Rules Are Meant to be Broken

Douglas MacArthur once said, “Rules are mostly made to be broken and are too often for the lazy to hide behind.”

MacArthur was a five-star general in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. But his quote may as well be the foundation for all great art (and life in general).

To create this panning blur of a black skimmer just after sunset, I dropped my shutter speed down to 1/60th of a second and set my ISO accordingly so as to purposefully overexpose the water. The result of these decisions was a high-key panning blur. 

This photograph breaks a few rules. It steps away from tradition, and I wanted to chat with you about it because I hope that it will help you begin to think and see more creatively.

In this next issue of PhotoWILD Magazine, I’m releasing part three of my Mastering Birds in Flight series. Inside, I dive into the technical consideration about photographing birds on the wing: shutter speed, aperture considerations, and of course, how ISO factors into all of this.

But the photo I’m sharing here flies in the face of all that.

In fact, technically speaking, it flies in the face of just about every so-called “rule” you can think of for photographing birds in flight.

Now back on the Outer Banks, that long and wispy ribbon of sand that unfurls into the Atlantic Ocean along the coast of North Carolina, I dropped my tire pressure to 20psi and traded pavement for the soft sand of the beach in search of photographs. Normally, if I’m going to find shorebirds to photograph on the beach, I do so at high tide along this stretch of coastline. When the tide rises, the ocean swallows the foreshore of the beach and concentrates birds along the wrack line which is sort of a mosaic of bits of shipwreck (from which the word “wrack” is derived) and metric tons of sargassum weed that became separated from the Gulf Stream and itself was wrecked upon the shore. Along this line of flotsam and jetsam, birds take refuge from marauding black backed gulls and hunting peregrine falcons, while feeding on the plethora of life that lives within the drying sargassum.

But the storms that made headlines just weeks ago, along with the never-ending northeast winds that have dominated autumn this year, chewed and cut and sculpted so many tidal pools and bites along the shore near the inlets and capes. When this happens, whole new worlds are opened up on the beach. Species like oystercatchers and black skimmers, birds more often found in the protected estuaries behind the islands, find their way out on the beaches to join the likes of black bellied plovers and sanderlings here, to exploit these new but ephemeral habitats.

I busied myself photographing the frenetic sanderlings for a while and enjoyed the fact that both of us arrived on the beach around the same time this year from Alaska. These birds, like many different species arriving with the fall migration, breed in the arctic tundra. But as the sun began to set and I began to contemplate brushing off the sand and heading out, a flock of skimmers finally arrived to work the shallows of these pools in search of small fish.

When the light began to fade and the action was heating up, I took note of the skimmers flight pattern, dropped my shutter speed to 1/60th of a second, and got into position behind my ground pod at the edge of a bite.

Normally, with birds in flight, we obsess over shutter speeds fast enough to freeze the action. Often 1/2000th of a second will do, but for some species this requires speeds of 1/4000th to really stop the motion of their primary feathers along the wingtips. Yet, here I was going the opposite direction. Instead of speeding things up to freeze the fighter jet like maneuvers of the skimmers, I slowed everything down.

The sun had official set into the Pamlico Sound behind me. The light was fading fast. And it’s quality turned ocean and tide pools alike into pools of mercury. This created the perfect opportunity for high key photography. Instead of exposing for color and details, I blew out the water to create an almost painter’s canvas-like background to photograph the skimmers against.

The slow shutter speed I chose meant that there way no way I would get a sharp image of these birds. That is, of course, unless I matched the pan of my lens perfectly to the speed of the birds while I tripped the shutter.

The technique is known as a panning blur.

If you time things just right, the wings of a bird and the environment around take on a softly blurred painterly effect while the head of the animal is rendered tack sharp.

There is nothing easy about creating panning blurs. Often, it’s a game of numbers. It’s not uncommon to only have one out of hundred or more photos that are usable. But the more you do it, the better you become at tracking and panning with the animal at the right speed.

Sure, I could have cranked up the ISO of my camera and photographed these birds exactly like everyone always photographs them when they are skimmer the surface of the water for fish. But then again, I would have just created cliché photos of black simmers that were otherwise wholly unremarkable and destined for the trash bin after import. Instead, I decided to break the rules of tradition with photographing birds in flight.

And the result was something unique and beautiful.

There are two types of wildlife photographers: artists and documentarians. Neither is better or worse. But the practices, skill sets, and mental game of these two types of photographers are as fundamentally different as night and day.

As an artist, I will always prioritize creative thinking and experimentation over guaranteed results. When I’m in the field, I’m thinking about the photograph, not the subject. As you grow as an artist, as you’re your wildlife photography matures, my advice is to break every rule you can think of. Only then do you begin to develop style.