Luckily, today I was never supposed to be outside. Last Wednesday, after a brief visit to Bempton Cliffs RSPB reserve, my fellow MSc students and I collected a whole host of animals from Filey Brigg; a rocky spit sticking out into the North Sea riddled with tidal pools. Today was time to photograph them in the studio.
On land, wildlife photographers are severely limited. Phyla are the largest divisions of the animal kingdom and, with one exception, all 36 animal phyla evolved in the sea. We terrestrial beings represent a highly specialised minority of the ten phyla that have made it out of the sea. Almost all of the animals we frequently photograph, from slugs to dragonflies, scorpions to albatross, and even ourselves, fall within just three phyla; the Molluscs, the Arthropods, and the Chordates.
How then can we hope to document and photograph a larger proportion of the evolutionary tree without going sub-aqua or pointing microscope-mounted cameras into our ponds? One of the very few ways is to go rock pooling.
During our short foray, we collected members of the Echinoderms and Cnidarians, as well as encountering many divisions of terrestrial phyla that do not occur on land.
Us landlubbers are very accustomed to most well-photographed terrestrial animal's patterns and forms, so as photographers we usually try to show these species interacting with their environment in new and interesting ways. This is not true of many marine groups, so in the studio I tried to simply highlight the shapes and forms of these species.
To do this I decided to photograph them on a white background; a style of photography very much in the vogue at the moment, especially with the recent launch of Niall Benvie and Clay Bolt's meet the neighbours project.
I hope you will agree that this technique exemplifies the shape, colour, and even transparency of the individuals. If you would like to know how to shoot against a white background then the best place to look definitely the meet the neighbours photographers guide.
Lastly, and just in case any of you are wondering about the ethics of collecting specimens for studio shots from the wild, I would not normally condone this practice. However, as we were with Nottingham University academic staff, and all collected specimens will become part of the well used and important university collection, this put me at ease somewhat.
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