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Every photographer dreams of the phone call that comes one morning offering an assignment to some exotic place, with all expenses paid, helicopters, unlimited access, and bags of money. And all you have to do is roll out of bed, order room service, burn through a couple of rolls of film, and race back to your hotel in time for lunch on the patio. Pop. Did you hear that? That was the sound of your bubble bursting. Photo assignments are more difficult to get today than 20 years ago; and in the field of nature photography, they have become an endangered species. The reason for this is pure economics. Today, there is a surplus of high quality stock photographs of nature and wildlife from around the world and, as a result, magazines no longer need to send overpriced photographers to exotic locales. They can simply put out a call to a hundred starving stock photographers and, chances are, they will get what they need for a fraction of the price they would pay for an assignment.
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When we first found these nesting long-tailed jaegers last summer in the Arctic, it was cloudy and raining. We returned on the next sunny day. We made the shot on Fujichrome Velvia with balanced fill flash set at -0.7.
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During the '80s and '90s we did dozens of photo assignments, mostly for the Canadian government and tourist agencies. We were sent to remote wilderness locations where few photographers had traveled before. One of our toughest assignments was to Ellesmere Island National Park Reserve, the northernmost point in Arctic Canada, at latitude 81 degrees North, a little over 600 miles from the North Pole. Needless to say, there were no fancy hotels, no room service, no CNN, and most importantly, no donut shops where we could sip our morning coffee. Instead, there was wall-to-wall wilderness, and all the ice, rock and tundra we could absorb.
The assignment started in the small arctic community of Resolute where we hopped aboard a De Havilland Twin Otter for the four-and-a-half-hour flight to Lake Hazen. A Twin Otter costs roughly $2000 an hour (plus fuel) to charter, so as we flew north amid the drone of the engines we calculated that it was costing around $15,000 just to get us there, not to mention the additional $2500 it had already cost to get us to Resolute. And if we wanted to come home again, that would be another $15,000. Since it was costing so much money to send us north, we felt lots of pressure. To make the most of the assignment, we spent seven weeks camping and backpacking in the park, even though we were paid for just three weeks of shooting. During that assignment and numerous others, we learned some valuable lessons and the experience we gained made us better field photographers. Today, we continue to profit from those simple lessons. Here are the three lessons that we think are the most important.
Lesson #1 Prepare, Prepare, and Prepare Some More
Whether you are trekking out on an arduous backpacking assignment, leaving on an organized photo safari or simply heading out for a day of shooting near your home, you should review the equipment you plan to bring along.
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Tanqueray Fjord in Ellesmere Island National Park Reserve. We scouted this location ten days before we finally got some decent light. We used a Nikon 28mm lens and Fujichrome Velvia film.
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We have a checklist on our computer that we've developed over the years, and we refer to it regularly. It lists all our cameras, lenses, and photo accessories, as well as film and batteries. How often have you been on a trip and forgotten an important accessory such as an electronic flash cord, a collapsible diffuser, a cable release, or a flash extender? Clearly you can't bring every piece of equipment you own on every trip you make. A checklist helps you to carefully evaluate what you should probably bring along, and what you can leave behind. The temptation is always to bring as little equipment as possible so there is less to carry. The new lightweight zoom lenses are attractive for this reason. We've known people who brought just two lenses on a three-week photo trip: a small zoom, something in the 28mm-120mm range, and a longer focal length zoom such as a 75mm-300mm or a 80mm-400mm. Then, a day or two after the trip begins, they drop and break one of the lenses. This once happened to a professional photographer who sent his telephoto zoom to the bottom of Lake Baringo in Kenya on the second day of his safari. It's hard to create compelling wildlife shots when your longest lens is a 135mm. The lesson here is to ALWAYS bring some backup lenses with you, preferably manual lenses that are more durable, even indestructible, that work in any kind of weather, and will continue to function, even after you use them to hammer in your tent pegs. You also need at least one extra camera body. We usually bring sturdy manual cameras for backup because they rarely break.
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A nesting red-throated loon. We kept this bird on our checklist for two weeks while we shot different behaviors, angles and light conditions. This shot was made with a Nikkor 600mm f/5.6 lens on Fujichrome Velvia at 4:00 AM.
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Our standard checklist also includes things such as film and batteries. Seems pretty obvious doesn't it? Apparently not for everyone. Last December on the JVO Ultimate Antarctica trip clients went ashore at least a dozen times without film and/or extra batteries. A daily checklist helps us to avoid embarrassing senior moments such as these. A checklist might also have helped one of our clients who went ashore and forgot his entire camera case.... and also his spouse.
Lesson #2 Capitalize on Crummy Weather
Years ago, we heard a National Geographic photo editor give the following advice: "When you feel most miserable, and the weather is horrific, that's the time to pull out your camera." It took us many years to surrender to the wisdom of this statement. Like most photographers, we worried that our cameras might get soaked in the rain, our tripods would be ruined by salt spray, or we might break our film if we subjected it to frigid cold. One of the most interesting shots we have of a backpack trip we made in the Yukon occurred in the worst of conditions. We were slogging along in the wind and rain when a shaft of sunlight framed Aubrey inside a rainbow. Another time in the Arctic, during a late winter camping trip, Wayne was miserable and cold after a long day of snowmobile travel. When he and his Inuit companions sighted a trio of musk ox bulls, he resisted the temptation to forget about photography for the day, and the shots he got of these frosty shaggy beasts are some of his best. And in Antarctica this past winter, Wayne got a shot of king penguins on a beach in a momentary blizzard. The conditions were terrible for camera gear, but the shot was worth the risk.
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Aubrey in a pelting rainstorm in Vuntut National Park, Yukon. The photo was made with a Nikon FM2 camera and a Nikkor 28-70mm zoom on Fujichrome Provia film.
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Even when you don't take any photographs, time in the field is never wasted. Trudging around any location, even in the gloomiest of weather, provides a valuable opportunity to scout scenic locations, locate wildlife, and then wait for the weather to improve. Last summer we camped in the Arctic for five weeks while working on nesting birds. In the entire time, we had only 14 days of sunny weather. Even so, we hiked the tundra every day searching for subjects. That's when we found nesting king eiders, red phalaropes, tundra swans, Pacific loons, a family of short-tailed weasels living in a rock pile, a tame brown lemming and dozens of arctic wildflowers. When we found something worth shooting, we added it to the checklist we hung on the wall of our tent. When the light improved we raced around and shot all the subjects on our shopping list. Planning and perseverance made the trip a success, despite the weather.
Lesson #3 Banish Those Bad Light Blues
How often have you heard photographic instructors preach that you should NEVER photograph a subject unless the light is sweet and low? We say nuts to that. What if you visit a massive penguin colony only once in your lifetime and the light is poor? If you listen to the photo pundits, you should keep your camera packed away. When we photographed Ellesmere, we often had to deal with terrible light. But, and this is a big but, how understanding do you think the folks who spent over $35,000 sending us there would have been, if we had come home with only 10 rolls of exposed film because the light conditions weren't ideal? Like so many pundits, those who preach about photography often don't work in the real world. Their advice is sometimes all but meaningless. Since you can't always work in ideal light conditions, what can you do to banish those bad light blues? First of all, keep an open mind to photo opportunities. Explore macro subjects and learn to use your flash to "improve" on nature. Without question, fill flash has saved the day for us on countless overcast days in the field, no matter what the subject was, from lichens to penguins, or from seals to scenics. In the end, we came home with many more photographs than we would have if we had listened to the "experts."
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