographing wildlife, if I’ve had a good day out with my camera I can come back with hundreds of images. 

But even on those trips when I’m gone for a month and come home with 30,000 photographs, I still get home with my edits mostly done, and my development mostly finished and ready to print. Often I’ve also got a PDF monograph ready to send out to the photographers in my community.

In contrast, I have a friend who shoots trips like this and he won’t get around to doing anything with his photographs for years. Until then they will sit there on hard drives begging to be seen, to be printed, learned from, and put into some form of creative output that can be shared with the world. 

Why? It’s not some kind of strategy, and he’s not giving them time to get objective about his edits. He just gets overwhelmed by it all. And he doesn’t have a system. He looks at all those images and gets paralyzed. So while I’m excitedly making prints and sequencing monographs or updating my web galleries, he and so many like him are doing…nothing with their images. No bodies of work created, no beautiful prints, no learning from their mistakes or experiencing the joy of seeing—and sharing—their finished work.

I know so many photographers who walk in the door after making a bunch of photographs and say, “Well, that was fun. Now what?”

The edit—choosing your keepers—can be so intimidating that it gets reduced to an ad hoc effort at picking a few good shots,  pushing some sliders around in Lightroom, and throwing them onto Instagram before moving on to the next thing. I’ve been there. 

Before I started doing assignment work, my editing was scattershot and intimidating and took forever. But client work forced me to get intentional about how I imported and organized my images, to be clear about my criteria for selecting the best of that work, and more systematic about the output.

Knowing I would be shooting for something, that my work would be used in certain ways made a big difference to me. It still does. In my personal work I know I will be making something—a book, a web gallery, a collection of prints—and that helps me make better choices about which images I shoot and how I select the best of that work. 

This email is the first in a series in which I want to explore what you do with your images after the camera goes back in the bag and the ways that can make you an even stronger, more intentional, and more creative photographer when you take it out again.

The first question I want to ask (on your behalf) is this:

“How can I make the edit easier, less intimidating, or overwhelming?” 

I’ve got three simple initial ideas that I think can be really helpful, and they’re a big part of how I am able to regularly come home with up to 30,000 images already mostly edited and the best of that work ready for output rather than dreading the pile of images I had yet to go through. Here are those ideas. I hope they help.

Just Look for the Best of the Best

We all photograph for different reasons and we all do things differently, but I think edits (especially the first edits done relatively soon after shooting) should be selections, not ratings. Pick them or don’t pick them, but don’t rate them. at least not at first.

My own edit process goes much more quickly because I’m not looking for every single image that meets some basic minimal technical standard. I’m looking for the ones that make me lean in. The ones that make my heart sing. The ones that grab me and won’t let me not select them.

You might have a great reason for rating images, but I think trying to decide whether an image deserves 2, 3, or 4 stars slows the process. Because I’m looking for a few frames that are a decisive “Yes!”, I’ve found rating them makes me look for the wrong thing.

For me, a 3-star image isn’t a Yes! It’s a yawn.

Consider being more binary. Yes! Or no. After all, how many images do you really need? Wouldn’t it be easier just to look for the best 12 or 24? It is for me.

Do Smaller Edits

Break it down. Make it easy on yourself. You don’t have to edit thousands of images all at once.

I do daily field edits and come home with main selections already made. This makes it manageable, but it’s more than that. Doing daily edits means things don’t get away from you. And—as a bonus—it gives you a chance to spot things that aren’t working. For example, you’re more likely to notice that you accidentally shot small JPGs all day when you thought you had been shooting RAW. Or you discover your lens isn’t focusing quite right. Or your sensor needs cleaning. It’s better to discover that after one day of shooting and be able to fix it, rather than much later on when it’s just too late.

Maybe you don’t do big multi-day projects, breaking your edits down into bite-sized pieces, perhaps into sequences or using Lightroom’s Stacking feature, can still make the process much more manageable and keep you excited, rather than doing one big exhausting edit later on. You don’t have to do it all at once and you probably should consider doing it all more than once. I have found multiple smaller edit sessions make the best of my limited resources of time and attention, which wane after a few thousand images, let me tell you!

Consider Your Output

Don’t just make photographs; make something with the photographs.

I’ve found that knowing what I’m going to do with my images has made me a much better photographer and a much better editor because I now know what I’m choosing images for. 

If you know you’re going to be making a book, you’ll make different choices. If you know you want a dozen horizontal prints, again, you’ll make different choices. If you know you want a body of work that explores a theme, what you shoot and how you edit will be affected by that. 

When we edit we’re asking which are the best images, but first we need to ask “best for what?” And that is entirely your choice. Just don’t let it only be best for a couple Instagram posts or a handful of random images that never leave your hard drives. 

These three ideas alone will make your editing simpler:

1. Look only for the best and don’t worry about the others.
2. Do smaller bite-sized edit sessions, and
3. Consider—or make intentional choices about—what you want to do with your pictures so you can think not only about which images are best, but best for what.

