Beyond your nature photography: How to create a deeper meaning and provoke others.
More specifically, how do you reflect on your nature photography?
Wikipedia defines nature photography as "... a wide range of photography taken outdoors and devoted to displaying natural elements such as landscapes, wildlife, plants, and close-ups of natural scenes and textures. Nature photography tends to emphasize the aesthetic value of the photo more than other photography genres, such as photojournalism and documentary photography." [1]
There's no doubt that Nature Photography is a visual art form. The observer's eyes wander through your image, being led to the subject by your composition. While a picture may be worth a thousand words, an observer may have difficulty determining your subject and/or message. Unlike Conservation/Documentary Photography, Nature Photography is visually appealing, not a message with a hammer.
What more can you attach to your image? How can you take your creativity from the camera to the print and beyond?
Words
Currently, you have over 171,000 modern words available to attach[2]. Words can ascribe characteristics to nature. Words that convey hope and despair, isolation, struggle, inspiration, anguish, family, life, and even death.
Words give us hope, influence our sensibilities, provide justification, and reveal our impact. Words allow your interpretation of an image to give it meaning and context. Words have an impact!
Words can inform, educate, excite passion, be positive or negative, and generate divisiveness or advocacy. But most importantly, words make you a storyteller.
The images and stories you create will influence others, whether they're family and friends on social media, colleagues, and acquaintances, or the whole world. It's up to you.
Printed words, on paper or screen, have a voice. You hear the writer's tone; their anger, concern, joy, or exclamation. The spirit of their words reverberates within you. Envision your words narrating their feelings created by your image. What do you want those words to convey to them?
The voice of your words is influenced by your heroes, family, and others, past and present. You may find inspiration from authors and photographers, painters and filmmakers, teachers and writers, and many others.
Your image is a sliver of time, captured as only you remember it. The two images below, "Breakfast with the Bald Eagles" and "The one against the flow," are nice images. Over the last two centuries, millions of photographers have captured similar images, maybe even similar titles. But only I can convey the meaning of this fragment of time and now my reflection years later. I want to make Ordinary Into Extraordinary.
My reflections
White Eagle Boulevard - Breakfast with the Bald Eagles - Copyright Mike Fults Photography 2017
When I took this picture in 2017, the bald eagles nested about one-mile north-northwest of my home. The nest was built in a snag, a tree that was no longer living but still strong and sturdy. The eagles had nested there for as long as I've lived in the area, sixteen years, probably much longer. Over time humans have encroached on the nest. Typically, when there is a nest and a natural buffer, Federal law prohibits human advancement within three-hundred and thirty feet of a nest and six-hundred and sixty feet when not [3].
However, when I captured this image, I was standing on the eastern side of a four-lane road with the nest on the western edge less than one hundred feet away. A large church with a weekly congregation of well over four hundred Sunday worshipers was developed approximately three hundred feet west of the nest, with a large parking lot even closer. The natural buffer was stripped away except for several long-leaf pine trees instead of the hundreds that had previously surrounded it.
I'm not an ornithologist or bird behaviorist, but it's not difficult to imagine the eagles are disturbed yet still reproductive. Developers call the process of removing regulated habitat buffers Mitigation [4]. Warren Zevon could have been singing about Mitigation.[5]
Let's look forward to January 7th, 2023. Today my thoughts and words of this image have had time to simmer from a story of hope into one of despair and sorrow. In September of 2023, Hurricane Ian devastated much of Southwest Florida. While surveying the local area a few days later, I noticed several trees blown down, mainly along the outer edges of pine stands. Healthy trees in the middle were roughed up but still standing. The snags within the middle of the pine stands were often still standing, having been protected by that buffer. The snag on which my eagle's nest was perched was not one of them.
Lately, I've seen the eagles in the area, flying along the road and power transmission lines. Typically a mated pair of bald eagles will have an alternate nest, and maybe it survived. They will persevere and continue, hopefully out of the range of human expansion.
"The one against the flow" - Copyright Mike Fults Photography 2020
The second image, "The one against the flow," was created during a moment of exhaustion. My daughter and I were hiking through Cloudland Canyon State Park in Northwest Georgia[6]. And if you know the canyon, you know that to descend, you walk down hundreds of stairs and switchbacks along the canyon wall. With my equipment, including a tripod, two liters of water, and whatever that thing is around my midsection, we reached Hemlock Falls on the Sitton's Gulch Trail.
This is a great place to rest and replenish your energy. I set up my tripod and pulled out my 70-200mm f2.8. Typically, I'd use a 24mm or 35mm, but I wanted a flatter perspective. This is a three-image stitched pano captured at f11/8 sec ISO 64.
While my daughter and I were eating our lunch (yes, in the middle of the day), we noticed a single yellow leaf on the rocks under the falling water. We made some jokes that weren't memorable, and I took several sets of images at different settings. We packed up and continued down the trail. But I couldn't stop thinking about a single leaf. We hiked and photographed the remainder of the trail, where my wife picked us up a the bottom. Having ascended the canyon walls once before, I knew better than to try that again.
We returned to the fifth wheel that evening. It wasn't until I loaded my images onto my iPad and started reviewing that the impact of this image dawned on me. I am that leaf, and the water is the digital information and televised news that flows over me. I take respite from the spew to keep from developing negative feelings about humanity. When I enter the flow, I get washed away. Society suffers from the same rapid flow and divides us into silos of politics, religion, science, and much more. Groups, networks, and individuals create clickbait and misinformation to drive revenue from associated ads.
I hope people will take moments of their day to step out of the flow from time to time. Meditation, reflection, or positive distractions, such as hobbies, are far more beneficial for me. My aim is to provoke you to do the same.
As I've evolved, I often reflect on nature and its processes. I figure this; if it works in nature, it ought to work for myself.
You will have differing views, opinions, and reflections on these images. I hope you do. I encourage you to contemplate how you'd write about your images.
I hope you take your photography and develop your message. Whether a message of conservation, observation, or appreciation, I want to inspire you. If I inspire the few, you, in turn, will inspire the many.
My name is Mike Fults, a reformed computer programmer and now an award-winning professional nature photographer, writer, master naturalist, instructor, and interpretative guide. I've been photographing the world since I was eight years old and professionally since 2018. Follow me on social media, join my Meetup Group, or signup for my newsletter "Mike in the Wild".
About Me
I am a Certified Professional Photographer (PPA) specializing in nature photography. I am also a Certified Florida Master Naturalist (UF/IFAS), and a Certified Interpretative Guild (NAI). I live in Lakewood Ranch, Florida, 50 miles south of the Tampa Bay region. My wife Cheryl and I love to travel in our fifth wheel, with it becoming our home and my studio. Not much in this world is more satisfying than culling and editing images in the forest.
The purpose of my photography is to provoke, educate, inform, and guide. I will create art, write about my photographs through interpretation, and mentor fellow photographers. I will educate them on technique and composition using their camera and during post-processing. I will also help them develop their message about their photography. Hopefully, my legacy will provoke some to provoke many.
Footnotes
[1] Wikipedia Link
[2] English Language - 171,487 currently in use 2022 Link
[3] NATIONAL BALD EAGLE MANAGEMENT GUIDELINES - U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, page 12 Link
[4] Florida Department of Environmental Protection - The Uniform Mitigation Assessment Method (UNAM) Link
[5] Warren Zevon - Lawyers, Guns, and Money Link
[6] Cloudland State Park Link