The Creative Process part 2

In some ways, I cut my teeth as a professional photographer with the wild horses of the North Carolina coast. Nick Nichols, the last of a dying breed of staff photographers for National Geographic, once said that the only way you will make it in this industry is by making something, some subject, your own; by beating it to death with your photography, by putting your blood, sweat, and tears into shooting it more and like no one else has ever given it the effort. When you think there is no good reason that any sane person could shoot that subject anymore, you go back and do it all again. Then, and only then, does the world take notice.

I bought this hook line and sinker when I was getting started. Given where I lived, I had unapparelled access to these island horses. So, I poured my heart and soul into creating images of these horses. And people began to take notice. Print sales happened, TV shows happened, interviews and profile pieces happened, etc.

Today, I can say I have probably spent more time than any other photographer chasing after photographs of these horses. And yet, I still have a list of ideas, of photos, that I am working down. Over the years, I developed a whole pile of concepts that I want to create with these horses. And even though I still devote a minimum of an entire month every year practically living off my boat photographing these horses, if I am able to check off just one of these photographs from my list, I consider the year to be a huge success.

Such was the case with this particular photograph of a wild horse wading across a vast expanse of water at sunset. If you think three days is a lot, try waiting 5 years for a photograph to come together!

One of the things that make these island horses so unique in the world is how they have adapted to a world so dominated by water and tides. These horses spend a considerable amount of time wading and swimming to access food on various marsh islets. Hurricanes and nor’easters flood everything. And so, with my photograph, I want water. I want to capture images that emphasize the uniqueness of their semi-aquatic world.

Five years ago, I set on the bow of my boat, while it was anchored against the tide, and watched as this particular area of the islands went completely under water. It was high tide, but that happens twice a day and I have never noticed this unique vista before. Looking up, I could see a full moon on the rise – which proved to be the key. Full moons and new moons create what we call spring tides. This isn’t spring as in the season, rather it is derived from the German word Springen – which means to leap forward. Thus, the high tide was significantly higher than usual and the whole of the place came underwater much the way that a nor’easter or hurricane would flood this world.

As it happened, there were horses in the vicinity and the sun happened to be setting. There was no photograph to be made at the time. But the ingredients were all laid out on the table before me and in that moment the photograph I wanted to create came to me.

Each year I spend the better part of May and half of September on the islands. Sometimes I throw a June into the mix as well. This gives me either two or three spring tides to work with for each trip. But, not all high tides are at sunset. The tide is driven by the moon, which swings round the Earth on a roughly 23 hour cycle. Thus, the tide varies by about 1 hour every day. If it is hightide at 6pm today, it will be roughly 7pm tomorrow.

All of this left me in a situation in which I needed the moon to be in the right phase, the timing of the tides to be at the right time, the weather to be just right so as to allow for this orange glow, AND I needed horses to be here. A tall order for sure.

The math behind this is quite easy to do. I am on these islands every May and September. In the spring, I am here for about 5 weeks. Each springtide (new and full moon) has about a three-day window in which everything comes together just right. So, this gives me two springtides each May and thus 6 days to attempt the shot. In September, I am only around for either a new or a full moon (one springtide) and so I get only 3 days. 

So, if we say I spent 6 days every May chasing this image for 5 years, that equals 30 days. And then 3 days in September for 5 years equals 15 days. Thus, all said and done, I spent a solid 45 evenings on a boat, waiting for this opportunity. Yes, wildlife photography has taught me much about patience in life

How much time do you put into creating a single photograph?

This isn’t a contest of course. No metals are being handed out. We don’t even get a cookie unless we sell the photograph and buy the cookie ourselves.

Let’s go back to the wood ducks. But, let’s do it via the year 1926 and the publishing of a book entitled Art of Thought – The Model of Creativity.

In Art of Thought, Graham Wallace broke down the creative process into 4 stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and implementation. Wallace was a social psychologist and apparently guys like him sit around having creative thoughts and writing creative books about creativity. Sounds like a good job to me.

Anyways, if we consider the story I detailed above about the creative process I went through to make this one image of a wood duck, Wallace’s 4 stages are glaringly obvious.

First, preparation. I have already suggested that the better naturalist you are, the better wildlife photographer you can become. This is all preparation. Diving into the natural history literature on wood ducks and their swampy domains gave me ammunition. It filled my brain with factoids that would all come into play later. But preparation for this image was also the experiences of a lifetime of being in swamps, and the days spent on this assignment wading through the dark, waist deep in black water.

All of this, the information, the books such as the Ecology and Management of Wood Ducks (which cost me 85 friggen dollars by the way), the pouring over and digesting of everything Cornell’s Laboratory of Ornithology has published about these birds, the watching, the observing, the listening, the experiencing – this is the preparation stage.

Stage 2 of the creative process is where all that stuff that goes into preparation moves to incubation. This is where it all begins to ferment together. It’s not a day by day process. It happens real time, with no hint of a mathematical formula. For me and my wood ducks, incubation began as soon as soon as I stepped into the first swamp during this project. I didn’t know I wanted a dark and moody image just yet. I just knew I wanted to capture wood ducks in the swamp. But it was everything that I had learned, and everything that I would experience during this process, that would lead me to the next stage: illumination.

Now, I’m going to argue that the illumination stage was two-fold for me. On the one hand, I came to the realization that I wanted a dark and moody image to contrast the beautiful colors of the wood ducks while I was watching the canary yellow and royal blue flashes of color in the form of prothonotary warblers. On the other hand, it could be argued that it was when I saw light reflecting off the cypress trees and into the water. Some actually add an additional stage to the whole creative process called inspiration. And with this particular situation, I see why. Though it may have been the light reflecting off the trees into the water when the lightbulb went off as to the image I wanted to create, the prothonotary warblers were my inspiration to play dark off of vibrant color.

Last, but certainly not least, is the stage of implementation. With a brain packed with ideas, fermented, incubated, inspired, and illuminated, I then set about working to create a photograph that danced around in my mind.

If you have spent any amount of time thinking about creating a photograph, chances are, you can dissect the whole process just like the one above. And maybe that’s just it. You have to be thinking about photographs. You have be thinking about the ones you have already created and ask yourself what you would do differently if you could. You have to be thinking about photos you have seen that have inspired you. And most importantly, you have to be thinking about the photos you want to create. You have to begin creating them now, in your imagination, and then go about implementing them.

This article is probably not for your typical amateur photographer. This is for people who want to understand how to take their photos beyond the trite and cliché. Photography is visual art, and art is the representation, the physical expression, of the artists creativity. Knowing all the technical stuff that goes into creating a photograph only allows you to step up to the starting line. What happens afterword is up to you. Once we break through this glass ceiling in terms of understanding, we find that we are limited only be the depths of our own creativity.