I’d love to hear from you on this. Where do you find your greatest challenges when it comes to choosing your best work and doing something with them, staying organized, and doing all the work that happens beyond the shutter? If you feel like talking about it, drop me a note in the comments below.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

I learned something new today. Did you know that, according to some random guy on Instagram, every lens is at its sharpest when you choose the aperture that is twice the value of the maximum aperture? So, if you have a /2.8 lens, it’s sharpest at /5.6. If you have a /4.0 lens, it’s sharpest at f/8.0. You should always use the sharpest aperture. Or so he says.

Now I have heard different versions of this nonsense for years. The numbers always differ. We’re not talking depth of field here, just that your lens is optically sharpest at f/X where X = some random aperture. After 40 years, I don’t even know if this is true, but X could also equal all the fucks I’ve got left to care about this shit because never, ever have I wondered at what point my lens is sharpest. Not once. Nor have I ever used that information to choose an aperture. I don’t believe my pictures have suffered.

I am so done with the pixel peeping. If you buy a lens today from a decent manufacturer and not something made from plastic and ordered for $30 on Temu with a brand name like Kinkon, Plentax, or Plastisonic, then you are getting better optical quality than the most iconic photographers before us ever had. I don’t believe their pictures ever suffered, either.

The pixel peepers have never been so able to make sharp pictures of fuzzy concepts. Your lenses are sharp, and moving from /2.8 to /5.6 won’t do anything anyone notices except change your depth of field—and that’s not what the peepers are talking about (but perhaps they should be, as depth of field is something we notice).

There is a vast difference between a photograph that is sharp and one that is poignant, which is another word that means sharp but carries far more weight and importance in this conversation.

Poignant means sharp to the senses. It pierces. It pricks. A poignant photograph is one that touches us sharply in the emotions. It leaves a mark. Sometimes even a scar, so indelible is its impact. And it can do this for a hundred thousand reasons. A lick of light, an obscuring shadow, a gesture, a contrast, some memory stirred up, a hint of story. A photograph can make us laugh or cry. It can haunt us. It can show us things we never knew and make us dream of things we might never see otherwise.

A photograph can deeply, deeply move us, and when it does, it is poignant. And never, ever, not once in history, has that emotional response come because the photographer chose an f/stop double the value of a maximum aperture.

Not once has sharpness been the punctum, a word used by Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida to describe the quality in an image that pricks us or pierces us emotionally.

We resonate with the poignant, with the punctum. We do not give a shit about sharpness, not at the levels we’re talking about right now. I can’t tell the difference between f/2.8 and /5.6 on my lenses—not in terms of sharpness—any more than I have ever noticed better edge-to-edge sharpness from one lens to another. Not once have I even thought about it. If the people reading your photographs are wondering about the shit in the corners and how sharp it is, then you haven’t given them enough in the rest of the frame to pull at their feelings.

If they’re looking for sharpness—the kind you get only because you’ve doubled your maximum aperture, not just because you nailed the focus—if that’s what’s going to make the image work for them, then you have not given them poignance.

We’re not talking about nailing the focus. Depth of field is different, too. We’re not talking here about what’s in focus and what is not. That can, and does, often matter. It can affect how an image feels and what the image is and isn’t about. We’re talking about sharpness. How sharp the in-focus elements are. As often as not, depth of field is about what’s not in focus, and that can also have a huge effect on the image, including the depth of feeling. But sharpness? It’s a smokescreen. If you’re choosing your aperture because “it’s sharper” rather than with consideration for how the image looks and feels, then making it sharper isn’t going to help.

I have never looked at a photograph that has stopped me in my tracks and thought, “That sure is sharp!” Or worse, “My god, look at the CORNERS!” and then shaken my head in wonder.

We are drowning in those sharp pictures of fuzzy concepts. Our lenses are getting so good, so out-of-the-box-razor-sharp-no-matter-what-aperture-you-use, that it’s a shame that we have nothing more meaningful to point to in the resulting photographs than how sharp the lens was or was not. It’s just not the fucking point. It never was.

This craft matters so deeply to me that I’ve given it the last 20 years of my life, and because I am also a teacher, I’ve given those years to my students in hopes that it makes a difference and lights a flame. So, when I see stuff like this, I spin out so fast my panties get irreparably twisted and need to be cut from my body with paramedic shears. I take to my keyboard faster than a knife fight in a phone booth, and my language gets a little salty, because it’s my way of coping with the stupidity when what I really want to do is hire one of those planes that drags a gigantic banner behind it that says, “It doesn’t fucking matter!” Because my hope is that you’ll pay attention to what does matter.

We have enough sharp photographs, so many that they’ve dulled our senses. They’ve made us numb, and the more play we give to this nonsense, the more you are led astray by what truly does not get you any closer to photographs that leave a deeper impression, the longer it will take you to do so, and none of us has unlimited time left. 

Your lenses are more than sharp enough. It’s not the sharpness of the lens that’s stopping any of us from making images that pierce the heart or cut through the thick skin of indifference.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

I am not a young photographer anymore, and I’m guessing you aren’t, either. You only need a couple of years behind the camera to understand the basics that those initial lessons were meant to teach you. But they weren’t meant to be the only lessons. They were lessons meant for starting, but not for growing. They were meant to make things easy and to get you some early wins with the camera, not to equip you to make photographs that are nuanced, complex, or powerful.

