Out Of Africa

More on physicality, being there, and prints

The challenge of nature’s camouflage from a black and white perspective.

In a post last week about my trip to Africa, Bob beat me to the punch and nailed it again. That's the price I pay for working with someone infintely smarter than I am.

Kidding aside (well, maybe not the fact that he's pretty damned smart), I did want to contribute my two cents about the criticality of physical presence in what our community seeks to achieve in their art.

By physical presence I'm restricting my comments here to the act of being "out there", capturing our images and the physical nature of printing on fine art papers. And, out there isn't necessarily photographing wildlife in Africa. It may be the portraitist, the light painter or the insect macrophotographer in her studio, or whomever else doing whatever else photographically.

For me, as a pro nature photographer, immersing myself in the physical environment is critical to my work. I have been to Africa several times. From each visit I learn more about what did not bring me closer to my artistic vision, so I can plan different approaches for the next visit. Whether Africa or Canada's glorious Yukon Territory, or any of the other places I have lead photographic tours or have gone for my own artistic work, that physical immersion is a critical element of my art. I need the sights, the smells, the sounds as inputs in order to tell the story.

As a side note, I rarely find that in one visit. There is a huge learning curve I have to climb in order to really grok how my work fits in with the physical space.

The Print

So how does this all sync with the ultimate goal of our community's collective work, producing fine art prints? I'll tell you a little secret. Maybe not so little, as it comes from decades of experience (yes, I am a "senior" photographer).

When I'm out there, I intentionally try to shoot with the ultimate print front-and-center in my mind. If I'm shooting B&W, I look for distinguishing elements that will enable a print to stand out; tonality, strong composition, patterns, texture, perspective. If it's not there in my frame, I don't waste time recording it. Well, I try not to but I'm sure all photographers know the suffering of seeing the mistakes made.

I’ve not yet even looked at all the images I made on this trip. I am torn between B&W on many of these.

Certain subjects, I feel, require color. I did shoot leopards in B&W while in The Serengeti and some of those images I believe will be strong enought to rise to a good B&W print. But I love the elegance and strength of leopards and I find it difficult not to portray their beauty in full color. However, because these magnificent animals blend in to their enviropnment so well, it makes "contrast" an extra special challenge when shooting in black and white.

My point here is that my work, in particular, is intertwined with the physical world. When the shooting and post-processing is done, there is nothing in my art that even comes close to seeing and feeling one of my images printed on a piece of gorgeous fine art paper. Again, perhaps not yet, but isn't that what we aspire to produce?