HURT TIL IT SMILES

By MICHAEL PERKINS

WILDLIFE HAS BEEN SUCH A SMALL SUBSET of my overall photographic work over a lifetime that it holds a very special challenge for me. In shooting nearly everything else, I have landed at what might be termed a plateau of competence, an ability, through repetition and practice, to predictably deliver a decent result in a variety of disciplines. However, immersing myself in nature subjects places me so far outside my comfort zone, so far from any smug illusions of mastery, that it involves real risk. Ironically, more than ever before, that is where I am deliberately placing myself. Art doesn’t always thrive in the danger zone, but, on the other hand, doing what you’ve always done means you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.

Green heron perched on a boat. Best to take the freebie and relax, but….(see next)

Bird work is a subset inside a subset, occupying a larger portion of my nature output in recent years, and offering equal portions of satisfaction and frustration. Birds are unlike other subjects for portrait work because they don’t care what I want and aren’t here to make me a success at it. They exist in their own sphere and under their own impulses and needs, and whether I can focus fast enough to catch them on the wing, or compose well enough to properly showcase them is of no importance to them. I am, by habit, caught up in what I want to achieve or capture, or, technically, succeed at. To properly photograph a bird, you have to shift every normal emphasis of style and approach. You can’t go out with a given quota or “yield” in mind, as conditions shift so quickly, so consistently that, on many days, you’re fortunate to have even a single usable shot to show for your effort. But that’s not really a negative. In fact, quite the opposite.

…Mr. Heron decides he’s out of here, and you’re too slow, boyo. In otherwords, a typical day.

To, as portrait photographers used to term it, “watch the birdie”, you have to develop a different kind of watching than for any other form of photography. You have to slow down. You have to listen as well as see. And you need to silence the part of your ego that instinctively thinks of the photograph as a trophy, as one more scalp on your belt. It sounds very New Age-y to say that you need to “let the picture take you”, but that is, at least, an approximation of what you’re aspiring to. Finally, given the sheer number of blown shots you must walk past on the way to the keepers, you need to be all right with failure, or at least be able to find a new definition of “success”. Art is not something that’s logged on a scorecard; it’s peeling away all the wrong versions of something until the right version is revealed. You hurt ’til you smile. Nature work is its own separate discipline, in that it’s defined by how well you manage yourself, rather than whether you tame the subject.