To unabashedly mix my metaphors: early lessons were only about learning to hit the first notes, not to write a song.

One of those early lessons that took me longer to get beyond was the need to fill the frame with my subject. Wait, scratch that. I still believe it’s important to fill the frame, but I understand that idea now in much stronger ways. I give my earliest teachers the benefit of the doubt: they wanted me to learn the basics. In this case, they wanted me to avoid filling my frame with elements that were not my subject—distractions and the kind of flotsam and jetsam that seems to drift into our frames when we’re not intentional about our compositions.

But your subject might not be the thing you think it is.

See the image below. The animal in the frame is a coastal wolf. A younger me would have called that my subject, but she is not. My subject is not the wolf but, rather, the wolf in the landscape. It’s the relationship, and zooming in tight (as I might have done in the past in an effort to “fill the frame”) would have diluted the intended subject of the image.

Perhaps “fill the frame with your story” is a better way to put it because so many people think their subject is the thing. I think the subject is the idea. The story. And very often, the only way to tell the story effectively is to make the thing smaller in the frame so there’s room to fill that frame with other elements that make the story bigger.

Look at the photograph below. The man on the dunes—is he the subject? What would the story lose if I cropped in much tighter? It would change, wouldn’t it? The image wouldn’t be about the desert with a man in it. It wouldn’t be about size, or vastness. It would be about a man with a camera. That wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. It wasn’t the feeling I wanted to create. So I filled the frame with the vastness. The man wasn’t the point; he just helped amplify the point, and he needed to be smaller to do that.

Look at the other three images below. What might they have lost if I had gone tight and made yet another portrait? Would I have lost story? Mood? Visual depth and interest? Would my picture be about something different? Would they be any better?

Wildlife photographers in particular are notoriously good at filling the frame with things. Beautiful, wild things, shot as close as possible, but the more I look at the tighter images, the less story I see. That’s OK; not every photograph needs to tell a story. Sometimes those tighter images are part of a larger story told with more than one photograph. I hope they do that in my own work. But they don’t tell the whole story.

My big challenge to myself, because I’m also learning, is to think bigger by going smaller.

More and more, I find myself dissatisfied with the longest lens/tightest portrait shot. I reach increasingly for the shorter lenses and let myself wrestle with composing a bigger story by letting the main characters share the stage. Pulling back gives scale, gives context, and gives more room for the light and colour to be their own characters. I find myself inhabiting the world of these bigger pictures a lot longer, exploring them visually for longer than I do with my tighter work. I remember them longer, and their impact feels deeper to me.
 
Of course, this is not only about shooting wider. That’s easy. But as you pull back and include more elements, each of those elements needs to play a part. It can’t just stand on the stage doing nothing. It’s harder to make a meaningful and satisfying image in which all the elements do that. Maybe that’s why the tighter portrait is more common; it’s just a little easier. And I’m not saying those photographs can’t be powerful. They can. But they can also hit the same note a few too many times. They can tell an intimate story, but not a larger story.

My internal quest these days has become a search for scenarios, not just “subjects,” though here I use that word the way I used to mean it: as thing.

Because I’m looking for bigger pictures with layers of impact, not just looking for an elephant (“subject”). I’m looking for a scenario: an elephant with a calf, in a tender moment, in interesting light and a captivating setting. I want to fill my frame with those rather than reaching for my 600mm and excluding them all. Or, more likely, I’ll explore both. But it’s the one with some scale that I think will play much larger and give both my imagination and my emotions more to engage with.
 
For what it’s worth, I still sometimes shoot with the sun over my shoulder. I haven’t discarded the idea; I’m just happier with backlit or sidelit scenes. I don’t find the rule of thirds completely useless. Look at my work! Plenty of things sit on thirds in my frames. And yes, I sometimes still fill the frame with those things.

The ideas we learn at the beginning don’t stop being useful, but if we want our craft to grow, we need to evolve beyond them and explore all the possibilities.

What would your work look like if you redefined what it means to fill the frame? If you looked at the subject of an image as the idea, story, or the feeling, not the one physical thing on which you set your focus point? What would it feel like if you pulled back a little and gave the other characters—not just living things but trees, rocks, sky, light, space, texture—some room to help tell a bigger story?

Scale is a powerful tool. I’m not going to tell you how to use it, but I’m begging you to explore it

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

Few photographs are truly compelling to us because of just one thing. A person, a landscape, a beautiful bird. Beautiful on its own, perhaps, but once it becomes a photograph, we usually need more.

An interesting person in great light, with a great spark in their eyes? Now, that we can connect with. A dramatic mountain with an interesting foreground that leads us into the scene, all in soft warm light? Oh, hell yes! Two birds with blue feathers against an orange background and a moment of tension hanging in the air between them? Yes, please. More of that!

