The Creative Process part 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?

Back to the swamp, and the smells, and the humidity, and black water, and the pin prick of mosquitoes I thank God no longer carry malaria around these parts (they did until the 1950s).

Knowing that I wanted to approach these wood ducks by starting with portraits of the birds, I initially began working this assignment from the confines of a blind I had to wade through waist deep water for a hundred yards in the dark in a swamp to get to. Never mind that this wasn’t winter anymore and so all of the reptilian world was about. Never mind that the occasional unseen large thing would bump into me as I tried to quietly trudge through the swamp by headlamp. Never mind that the first time I climbed into the mostly submerged blind, something frantically fought to get out just as I found myself getting settled in. Espresso, by the way, has nothing on that experience for waking you up in the morning.

And here is the thing: that whole experience, all of that stuff that happened, all of the predawn creepiness, and foreboding of the swamp in the dark, all of that becomes part of the story I found myself wanting to tell.

You see, the creative processes is not a mathematical equation. It’s not some sort of artistic 1 plus 1 equals two. It is a process, but it’s a messy one. The way it all comes about is like some sort swirling vortex of entropy. Creativity is uniquely personal because it is the culmination of personal experiences that have shaped and sculpted the way in which we perceive things. My creative vision is different from yours because our experiences have shaped our perceptions slightly different.

For me, on this assignment, it’s the experience of finding myself sitting chest deep in water, in the dark, in a blind, and feeling something large desperately trying to claw its way out of the bottom of that blind 45 minutes before sunrise. It’s the deep and guttural bellows of the alligators I could hear in the distance – essentially their matting calls. It’s the serine beauty of the cypress swamp at sunrise as the days first shafts of light come filtering in through the feather like needles of the trees. It’s the hues of color. It’s the pungent smell of tannin rich waters and thousands of years of humus (the organic component of soil formed by the decomposition of leaves and other plant matter by microorganisms).

But maybe most of all, in all of this darkness and shadow and mystery, it is the experience of seeing little flecks of bright and cheerful colors streak by in the form of prothonotary warblers like so many little specks of yellow and blue paint that dripped from the brush of an artist working on a far grander scale than I against this black canvas. Life is never so vibrant as when held up to the calm inevitable shadows of death.

Or so I assume.

And in this moment, it was if I saw the swamp for what it was the for first time. And I knew instantly how I wanted to create a photograph of a wood duck.

I wanted darkness. I wanted the mystery that I felt and experienced, that was so palpable in this landscape. But this is where photography differs from all other forms of art. Whereas a painter may set down before a canvas and pull their creative vision out of the aether and into reality, for us writers of light, we have nothing more than an idea swirling around in our heads. The challenge is to let it all brew, steep, ferment, ruminate or whatever metaphor you so choose. And then, and only then, to go find that image.

Sometimes it’s all concrete in your head. Sometimes the vision is solid and complete and as tangible as the intangible can be. Other times, more often than not, it’s nothing more than an abstract idea, a concept, a notion, a feeling and you are on the hunt for where all of those feelings somehow come together.

And so, with my wood ducks, I spent nearly a week photographing these birds before it all came together. I abandoned the blind and changed locations for better backgrounds. The blind was located on private property and the whole thing was unquestionably a swamp but remember that not all swamps live up to the swamp of our imagination or mind’s eye. I wanted quintessence. I wanted bigger trees, darker shadows, an altogether more primeval landscape. Though the blind would work fine for videography, for a still photographs I needed the total package.

The swamp I ended up shooting in, proved to hold everything I had been looking for. Big old cypress trees and black water and deep shadows and loads of wood ducks. And day by day, the visual story unfolded.

One morning, while laying belly down in the mud with my 600mm inches above the surface of the water before sunrise, I watched as the sun began to reflect off the trunk of a cypress tree and into the water below. Given that the sun was at this point just cresting the eastern horizon behind me, and this was the only real light to be found in the forest, I wagered that the dynamic range between those highlights of the tree and the shadows on the water would be greater than what my camera could capture. A quick test shot revealed this to be the case. And in this moment, the idea of the photograph I wanted to create began to take shape and form in my mind.

The only problem here, is that I was working with wildlife. In landscape photography, you may need only wait for the right light or weather. With wildlife, you need both of those things to happen, but then also the wildlife to just so happen to be in the right place and the right time when the light and weather and all the other little details align.

For this image, it took three days.

It’s probably not fair to say that it took three days given that I only had a window of MAYBE thirty mins to capture this image each morning. So, it took three mornings of being back in the same spot at this same time with my exposure manually dialed in for the sun reflecting off the tree and water before a drake wood duck happened into the right spot. Wood ducks were everywhere in this little swamp. Each morning had ducks swimming to and fro. But none happened into the right spot – until they did.

Sometimes art happens in the moment. Sometimes we get lucky and creative vision solidifies real time as events unfold. But more often than not, we need patience. We need perseverance to make things come together.

Regardless of how it all happens, it’s important to understand that it first happens in your mind’s eye. Creative vision. If you are not working from creative vision, then you are doing nothing more than reacting to the situation.

Though three days may seem like a long time to stay focused and work on a single image, this is nothing compared to another photograph of mine of another species from another place.