Embrace the Suck
As wildlife photographers, we’re accustomed to things not going our way. No matter how much we plan or prepare, there’s just so many variables outside our control. In many ways, it’s this singular fact that has informed and defined almost every very aspect of my approach to wildlife photography.
While some would argue that it’s this lack of control that disqualifies wildlife photography as a form of art, for me it’s the unpredictable that makes it one of the most challenging of all art forms – if that makes any sense.
I just wrapped up my Epic Bears workshop in the mountains of Alaska, and putting something like this together is no small task. I spent two years traveling by float planes and small boats, tweaking my timing bit by bit to better understand the changing of the seasons in relation to the bear activity. Many thousands of dollars were coughed up to pay for pilots and boat captains and such. And all of it for fine tuning the type of workshop that I wanted to create out of this situation.
Organizing workshops sometimes feels like a creative endeavor in and of itself; it’s a bit like producing and conducting a symphony, with so much time and intention and moving parts all having to come together just so.
For this workshop, my mission was to find that sweet spot on a vin diagram between the greatest number of bears and the greatest amount of fall color. Earlier holds more bears. Later had better color. This is the Goldilocks paradox of wildlife photography.
The concept I was gaming for is unique in the never-ending flood of brown bear photography workshops up here these days. And unique is what I wanted.
September is a cloudy month across much of Alaska. Within a couple hundred miles of the ocean, you can pretty much count on “weather.” But that’s OK. If fall colors are a priority for your photographs, as they were for this workshop, clouds are a good thing.
Clouds simplify. Overcast skies remove all the contrast, the dappled lighting, the highlights and shadows and harshness that send nature photographers packing the world over. Clouds remove the need for understanding how to compose with light and shadows.
All of this is to say that clouds produce the low hanging fruit that so many come to depend on for their photography.
But understand one very important thing here: the low hanging fruit isn’t necessarily the sweetest tasting.
After two years of planning and polishing and anticipation, the timing could not have been better. The fall colors peaked while clients were here. We had big boars fishing for crimson red sockeye salmon. We had four different moms with cubs in addition to another 20 solitary bears. All these animals were at the peak of their physical fitness, donning luxurious silver tipped winter coats, sporting a summer’s worth of fat and girth in preparation for hibernation in the next three weeks. And my god, the color all around.
But there was one small problem.
After all the planning, after obsessing over the weather and hoping there wouldn’t be too much rain for the trip, despite forecasts, despite statistics, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
The clients on this trip were all seasoned photographers. They were well traveled and understood what clouds would hand them on a silver platter in this situation. And while everyone understands I cannot control the weather, the disappointment in the fact that we were treated with full sun was palpable.
I take a different perspective, however.
If you’ve been reading my articles on wildlife photography for any amount of time, you likely know I hold a philosophy on light that is shared by very few. To put it simply: I’m of the opinion that there is no such thing as bad light, only a lack of imagination in how to work with it.
You see, the real art, the real skill in the game of wildlife photography is not the ablility to focus on an animal or any of the other elementary things so many obsess over. No. The secret sauce in all of this is the ability to see the possibilities.
In other words, as wildlife photographers, we are limited only be the depths of our own creativity.
This isn’t to say that every situation in every “type” of light imaginable can produce extraordinary photographs. This is still wildlife photography after all. There is still a considerable amount of patience, of waiting for the universe to align. But we must be able to think outside of the box in order to begin to see the possibilities and anticipate how it might all come together.
The photograph above is one such example of this.
Created at 1pm in the afternoon, with a cobalt blue sky overhead and light so bright and harsh that we all wore sunglasses to protect our eyes from the glare of the water, the image stands as a testament to the importance being able to see the possibilities.
I can’t take credit for seeing this opportunity first. It was Scott Suriano, my co-leader on this workshop, that put it together and recognized the potential before I did.