Now, this is just a theory, so if you prefer my ideas a little less half-baked, then I’ll make it up to you next time. I’ve been noodling on this a while, and I’m convinced there’s something to it: a strong photograph needs to work for three reasons, not one. So often I look at a photograph that isn’t working for me and the only reason I can come up with is this: there’s not enough. It’s one thing—just one—and try as I might, I can’t describe it in threes. Look at how I described the images above: a dramatic mountain (that’s one) with an interesting foreground that leads me into the scene (two) all in soft, warm light (three!). I don’t just mean it has a subject, a foreground, and light. It has three interesting elements.

Subject is almost never enough. The world is full of subjects that we might love, but in the photograph, don’t interest us. The picture has to make them interesting.

So we do that with things like:

• Great colour or colour combinations
• Textures we can almost feel
• A meaningful gesture
• Great catchlight in the eye
• A story, or some kind of action
• A juxtaposition
• Mood!
• Tension between elements
• Contrast
• Creative point of view

Rarely is it sharpness, so don’t even start with “but it’s a really sharp portrait!” That’s not enough. But a portrait of a subject in interesting light with a strong gesture? Sure! And then if it also has an interesting juxtaposition and it’s sharp in all the right places, well, that’s just layer upon layer of impact and we’re here for it.

When I look at one of my photographs—or an image I’ve been asked to give feedback on—I ask myself: are there layers of impact? Or am I being asked to find my entire interest in just one thing because that’s all there is?

For example, if it’s a picture of “just a bear” and I can’t find another layer or two of impact, that probably explains why I don’t feel like the image is a success. If I can find three strong elements or decisions, I usually feel like the image has enough to engage me, and perhaps others. A bear doing something interesting, photographed from an interesting angle? Now we’re building something!

I sometimes flip the question: “Is it just a leopard?” Look, I love leopards. And in the wild, there’s no such thing as “just a leopard.” But in a photograph? I’ve seen a million leopard photographs and my very sharp picture of a leopard isn’t going to cut mustard unless it has something more.

Here’s another way of approaching this same idea: ask yourself, “What’s the hook?” For someone who wasn’t there and has no emotional connection to the subject, what’s visual in the photograph that might make them care?

A hook can be any of the things I mentioned in bullet points above. It might be something else, but it’s something we care about, represented in a way we care about. No hook? You might not have any impact, either.

My hard drives are full of images that almost made it. But they didn’t. Just a boring picture of a beautiful thing. No hook, no impact. Only subject. It’s heartbreaking when you’ve worked so hard only to come up short, but that’s life and our work will be better when we’re unflinchingly honest about it. Look, sometimes the light doesn’t pop. Sometimes your subject doesn’t do what you hoped and there’s no action, no gesture. Or there is, but it just doesn’t translate. It’s not even sometimes; it’s most of the time. It’s the rule, not the exception (that’s what makes it unexceptional). It’s 99% of the time. An exceptional photograph happens in the 1%.

So what do you do in the yawning chasm of time when “nothing’s happening”? You watch. You wonder. A great subject might not be enough on which to place the burden of a killer image, but it should be plenty on which to rest your awe. All that time not making photographs when we’re out in the wild is not time wasted. It’s time breathing more deeply, letting our minds release the stress of our urban lives. It’s time spent finding our natural place in the world. Letting the sun fall on our faces or the wind beat against our ears. It’s time to be more fully alive, enjoying the pursuit. And it’s time to make sketch images and learn to make what works by making lots and lots of what doesn’t work.

We spend 99% of our time looking for the 1%. The 1% makes the photograph more alive, but it’s the 99% that does that for the photographer.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

That has changed over the years, and I think much of the credit for my best work belongs more to my patience and perseverance than whatever talent I might have. What I have learned is to shoot through a scene quite faithfully.

But this isn’t about that. I’ve just returned from six weeks in southern Africa, shooting in forests, thickets, and SFG (Stupid F-ing Grass—a very technical term) that always seems to be in front of whatever beauty I have found. You spend hours looking for a subject, then more time finding a composition, then even more waiting for light, and when you’ve done all that? There’s always sh*t in the way!

To make this easier (???), my Sony cameras seem to have a grass-priority mode baked into the focus, making sure that if there’s a blade of grass within 5 kilometres of the scene, it’ll be in sharp focus. Especially if that grass is not my subject (it never is), and even more so if my subject is beautifully lit and I really, REALLY want the camera to focus on it quickly. Thanks, Sony.

The camera company that can figure out a “don’t focus on the d*mn grass” function can have my heart and my money, forever.

So what do you do? The short answer is: shoot through it. There are a lot of ways to get around the grass problem and, when they work, turn foreground crap into a strong part of the image, rather than a distraction.

The Sony system has something called full-time DMF (Digital Manual Focus), and when it’s on, you just help the AF out a little by nudging the focus manually. Sometimes it works; other times it just bounces back. Nikon doesn’t call this DMF or anything else because it’s just how their lenses work right out of the box. If you’re in AF, you should be able to just manually tweak the focus to essentially tell the camera, “You’re close, but focus on this instead.” If you use Canon, it’s buried in the menus and only works in AF single-shot, which is lame. For other systems, you’ll have to do your research, but feel free to report back to me. Either way, I’m pretty sure it’s a little hit and miss.

