Does a picture say the right thousand words?

Time to spout an old cliché. If you have heard it once you have heard it a thousand times. An image really does say a thousand words.

There is though a problem with this cliché. If I were to show the image above - which shows the River Severn on its way to freezing in central Worcester for the first time in at least 30 years - to a group of people it would undoubtedly say different things to each of them.

Imagine the group contained Jill, the archetypal climate change activist, and Jeremy, a supercar-driving climate change skeptic. (Jeremy's personality and name, you understand, lends nothing to any famous climate change skeptics you may be thinking of)

Jill, through daisy-woven dreadlocks and a haze of scented candle smoke, might stare tearfully at the image before reaching to her guitar and improvising a ditty lamenting the rarity of true winters in our warming world.

Jeremy, meanwhile, would scoff. Ice, he might add, boastfully, as if stumbling upon a profound yet original thought, only forms when it is cold! When Peter took this image it was minus ten every night for a week! How can the world be warming, ridiculous?!?

Our prejudices inform how we interpret images. A two million year old South African hominid would look at an image of an eagle with fear. Eagles, after all, preyed upon their children.

If we fast forward to the 13th Century, the eagle has become the king of birds, fear has been transformed to reverence. Eagles are able to rejuvenate themselves by flying directly into the sun before rising, phoenix-like, from the flames.

Now eagles are pests or conservation symbols, a product of evolution or one of god's mightiest creations. Viewpoint is everything.

This eagle though is not wild, and neither was the one in the previous photograph. He is owned and flown daily by a man who cares deeply for it. Suddenly, just with a few words, the eagle has become a beloved pet or a cruelly-held captive animal.

Whereas, though, most dog walkers simply walk, feed, care for, and love their pets, this eagle has a further purpose. The owner hunts with the eagle, flying it at wild hares. Sometimes it kills, sometimes it does not.

Now, to some people, the eagle is the sinister tool of a bloodsport; to others it is a rare opportunity to view a predator in action at close quarters; to yet more it is a pest control agent. Again, this has changed all with the application of just a few more words.

Where then does this leave conservation photography and natural history film-making if people tend to see their own prejudices in images and film? How do we know if the thousand words an image says are the ones we mean it to? Are conservation and educational images redundant, powerless to change people's perceptions?

Not at all, far from it. A carefully chosen image, a skillfully applied sentence, or (on film) a well chosen soundtrack, can bypass prejudice and bring out new emotions, making people laugh and cry on cue, sharing the emotions of the artist.

The challenge is to understand the perceptions of others and to chose those images, words, and sounds that affect your target audience in the same way they affect you, getting your message across as strongly as possible. The only real way to test this though is to show someone the final product and to ask them to explain, in a thousand words, what it means to them.

Note: The proof is in the pudding. Straight after this post I logged onto facebook, finding a link to this article showing that The Cove, a powerful conservation film, is starting to influence a modest but growing protest movement in Japan:

http://savejapandolphins.org/blog/post/some-good-news-a-demonstration-by-japanese-in-taiji-against-the-dolphin-sla

Just a memory

This weekend I watched as the last snow on the hills around Preston in the Scottish Borders melted away. Somewhat appropriately, I have just edited the last of my images from a day trip Lee Webb and I took to the Elan Valley in the height of winter.

From Rhyader we took the mountain road to Aberystwyth, fully expecting the road to be unpassable. Sure enough we soon had to stop before a large snowdrift. We decided to have a little walk (long walks are quite difficult in 6 foot snow drifts) around the area and found it to be a wonderland of drifting snow and ice-encrusted blades of grass.

A few minute into our walk I turned to see a large yellow snow plow heading up the road past our car. Perfect! We headed back to the vehicle and followed the plough up the road, taking photographs and helping other motorists as we went. Quite a fun day out!

