GOING HOME FULL

By MICHAEL PERKINS

I KNOW SEVERAL PHOTOGRAPHERS who evaluate a shooting day the way they might evaluate a round of golf, as if they had to total up a score of some kind to measure either success or failure. Their internal grading systems declare a given outing to be a bust, a win, a waste of time, or a revelation, with many bemoaning those occasions on which they “go home empty”, which, I guess, means they either “found nothing to shoot” (an idiotic notion IMHO) or “didn’t get any good shots”(another concept I have a problem with, since all photography is instructional and thus cannot be wasted time unless you waste it yourself) The idea of putting a day’s shooting into some arbitrary “pass or fail” column strikes me, to say the least, as missing the effing point.

Taken on a birdwalk in which the birding was marginal but the walking was divine.

When I began birding, I found I had to re-think what the object of a photo shoot was. I first went into it the way a fisherman might judge the day’s catch, that is, by how many trout were in the creel when I headed home. In such a mind set, any day I did not “bag” the correct(?) number of bird images was a bad day. It was as if I had been assigned by some cosmic editor to bring back a certain amount of “product” and had failed the assignment. Thing is, watching birds isn’t about what the rest of the world wants or demands. It’s about mindfulness, about being fully present in the moment. In terms of photographs, it’s the only way you will be able to even approach snapping subjects that are generally elusive and non-cooperative. Only paying full attention to what’s in front of you will mentally prepare you to make a visual comment on it, which is what happens when you choose to photograph, well, anything.

The other thing that anchors me in the moment is being just as mindful of my immediate surroundings beyond the birds. Not all walks are birdwalks, but all birdwalks are walks, each with its own features and compositional possibilities. Some of my favorite landscape images were the byproduct of days when days on which The Birds Aren’t Happening, or when I was far less adept than my companions at spotting this or that species and naturally began to look for something else to train my gaze on. Happily, I now can head back after a day when no usable bird pictures resulted, yet still not feel as if I “went home empty”. Empty is a manifestation of the mind. It’s just one of many mental program switches that you can toggle on or off. Photographs don’t just happen when everything’s perfect, or else no one would ever shoot anything. Run what you brung, shoot what comes along. It’s the attitudinal equivalent of A Bird In The Hand.