You can also just flip your lens to MF and work entirely manually, but that’s a drag. Still, it can sometimes be your only workaround. If you do that, be sure to use focus-peaking to help you really nail it.

I’ve also found that just sticking with AF but trying to focus on elements that are closer to the subject, and then moving the focus point to the subject and trying again, gives the camera a better starting point. 50% of the time, that works every time. If the grasses are much closer to you than the subject, it might also help to limit the focus range on your lens. This is usually accomplished with a physical toggle on the side of the lens. My 300/2.8, for example, will let me shoot the full range (2m to infinity) or only 6m to infinity, preventing the lens from searching through the 2m to 6m range and getting hung up on closer grasses, etc. . Just be sure to toggle it back when you’re done.

If you’re really struggling with this you need to know you’re not alone. It’s an issue, and a constant struggle and the best you can do is know your options, practice them all, and be patient. Why not just give up? Because there is so much to be gained.

Here’s the thing: if those grasses (leaves, branches, whatever) are that much closer to you and you’re using a relatively wide aperture, they can almost be ignored by the lens—even if they’re right in front of the lens. The more distance between your subject and SFG, the more your lens can blur it, elevating it to attractive patches of light and colour and giving your image texture and depth, or a window through which to frame the image.

For the past two years, I’ve been very intentionally putting these branches and leaves (and even SFG) in front of my lens. Sometimes it really doesn’t work. But other times, the lens looks right through them or around them, giving you a clear spot in the frame, with the rest of the crap now acting as blurry compositional elements. It’s all very counterintuitive.

All that time learning to get a clear shot has us convinced that stuff in front of my lens means no shot. Sure, sometimes. But often not. I am amazed what you can shoot through, especially when the SFG is closer to you than to your subject.

I think the best thing I can do is include some photographs to illustrate the point. They should explain themselves, but what they cannot show are the gymnastics I had to do to get the camera into just the right spot so the SFG (or whatever) is also in the right spot in the frame. Not all blurry elements contribute to the image. And they can’t show you the thousands of frames when this results in total failure. Or how much the scene just didn’t look like this before I blurred the heck out of it. But if you’re shooting in circumstances where there’s a lot of crap in the foreground, don’t give up until your efforts to shoot through the scene also means shooting through the vegetation. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, but when it does, the photographs are worth the effort.

Questions about this? Drop a note in the comments. I’m around through to the end of September and happy to talk about this or anything else that’s on your mind.

A Personal Note

Two weeks ago, I ended up having an emergency appendectomy instead of flying off to photograph bears. So many of you sent notes to wish me well, and I want to say a heartfelt thank you for your care. The recovery went well, and I got some much-needed naps in. I also read a book—and finished writing one. 

I have read The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf, twice now and it was even better the second time around. It’s a biography, really, of one of the most interesting artist/scientist/adventurers of the last couple centuries. Once the most famous scientist in the world we have largely forgotten about Humboldt but this book brings his life and legacy back to us. Beautifully written, highly recommended. You can find it on Amazon here. (What do you think, are interested in hearing what I’ve been reading? Let me know!)

Last week I got my last chapters written and submitted my new book to the publisher and I am thrilled to finally set the production in motion. WildLight, A Personal Approach to Photographing Wild Things will be my 15th book (16 if you count the 10th Anniversary Edition of Within The Frame), and it should be available in March! I’ll let you know when pre-orders are open, but it’s coming! Thank you—again—for giving me an audience and supporting my work. 

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

I should have been on a flight to the Yukon on Wednesday. I was meant, by now, to be sitting on a river with bears. I was, instead, lying on an operating table getting an emergency appendectomy. Don’t let anyone tell you the life of a photographer isn’t full of adventure. Oh, the romance of it all!

Timing couldn’t have been worse. Or better, really. My appendix could have ruptured while I was in Zimbabwe last week, or while sitting on the Nakina River with a helicopter as my only means of extraction. I’m disappointed to the point of tears that I’m not with the bears, but so grateful that the worst of this was really just the pain of it (and that the ambulance didn’t use its sirens, which feels a little like they weren’t taking this seriously).

Still, I’m missing my work—and the bears—and I don’t do well sitting around doing nothing, which is what I’m doing now. Well, not exactly nothing. At least I have you to talk to, and a new book to finish. And painkillers, which should make the new book a lot more fun to read.

I’ll make this short, but it’s been a while. I spent all of July and the first week of August in Zambia and Zimbabwe, focused on new work, guiding some wonderful clients, and falling in love all over again with what I do, where I do it, and the animals I do it with. I spent some beautiful time with leopards, lions, painted wolves, and elephants, ate meals under impossibly starry skies, and was gone so long I started to feel like this could all just be my everyday life.

I spent a lot of time looking for animals, waiting for the light, and hoping they would do something in that light. I grew even more amazed at the ability of my guides to find what we were looking for, often with no more than a partial track or the yelp of a jackal. And sometimes, in rare moments when it all came together, I made some photographs that thrill me.

Here’s a few of those that make me particularly happy. Enjoy.

As always, thank you for being here.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David.

