The Creative Process

It was sometime in the spring when I found myself making my way into the swamps of North Carolina with assignment in hand. I was bound for a world that was as much water as it was forest. This is a place of towering cypress trees with their gnarled and twisted knees rising from waters as black as onyx and smelling like a steeped oolong tea. Spanish moss drips from every surface. Shadows dance with shafts of light that weave to and froe like the seductive sway of the Arabian belly dance Raqs Sharqi. This is the forest obscura, where cottonmouths grow fat and lazy in their ways, and silhouettes of alligators drift by in silence leaving you to question whether or not it even happened.

Here, in this world that time forgot, lives a peculiar little species of waterfowl quite unlike any other of its kind. We call it the wood duck because it nests in woodpecker cavities, but the Latin name, or what is known as the scientific binomial name for this bird is more fitting: Aiks sponsa.

First, the genus. Aiks comes from the Greek for water bird. Being that this is a duck, or a species of waterfowl, Aiks is an obvious choice even though not all species of ducks fall to this genus. But the species - sponsa - now that is unique to the wood duck. The word means betrothed. And this bird was given such a name because the drake, the male, is so intricately and beautifully colored and clothed, it is as if he is preparing for his wedding.

But there is more to this name than just the coloration of the drake of this species. It also comes from behavior as well. Each morning, the drake will fly to the hen’s nest – a remodeled pileated woodpecker cavity – where he will perch on a branch next to the hole. Here he will wait patiently until the hen is ready to leave to find food. She climbs out of the nesting cavity, perches on the branch next to the drake for a few minutes, and then the two of them take flight together. The drake accompanies her until she is ready to return to the nest, for which he then escorts her back to the cavity. Here, again, they land on the same perch as before and she makes her way back into the nest. Once settled in, the drake flies away and the whole thing begins again then next morning.

Working on assignment for a magazine, all the little details of natural history are important to know and understand. As wildlife photographers, we are essentially the biographers of nature. And thus, to visually capture the story of the wood duck we must first know the nuances of that story.

But this is only part of the equation. We need to go beyond simply knowing a thing only from the sterility of books and intellectualism. We need to experience. We need to observe. We need to take notes and experiment and visually explore it all as well.

Piecing together images for a magazine assignment is a bit like putting together as many of the puzzle pieces as you can visually capture of that story. It’s the who, what, where, when, why, and how of all good journalism, of all good story telling. The only difference is that instead of doing it all with words, we do it with photographs.

Uncompromising quality. Workshop level education. The Art & Science of wildlife photography at your finger tips.

Already a member? Sign In