When photographing in snow I find the hardest thing is to concentrate on finding photogenic angles of beautiful scenes. It is very easy to think "this will look great because of the snow" without checking if it does, often resulting in scenes remarkable only because of their whiteness. I tend to focus on contours and shadows in the snow, hopefully bringing definition into white scenes. I love the deep blue shadows cast on snow and ice and how these contrast with those parts lit by winter sunshine.

I also like to pick out elements that hint at the smothered landscape below. In this case the abundant ice-covered grass blades fitted the bill perfectly, and when backlit looked like jewels.

My favourite photograph of the day is the bottom photograph. This not only shows jewel-like grass,low winter sunshine, and deep blue shadows, but is brought to life by snow drifting through the image. I personally think that anything that adds movement to otherwise static landscapes brings them to life.

Bejewelled Waterfalls

Three weekends ago (What? You didn't expect my blog to be up to date did you?) myself and a few friends embarked upon a two day roadtrip to Gretna Service Station. At first glance this fairly typical refueling stop seems to offer little to the nature photographer, but come dusk a wheeling ballet of millions of starlings fills the sky.

At least this is what usually happens. We arrived right on schedule fresh from a day in the Yorkshire dales to find Gretna basking in the last rays of sunshine emanating from a cloudless sky; the perfect conditions. Unfortunately, to our surprise, the starlings were not playing ball. There were certainly plenty around but for no apparent reason for the most part they were content to stay in small darting flocks.

After one or two fairly underwhelming shots the show was over and we retired to our hotel.

The next day we headed back to Nottingham stopping off in the lakes for a dose of landscape photography. Sam Waldron and I stopped at Raise Beck, a stream on Dunmail Raise between Thirlmere and Grasmere.

All the rocks, trees, and anything else within splash-range of the stream were coated in glistening ice creating a treacherous but very beautiful labyrinth. After a short while of attempting to find iceless paths up the gorge I realised the only way to find grip was to stand in the non-frozen parts of the stream, allowing the ice-cold water to flow into my boots.

One particularly dazzling part of the spectacle was a tree leaning over and partially into a waterfall. Every one of its bows was adorned with countless icicles, each two or three foot long. Unfortunately, the base of the tree was unaccessible but I still managed one or two shots looking down at it.

So what tips do I have for shooting frozen waterfalls?

1) Metering; constantly check your histogram! The combination of white ice and water and black rocks provides quite a task for camera sensors. I had to keep checking the histogram to make sure I was neither blowing the highlights or underexposing shadows.

2) Use a polarising filter. This cuts the reflections out of the water allowing you to see through to the rocks below. It also cuts out enough light to allow exposures long enough to blur the water.

3) Take a lens cloth. When shooting low near waterfalls it is almost impossible to prevent splashes hitting the lens. Keep checking the front of the lens for water drops and mop them up as soon as they occur.

4) Make sure your tripod is as steady as possible. Be very careful if the tripod leg is in water; it may appear steady but the water may be buffeting it.

5) Keep warm!

Is Wildlife Photography Art?

In an earlier post I mentioned that I think wildlife photography is an art. I have decided that the best way to illustrate why is to use a specific photograph as an example.

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/wpy/prevPhoto.do?photo=2451&year=2008&category=55

This photograph won the BBC Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year overall competition in 2008 and something about the image just strikes me.

There are a million and one internet articles about successful composition from the rule of thirds, to using leading lines. All of this boils down to controlling the way the eye moves through the photograph. However, this simply tells you how to make a pretty photograph, not a work of art.

When I look at this photograph I can feel my eyes being moved around the photograph but it is not simply this that makes it art, but to explain why it is I need to explain how my eyes move.

The first thing I see is the chase scene in the middle of the image. By being in the middle of the photograph this breaks the most often cited compositional rule; "do not put the subject in the center of the frame". Luckily, in this case the eye does not dwell but is first drawn to the almost silhouetted line of Oryx in the foreground, before being drawn back to the chase by the gaze of the Oryx. Lastly, I pick up the almost hidden line of Oryx in the background, again looking at the chase.