More than anything else, this is why I do this. My days behind the camera will be a constant back-and-forth between peace and panic, deep serenity and second-guessing myself about the direction of my work and the choices I’m making. But even when I’m distracted by the picture-making, there is wonder. Part of that wonder is a response to the wildness around me. And part of it is that I get to experience it at all. I wish the 16-year-old version of me could have had a glimpse of the life he would one day get to experience. I wish he could have known that the adventures he longed for would be so much wilder than he could ever have guessed. It might have made the winding road to get here a little easier.

Far from a vacation, this trip will be a lot of work, especially mentally. But that mental game is no different for my being in Zambia—and later  Zimbabwe—than it is for you wherever you love to photograph. I don’t know why I’m so interested in that mental game, but I think it’s the hardest work in photography.

I am deeply honoured to have National Geographic photographer and dear friend Paul Nicklen write the foreword for my next book. One line especially stood out to me, where he wrote about the elements of that mental game: “We call these soft skills, and that name does them a disservice. They are the hardest skills in the craft, and they take a lifetime to learn.” It gives me some peace to know that Paul still considers the mental game the most important—and hardest—part of the craft. I hope it does the same for you.

There are a lot of ways to play the mental game. When I head out with my cameras in tomorrow’s twilight, I’ll be pulled in a hundred different directions by all the possibilities. Some of the opportunities I will seize, some I will squander as I mess with my gear, some I won’t see at all, and some I’ll take a risk on and try something new, to varying degrees of success.

Through it all, however, I’ll be whispering to myself (sometimes with swear words), “Slow down and just make it about one thing, David.”

There are three elements to that, three ways I’m trying to guide my thinking. The first is this: slow down. Take a breath. Focus. It need not be any more complicated than that. But I need the reminder. Slow the flock down, duChemin.

The second: make it about something. Be aware of what you’re reacting to. Is it about the light? Is it about the way the two baboons are interacting with each other? Is it about the gaze of the leopard, the motion of the herd, the gesture of the elephant as it reaches its trunk for the higher branches? Make it about that. What choices magnify what you want the image to be about? Sure, ask yourself about the settings, but don’t stop there; ask instead, “Which settings will most amplify what this one image is about? Which lens? Which composition?

And then this: make it about only that one thing. Don’t worry about the next photograph; that one can be about something more, or something different. Just make it about one thing. Exclude everything unnecessary, and if you’re not sure whether it’s necessary, exclude it and then add it back in if the image loses the magic without it. Simplify. The more elements you include, the greater the chance you’ll dilute the magic. This is about isolation, and cropping tight is only one way to do that. You can isolate with a shallower focus, isolate motion with a slower shutter, or move your camera position. You can expose for the highlights and exclude detail by letting it fall into dark, luxurious shadow. You can wait for the scene to get less cluttered, for a stronger, simpler moment.

It’s hard to live without distractions, even in the bush with no phones and limited wifi access. The days are pretty simple here, but the distractions are so abundant it’s a wonder I don’t come home with whiplash from all the looking around. How lucky we are that the camera gives us tools to focus our attention, both as we experience the wonder and in the resulting photographs. But first, we all need to slow down. Take a breath, maybe fall in love with your subject, and then—once you’ve laid the groundwork—make it about one thing. That’s enough.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

In the 24 hours since I watched that video, the thoughts that keep resurfacing are about the value of slowing down and falling in love, and perhaps if you’re sitting there now with a cup of coffee of your own, these thoughts will take you somewhere, too. Stick with me because this one isn’t linear—it drifts a bit.

Photography, as a craft, frowns darkly on those who are in a hurry.

We rush to learn, to upgrade, to get from one photograph to the next. We rush to edit and develop and post that work, and move quickly on to the next thing. I have nothing more than my own experience to lean on, but I don’t think that manic pace is ever the progress we mistake it for. It’s movement, perhaps, but it’s not necessarily direction. It’s movement on the wrong axis, along a surface rather than into the depths.

True seeing takes time; real perception doesn’t happen in a glimpse. A scene is not understood at a glance, and insight doesn’t come quickly.

But do you remember the saying about the camera pointing both ways? It’s as important that we see and understand ourselves as it is that we take in the scene in front of us, and that kind of seeing takes not only a long time, but a slow time.

My most productive creative times are when I can pull into myself and sit with my thoughts. When I give myself the time to absorb not only what I see, but what I smell, what I hear, what my other senses tell me, and what I think and feel about it all. If you go back far enough, the word contemplation implies gazing into sacred space, watching and waiting for signs and omens. It was important stuff. I worry that I’m sometimes closer to glancing into those sacred spaces than gazing deeply.

Photographers tend to pay more attention to what they see than how they see.

I don’t mean the mechanics, I mean the way they perceive the world, and how they think about it. And that’s a shame because the way you perceive the world is the way you will photograph it, and the awareness of that doesn’t come to a mind that won’t sit still, constantly distracting itself. The mind that’s in a hurry will miss things, seeing what it wants to see and little else.

When I look back at myself as a younger photographer, I see a young man in a great hurry, arriving at a place with a mind so clouded by questions about how to photograph that place that he skipped over the part where he just experienced it, and took it all in long enough to have thoughts or feelings worth expressing in the first place.

