The Creative Process pt. 1

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.

For me, I start in close and then work my way out to capture broader AND more nuanced perspective at the same time. There is no right way to begin, but I begin this way because I find that through the process of focusing deeply on the subject itself, through the process of getting closer and working to capture classic portraits of a species, I become more attuned to them and their world. I begin to see them first as an individual and can observe them in the intimate relationship that they have with the world around them. Then, through this experience, through my observations, I begin to build the story around the subject.

But photography is so much more than documenting the world. At least it is to me anyways. Though I will play the role of photojournalist for magazine assignments, at the heart of it all however, for me, is art.

Don’t let this statement confuse you. You see, the same work goes into creating a single photograph that stands as a work of art that goes into creating a storied collection of images for an assignment. It’s all still a matter of story. Just like we can use 20 images together to tell the story of our subject, so too can we create just one single image to do the same thing. It’s just that the story we are capturing is a bit different.

There is a lot of fuss made over whether photography, especially nature photography, is or is not art. Years back, I found this offensive. I have been an artist for as long as I can remember. I paint, I do pen and ink work, I write, I play instruments, and make music. So, from the perspective of someone who works in so many different creative mediums, I can assure you that the same discipline, skill, and creativity that goes into making original music or creating an original pen and ink drawing goes into photography. That is, if you want it to.

The thing that brings into question whether photography is art though, is that you do not actually need an ounce of creativity or vision to take a photograph. If we are being honest with ourselves, you don’t even really need to know how to use the camera. Autofocus can handle quite a bit for you, and there are in fact professional photographers who shoot in Program (that is what the P stands for along side of M for manual exposure, or A for aperture priority). In fact, when Program was first introduced in cameras, professional photojournalists the world over nicknamed it Professional Mode because it took so much of the guess work out of the exposure.

Here in lies the difference between photography and, say, playing the guitar for instance. Set the camera to P, press the shutter button halfway down to autofocus, and then the rest of the way down to trip the shutter. That’s it. Technically speaking, you made a photograph and anyone who looks at it can probably tell that there is a person and a tree and a river and a mountain in there. With music, with paints, this is a very different story of course.

But just because not all photography is art, does not mean photography is not art. Walk into any coffee shop in any college town and you will find a plethora of awful and rudimentary paintings on the wall for sale by all sorts of heady students that have little to no understanding of shape and line and color. But does this mean that because their paintings do not hold up to the standards of fine art, that painting is not art?

As photographers, we must still learn to wield our tools masterfully. We need to understand exposure theory, the limitations of dynamic range, and understand the subtlest nuances of light. Once accomplished we then set forth into the world to discover ways in which to capture the art of nature. In photography, art is what happens when we search the world over for that one inspired and visualized moment when all the uncontrolled variables come into alignment like the tumblers of a lock and a window opens in the universe for a brief moment from which the magic spills out.  

But, I digress. Art is in the eye or the beholder, no?

To Be Continued. . .