Even though the Oryx are looking at the lion because herbivores need to keep track of predators, to me their gaze and positioning conjures the image of a Roman amphitheater, where the Oryx are the fascinated spectators.

To me nature is a fascinating but deadly spectacle, one that we can all enjoy, sometimes with morbid fascination, but one in which we are all intrinsically involved.

This is what art is to me. A photograph, poem, or painting, a song, book, or rock drawing is art if it says something about the world outside its form to the reader.

Every single nature photograph does this to me. Nature photographs remind me that the repetition of the simple process of evolution has produced a completely interrelated and completely ecologically interdependent web of life on a planet sculpted by the simple laws of physics.

This to me is completely inspiring. This to me is art.

Seal Silhouettes

There is a running joke amongst my course mates on Nottingham University's MSc in Biological Photography and Imaging, that I am perhaps a little too fond of silhouettes.

I do love shooting silhouettes, but why would you not?!? Almost all of the most striking wildlife photographs are simple compositions, have simple colour schemes, and reduce wildlife spectacles down to their core elements.

Typically, when shooting with the light, this involves using a wide aperture to blur foreground and background details, or recomposing until as little unwanted detail as possible is visible. This differs from landscape photography, where the aim is often to show all of the landscape, from foreground to background, in exquisite detail.

Of course, there are exceptions to both of these rules. If there were not, photography would not be an art (que debate)!

Silhouettes automatically reduce the complexity of an image down to the foreground (the silhouette) and background (whatever it is silhouetted against). The lack of texture automatically reduces the subject to its purest form, and the comparison with the background automatically shows the subject in perspective.

There are practical reasons, as well as artistic reasons, for shooting silhouettes. You do not need the subject itself to be lit. In fact it is often better if it isn't, and is as tonally different from the background as possible.

So what is my technique for shooting silhouettes? They are actually one of the simplest forms of wildlife photograph to take, involving three different steps:

1) Position yourself so your subject is against a bright background. This is often the hardest part of the task as the background is usually the sky, so you need to position yourself as low as possible in order to shoot up at the subject. Hills and ridges are useful for this, but I have often found myself in ditches and even golf course bunkers!

2) Meter on the background. This means it is possible to shoot silhouettes when other forms of photography simply are not possible. For example, just after sunset the sky is often still bright, but the land is not illuminated enough for telephoto photography. Shooting with the light is not possible but shooting into it is.

3) Focus on the edge of the subject. For other types of wildlife photography, it is usually best to focus on the eye of the subject. However, in silhouettes these will disappear into the blackness the silhouette. All that matters is that the edge of the subject is in focus.

As an example, I have decided to discuss this technique in the context of the seals at Donna Nook.

The technique described above still applies, but there are one or two minor ways it has to be altered to suit Donna Nook. Firstly, there are only two bright backgrounds available at Donna Nook; the sea and the sky. Shooting against the sky involves getting as low as possible to the sand, usually by lying down.

To silhouette seals against the sea, you may need to stand up. Normally, there is no way I would condone standing near seals. However, if the seals are in the sea, their own environment, they feel they can escape at any time so are much more relaxed. Often they inquisitively swim closer and closer to investigate people on the shoreline.

So where do you focus on a seal to get the best silhouettes? The edge of a seal is fuzzy, so focus on the edge of the seal is not 100% critical, although it is of course advisable to get it as sharp as possible. There are two parts of seals which simply have to be in focus; the whiskers and the teeth. Both of these have defined edges, so it will be immediately obvious if they are not in focus.

There is a little caveat to trying to get a seals teeth in focus. Usually if a seal close to you has its mouth open, this is a threat display and it is time to get the hell out of dodge for your sake and the seals. However, if the seals are fighting or warning each other whist ignoring you, then you are justified in snapping away.

With this in mind you should be ready to start shooting seal silhouettes, perhaps even grabbing some more challenging silhouettes than portraits!