I wish I could whisper back in time to that person and remind him that he’d make a better photograph if he first had something to say. If he took the time to think and feel more deeply.

“Fall in love first, and then write the poem about it.” That’s what I’d like to tell him, if he’s open to the metaphor. I might also tell him that falling in love can happen quickly, but that loving takes time.

Put the pen down for a while, feel the love as deeply as you can before you get busy writing a song about it. The more deeply you explore it, the more depth you’ll be able to bring to any effort at expression. The more you’ll have to say about love (or anything else, like perhaps Venice, autumn colours, or a songbird), the more you’ll understand your feelings about it. And the closer you’ll be to finding ways to express that.

Candidly, I fear that my memory of any place or event, any encounter, will be a memory of photographing the thing and not a memory of experiencing the thing itself.

Returning to the metaphor, when I’m so busy writing poems about love, do I even have the time just to be in love without picking it apart, reducing it down to the parts that rhyme?

Maybe it’s another discussion entirely, but could it be that some poets are more satisfied by writing poems about love than with actually being in love? Or (even worse, but just as likely) are they more in love with using fancy pens and writing on expensive paper? And if either of these is the case, do you want to hazard a guess about which so-called poet will write something that is not only beautiful but also true?

I love the young man I once was. I love his fire and his urgency. But I don’t envy him for how much he missed in that rush to move through life, to get not to the next moment, or the next experience, but to the next photograph. And I wonder how much better those photographs might have been if I had slowed down, quieted myself, and experienced those moments a little more purposefully—savouring them a bit more—before I pulled out my camera.

I know that sometimes savouring the moment is better with a camera in my hand. Sometimes it’s the window through which I first see the thing with which I didn’t yet know I was falling in love. Either way, my hope for that photographer remains, and it’s the same hope I have for you as you practice this craft with me: that you slow down and find the quiet in which to fall in love with something more than the tools of your craft or even the end product of your work. Something bigger and worthy of your love and effort.

I hope you’ll take the time to breathe more deeply and contemplate, gazing into the sacred spaces and experiencing them before you pick up the pen to start writing your poem.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

It won’t be the cover images from any of my books that are most important to me when I look back on my life.

No, most of the images we photographers go to such lengths to create—the money spent on gear and travel, the time spent getting it just right—really don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things. The one that has pride of place for you right now? Eventually, you won’t even glance at it as you flip past it in your collections.

What will matter is that you made the image in the first place. What will matter is that you experienced the thing with enough curiosity, enough engagement, that you took a second look and raised the camera. It will matter that you were awake and alive to that moment rather than just existing from one breath to another. It will matter that you cared enough, not about the camera, but about the little joys of life that you might otherwise have missed, and if you accumulate those over a lifetime, you’ll have lived with greater joy.

So long as you chase the right things, your pursuit of this craft will take you deeper into wonder about the world around you, give you greater empathy for the people in it, and drive your growth as a human being. 

It will matter that you saw the world from new perspectives and that you tried a new technique and failed the first dozen times. It will matter to you that you did something hard, and it will matter to your soul that you pushed through and learned greater patience. At some point, you will realize all this is less a matter of you making pictures and that mostly the pictures—one by one—are making you.

Your craft, so long as you don’t get bogged too deeply in the muck of the technology around which it all revolves, is making you more awake and alive to the world around you, and that matters.

But knowing that this picture, the one I’m making in this moment, is probably not the best I’ll ever make (especially if making it teaches me something) is not a negative perspective. There is no angst in this. It’s freedom. If one day the photographer I am becoming looks back with ambivalence on the images I’m making now, then I can be less rigid about that work in the moment. I can be more playful. I can take the time to look around and see what I’m missing. I can try out a new technique or take a few creative risks. I can be a little less focused on the results and more focused on the process. I can look more deeply and see with clearer eyes.

How ironic it is then (if not surprising) that this lighter approach seems to be making my photographs better.

Maybe that’s because my inner critics are getting a little quieter. The voices still chirp away, but I’ve lowered the volume. Because even if they’re right and no one likes my picture or, yes, this time they really are just crap, it doesn’t matter. Not in the long run. What matters is that I make it, that I find the joy and the wonder in the moment. Sometimes—even frequently—that joy and wonder don’t make their way into the photograph, but that doesn’t mean making it was any less important. Not if making it is what makes you more open to it—more awake and alive.

Pick up your camera. Go play. Go look at something new, or find something familiar and look at it from a new perspective. Look longer and deeper. Take your camera on a drive this evening, or walk towards the setting sun and see what those last rays of day will paint on their way west. Slow down. Take a breath. Follow your whims. Find the joy.

No, your photographs probably won’t change the world, but they will change you.

Keep at it, my friend. It matters. 

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

Two mornings later, I woke to find him outside my tent at 4 am, walking right past the tent door (door? It was a screen with a zipper). Lying in bed, wearing neither a stitch of clothing nor the prosthetic leg that I’d need to make any kind of getaway, I felt a little more vulnerable than usual. More exhilarated too! The morning before, I woke to find adult leopard prints outside my tent. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but I was beguiled from the beginning!

