Nature Photography ... the Bridport Way ...
There are all kinds of rules surrounding club nature or wildlife photography. Nature is generally the more relaxed of the two but we had a discussion at the club as to whether we should relax those rules a little further.
The decision was by no means unanimous, but it was carried by a large majority to allow the inclusion of farm and domesticated animals as well as plants that are cultivars.
The rules have been loosening gradually over time and perhaps we see ourselves being slightly ahead of the curve. Nature, as we have prescribed it, concerns itself with the natural world ... to include ...
All branches of Natural History including landscapes, geological formations, weather, plants (to include cultivars), fungi and animals, dead or alive, wild or domesticated. It permits photographing in zoos, botanical gardens, aquariums, the local deer park etc.
Any human made structure must form an integral part of the nature story ... like a barn owl in a barn or a person battling the weather or man-made structures succumbing to flooding or the like. Cages or barriers at the zoo are permitted if you wish to show the story of an animals containment.
Editing must be kept to a minimum ... the usual stuff, levels, sensor spots etc but certainly nothing to be digitally added to the frame and obviously no AI other than noise reduction.
Any artistic effects must be carried out in camera and not in post capture editing on the computer ... if you want movement in the image, apply it by moving your camera during capture, not by adding a filter on the computer. Similarly, composite images are only allowed if you can do it in camera ... not later.
How did we get there? By looking at other photographers work and deciding, amongst ourselves, whether they could be interpreted as a nature image.
We started off by looking at a rather ordinary picture of a bird, it wasn't really doing anything ... it was just there ... the colours were good but that was about it. Next up, we looked at the work of Andy Rouse and the very first image was of another bird, but this one was singing and the act of the bird engaged in some behaviour elevated it, head and shoulders, above the first one we saw. Through Andy's work we looked at the way light fell on a subject or the way light isolated the subject from its background. We looked at black and white and photographs that were a bit more abstract.
We looked at Susan Derges ... we decided that her Yellow Moon Dandelion was definitely a nature shot. Do we really need to see the dandelion in all it's detail? Once upon a time, a nature judge would have said yes ... and as for the name? They'd have preferred Yellow Moon Taraxacum Officinale ... but we, at Bridport, will allow ourselves a title with a little more soul. The aim is to provide a pleasing image, not a page from the Observer book of flowers with an accompanying binomial.
We also looked at some of Susan's rock pool images, appreciating the circular frame.
Some of her work also started to lean into abstraction ... another photographer that does this is Ernst Haas, unfortunately we didn't have time to look at his Colour Motion series ...
Warning, there are pictures of bull fighting in this series ... but ... isn't the the terrible relationship that some animals have with humans part of the story of the natural world?
We discussed Arte Wolfe ... we discussed how, as nature photographers, we're told to try and separate the subject from the background, but that's not the reality of most animals existence. Many of them spend their time trying not to be seen ... you'll have to take your time with these, some of them are tricky to spot!
We looked at Jo-Anne McArthur, we looked at her captive series which explores how we, as
humans react to the animals who might interact or ignore us. If you go to her website and stray away from Captive ... there is some strong stuff about the mistreatment of animals, including fur farming. None of it is gratuitous, it is all in the name of animal advocacy ... the images provoked a lot of discussion in the club and highlight that rule about cages or barriers at the zoo being permitted if they tell the story of an animals containment ... so many of us photograph in that environment whilst trying to make the animals look like they are roaming free ...
The last photographer we looked at on the night was Nick Brandt ... equally as hard hitting with just as much to say but he did it in a fine art sort of way. His first three books told a story ... On This Earth showed a picture perfect world of African wildlife ... the sort of unsullied ideal that most photographers try to imply with their wildlife or nature photography.
The second A Shadow Falls was slightly starker, still shot beautifully, albeit with a melancholy feel, but showing animals string to struggle within their natural environment.
The third Across This Ravaged Land is much darker ... humans appear in the work and whilst they are the good guys, the park rangers are posed with confiscated ivory ... it's powerful story telling. The three titles, when put together in a single sentence says it all ...
In that third book, he took mounted hunter's trophies and placed them in the wild as a stark reminder of what man is doing to the natural world. In some of his more recent work he has done the same thing with large portraits he has made of animals and placed them, like displaced relics, in the built environment. He called this work, Inherit The Dust. The work in This Empty World is monumental ... He built cinematic sets in the Maasai community land like a nature version of Gregory Crewsdon who we covered in previous discussion at the club.
What did we learn? Well, we learned that nature photography isn't quite as cut and dried as we might have imagined. When we see clematis growing in the English hedgerow, it's an escapee from the garden environment ... the fact that it is wild doesn't make it any less of a cultivar. Wisteria is a cultivar in an English country garden but most likely wild if you were to photograph it in China. Cherry, Japanese Maple and Mock Orange, to name but a few, grow in the wild elsewhere ... we decided that the days of outlawing cultivars from Nature photography is probably limited and certainly fraught with regards to policing.
Dogs, horses and cattle, despite being domesticated are just as much part of the natural world as a lowland gorilla ... and in a rather tongue in cheek remark ... if the Crown owns all the mute swans then technically they are pets ... and if our regular nature judge, Charlie Wheeler has been photographing pets, then it's good enough for the rest of us!
If you want to look at some unusual depictions of some of our more domesticated fauna then try Tim Flach, Randal Ford and Giacomo Brunelli ...
Our next discussion group at the Town Hall ...