We had the clients split between two boats on the lake, with me in one and Scott in the other. Before us were 2 different fishing bears in two different little coves. We were working with the contrast of the situation already, angling ourselves so we were facing the shadowed sides of the willows and alders. As our bear stepped into shafts of light, it was diffused from being filtered through the vegetation. The result was serene, and we created some beautiful photographs here as we composed with light and shadows as opposed to bears and fall colors.
This photograph, was created only minutes before the one at the top of the article. Experimenting with different backgrounds and trying to find ways to work with dappled lighting was one of many different techniques we used to overcome the challenges of harsh midday sun. Looking at this photograph, it would be nearly impossible to tell that it was created at nearly 1pm in the afternoon on a bright cloudless day.
When a third bear, this one with a truly fat cub, stepped out of the alders, Scott decided to move his boat to investigate the situation. In no time, however, he dove off the bow of the boat and into the shallows with lens in hand.
Seeing this, I paused and took note of what was happening. From my position, the bear he was looking at was in full bright sun. Scott was on the other side of the bear however, and I knew she would be backlit from his angle. To pull off a backlit shot, you must have contrast; contrast between the subject and background. Sometimes this comes in the form of a setting sun that fills the space around the animal with light and color to create a classical silhouette. Other times, especially when working in the water, you can compose a subject who is in shade against a bright background, such as the brilliant gold and orange of fall colors at golden hour while it reflects into the water around the animal. Understanding the elements of design makes all of this relatively easy to pull together in a variety of different way (see Mastering Silhouettes in the Summer 23 issue of PhotoWILD Magazine).
But turning to look at the background he was photographing against, I saw nothing but a giant black wall of shadow from the mountain next to us.
Instantly, I understood.
Swinging our boat to the rocky point where our comrades were stepping into the water, we all but dove over the gunwales and onto our bellies atop the water worn stones with visions of some iteration of this composition dancing in our heads. Waders are mandatory for many reasons.
With her lone cub sitting perched on rocks next to the glowing backlit willows, the mother bear stepped out to the edge of the water. With all the glacial silt in the lake, the water is typically cloudy with visibility of only a foot or so. It’s this glacial flour, pulverized down to what nerds like me know as colloidal particles, that creates the otherworldly blue of the lake that is more Caribbean than Alaskan. But despite the mesmerizing color of the water, neither fish nor bears function very well in this glacial flour.
Where small creeks and streams, not fed by glaciers, flow into the lake off the mountains, the water is clear. The force of the clear streams pushes the cloudy water back, revealing thousands of bright red sockeye salmon in full breeding colors. The salmon come to spawn on the gravel beds at the mouths of these little feeder creeks where the water is clean. They do this to keep their gills free of all the glacial silt in the water. The bears, on the hand, come to hunt these areas for their own reasons. Despite being able to smell an individual salmon under the water, they still need to actually see the fish to catch them.
When a bear launches into the water after salmon, she does so with all the power and force and intensity as you might expect from someone whose life depends upon that fish. Sometimes claws meet flesh. Sometimes she fails. And sometimes a fish will abruptly change directions, trying to lose the predator in the chaos of the hunt, bringing the bear quickly to her hind legs as she rises from the water to get a better look before adjusting her trajectory and launching again in an explosion of water and power.
If you’ve never experienced this, it’s extraordinary to watch. The raw power on display will leave you in awe.
But from the perspective of photography, the photos all tend to be the same. You know the shot I speak of here: a bear’s head wreathed in water, the intensity of the stare, the teeth, the polished claws outstretched, poised to slam down onto a fish and pin to the bottom.
If you have never photographed fishing bears, this is the photo you want.
But if you have spent hundreds of hours watching and photographing bears fishing for salmon such as I have, then you are always searching for something more. Learning to embrace the suck, as the saying goes, allows us to go beyond the cliche because it forces creativity and out of the box thinking.
This is how we grow as photographers and artists. Always chasing after the low hanging fruit holds us back. It’s only when we push ourselves outside of well worn and deeply rutted comfort zones, do we find that our photography begins to move beyond those same old tired photographs we keep creating over and over again.