I’ve been guiding safaris in Africa for over 15 years now, and not until I started coming to Zambia has it felt this adventurous—this wild. These were not the only encounters. That same bull elephant was often seen in and around camp, a constant reminder that the place was untamed and belonged to someone else. At one point, I was putting my camera bag into the Land Cruiser when the same resident bull quietly appeared at the back of the vehicle, silently and with no warning. There he was, just calmly browsing away. One of my favourite images was made without even leaving camp.

Another vignette, this time at Musekese, a camp in Kafue National Park, one of the largest and oldest parks in Africa, and also one of the most empty of humans. During the six nights I spent there, I only saw one other vehicle. But I was there at the end of the rainy season, which can be challenging for encountering wildlife. The grasses were over 6 feet high in places, the roads were deeply rutted from elephants who walked them while they were still sticky black mud, and the wildlife had plenty of options for water. That changes as the dry season progresses, but during my visit, it was challenging. So when a young leopard jumped out of the grasses into the road in front of us, my heart jumped, too. We followed him not far to the base of a sausage tree, where he lay down and gave me yet another version of my hundreds of “leopard in the grass” photographs. 

But then he looked up at the lowest branch, and I barely had time to think, “Will he?” before he leapt into the tree. That brought the scene closer to interesting, as he sat about eye level with me. But then he started playing with the sausage fruit in the tree. Think heavy white dangling cucumbers (hmmm, on second thought, don’t think too long about that). And he just played. Like a kitten, he batted at them, tried to catch one, then batted at them again. Over and over. And when he tired of that, he knocked one to the ground, followed it down and, with the heavy fruit in his mouth, walked off very pleased with himself. I named him “Sausage,” and so far the name seems to have stuck. What he did with that sausage fruit is anyone’s guess. Never in my wildest dreams did my imagination conjure a scene like that.

You hope against hope for sightings even half as extraordinary as this. Something different. Something no one else might ever have seen. Even better, something no one has photographed. I was the only one there, just me and my guide, and these pictures thrill me for how unique they are. Actually, they also thrill me because the quality is as good as it is. The light was still quite low, so I was shooting at high ISO and pretty low shutter speeds, so the whole drive back to the camp later that morning, I was as nervous as I was excited about seeing the images on a larger screen. Would they be sharp in all the right places?

One more. When I booked the trip, a bit of a last-minute lark, one of my hopes for the adventure was time to spend with painted wolves, but with the grasses as high as they were and painted wolves already incredibly elusive, I kept my expectations low. There are only about 6,600 of this species still on the planet, so the odds aren’t great that you’ll even see them. But we got lucky, and we spent about an hour with a pack of eight dogs, backlit as the sun crept down, and they relaxed and played together. At one point, already marvelling at my luck, my guide handed me a cold gin and tonic. Painted wolves at sunset, my camera in one hand, and a G&T in the other? I felt like the luckiest man in the world.

This was the first solo trip I’ve done truly alone for a long time. Just me and a guide. It was more challenging than most, too. But where there’s challenge, there’s growth. I learned more about tracking. I asked more questions about species I knew nothing about. I grew as much as a naturalist on this trip as I did as a photographer, and that will serve me well. I took some photographic risks that I’ve been excited to try, and learned from those, too. Like my last trip to Kenya, I treated this trip as a Hail Mary of sorts and gave myself permission not to make the same images I’ve made before. I gave myself permission to wait out scenes for longer than I felt I had the patience for. To really stretch. I played more than I sometimes do, and I could feel the joy flooding back.

After 15 years focusing on wildlife, I now feel like I’m really making progress; that there might just be hope for me. It was a good reminder that the path towards mastery is a long journey, but a thrilling one if you don’t tie your hopes too tightly to specific outcomes and give yourself the permission you need to be a perpetual student. And time. You need time. Not the little fragments we give ourselves between other moments in life, but real time that we carve out for ourselves to do the things we need to do, to focus, to get into flow.

Here are a couple more.

This feels like a bit of an aside, but it’s very much on point, so bear with me. My mother is declining in health and mental acuity. Her butter is sliding off her biscuit a little, if you know what I mean. We spent the last month cleaning out her old apartment and getting her into a home where she’ll have the care she needs. What I found as I cleaned things out was a lifetime of memories she’d stashed away. Some we kept, many we could do nothing with but discard. A wedding dress. The baby bunting she brought me home in as a newborn. I saw my mother’s life reduced to a couple of banker’s boxes of memories, and a trailer of garbage bags, some donated, most to be taken to the dump. A few pieces of furniture that went to new homes.

I love my mother. She is becoming more and more just a fragment of the person I knew her to be, and it’s heartbreaking. She’s not making new memories, and she’s slowly forgetting the ones she had. I’ve never been more aware of how brief a lifetime is—how quickly it all goes by. And never so sure that all we have is now and the experiences with which we fill the present. They don’t have to be in the bush, but make them big. Make them count. Make them experiences that take your breath away and fill your soul with wonder. Don’t wait to live every moment.

Want to join me on one of my adventures? You can join my Adventure List here and be among the first to get details.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David