HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

By MICHAEL PERKINS

PHOTOGRAPHY DOESN’T NEED ANY ASSISTANCE when it comes to teaching its practitioners humility, constantly reminding the shooter that, boy, you got a lot to learn. The feedback from one’s total output, which is, let’s face it, largely composed of either near or total misses, is immediate and occasionally crushing. How can something that seems so simple be so hard to be good at? So let’s agree that the constant baseline of all picture-making enterprises is a severe whack to the ego.

To make matters worse, piled onto that baseline are any number of additional layers of failure, as the novitiate makes his/her way up the ladder to some semblance of competency. One of the toughest such layers for me is nature work, and within that, the specially punishing hell of trying to bring off bird images. Many failures in this category are due to the shortcomings of one’s gear, as it takes at least a modest outlay of funds to get the equipment needed to capture birds under a variety of constantly changing conditions. Then there is the sheer, maddening patience that is required before you can even try to take a picture of one. Beyond the fact that, on a given day, no birds of any kind may even show up or reveal themselves, you have the golden roster of excuses: weather, foliage, distance, “the sun was in my eyes”,etc., etc. The alibis are legion, at least when I am trolling for pity as regards my own blown shots.

And even if you solve both the gear challenge (the right lens, your ability to work it well) and the search for the golden moment (are you sure the nightwings are coming tonight?), there is the problem of whether you even know how to make a picture of anything in a compelling fashion. Did you just “register” the bird’s body within your frame or did you tell a small story? Showcase something of its character? Compose for effect? Some days, you drop one more desperate nickel in the cosmic slot machine and you go home with a hat full of silver dollars, as happened in the above shot, the one salvageable image from over fifty frames taken that afternoon. Will I be back? Well, sometimes one usable pelican is enough to bait the hook and keep you on the line. Other days, you lick your wounds and curse your luck. I don’t know if that’s the same as actual humility.

But it smarts just as much.