Purpose Driven Photography

One of the biggest hurdles that all professional wildlife photographers will face at one point or another is what I like to call artistic ennui.

Even if you don’t recognize the word, you know what this is.

Ennui is defined as a feeling of dissatisfaction arising from a lack of excitement.

It’s something that every professional artist will have to come to terms with at some point. And I would wager that there’s a 50% chance that you may be going through this right now with your own work.

In the context of making a living with our photography, ennui is when you artistically flat line. You just don’t feel like you are progressing. All your work starts to look the same. You’ve plateaued. You become bored senseless with the work you are producing. You start to lose passion for the craft. You become less ambitious. 4 am alarms become a lot easier to sleep through. And you begin to lose motivation to simply get out and shoot.

This experience can be crippling in many ways. But in working through it, it can also force us to learn how to breathe new life into our work.

So how do we break ourselves free of the funk?

How do we get our mojo back?

When I find myself going through a rut like this, the first thing I do is simply stop photographing anything and everything that I normally would. Often it’s simply the repetitive nature of working with the same animals over and over again that puts me in this funk to begin with. The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is an incredible backyard to work in, having the highest diversity of mammals anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. But when we photograph the same list of big mammals day in and day out, our photography begins to lose its soul.

This is why organizations like the BBC’s Natural History Unit typically do not send people into the field on assignment for more than three weeks at a time. One crew of cinematographers goes out, works three weeks, and then gets replaced by another crew.

The BBC has been at this game for a very long time. And the point of it all is to avoid burnout. When we begin to burnout, our work gets stale. We lose the creative spark entirely. We miss the nuances of visual story telling. And our work becomes boring.

As working photographers, when our work gets boring, we cease to create images that people want to buy. Our photographs become cliché, trite, and enter the realm of “dime-a-dozen.”

Being a professional wildlife photographer means that you MUST continue to produce new and inspired work. This is a machine you are building. It must be powered – constantly.

For this reason, we need newness. We need change. And we need to be challenged.

Really this last statement cuts to the heart of the matter I think.

Challenge. We all need it. Creativity is dependent upon it.

Roughly 75,000 years ago, something cataclysmic happened. Given how long we have been around on this planet, our gene pool should be significantly more diverse than it is today. And geneticists are able to trace this bottleneck back to around 75,000 years ago thanks to the rate of mutations on the Y chromosome.

Switching G words here, geologists have now confirmed that at around this same time there was a massive super volcano explosion – on the order of Yellowstone in size – that took place in the Sumatran lake known as Toba. The blast was so powerful that the forests of India, some 3,000 miles away were completely destroyed as ash began to pile up and researchers believe that three-quarters of all plant life in the northern hemisphere perished from this event.

Many believe that it was this super volcano, and the Earth's subsequent and rapid plunge into an ice age, that created the genetic bottleneck in our own species.

Whatever caused the big squeeze on us, we do know that immediately following this event is when art suddenly appears in the archeological record. Jewelry, complex tools, intricate burial rituals, and cave art such as the Blonobos Cave Engravings all pop up around this same time. This is the time when we got serious about tools, art, and culture; when we suddenly got serious about creating stuff.

The theory goes something like this: the eruption created a global catastrophe so great that humans came close to going extinct. This put tremendous natural selective pressure on us with only the most intelligent and the most creative of our species figuring out how to survive the event. Those hyper-intelligent and creative genes then became the dominant ones in our population, which gave rise to art as we know it today.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Or in this case, the mother of creativity – which is really the same thing.

As a visual artist, this is the legacy that you are a part of. Artistic mediocrity is your Toba super volcano.

Adapt or die.

A little dramatic you say?

As professional photographers, whose livelihood is based upon our ability to create new and compelling content, I don’t think so.

To stay fresh, to stay inspired, to stay focused, and to work with intent and purpose, working wildlife photographers find this creative challenge by giving themselves personal assignments to work on.

Giving yourself assignments, much the way a magazine editor would is one of the best ways to keep your head in the game and keep your work inspired. Quite often these end up morphing into something bigger, something profitable, like a magazine article or a unique collection of images that you sell.

Case in point. . .

One such personal project that I undertook was photographing salamanders in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee years ago. Wait. Salamanders? What happened to bobcats and grizzly bears? Well, that’s just it. Salamanders are NOT what I normally photograph. This was different. A challenge. And therefore salamanders were exactly what I needed to go photograph.

Herein lies the importance of doing things like this for yourself. It forces you outside of your comfort zone. My comfort zone is situated behind a 400 or 600mm lens often staring into the eyeballs of an animal that can rip me to shreds. Photographing salamanders is the polar opposite of this.

Just consider the equipment: a grocery list of different types of macro lenses. Multiple flashes. Clamps. Brackets. And a bunch of other stuff not normally found in my camera bag. In addition to all the macro gear that I planned to use, I also created a portable light table that I could carry into the woods as I wanted to use field studio techniques for these shots.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the salamander capital of the world. There are more species of salamanders in the Smokies than in any other place on the planet. And one of the unique habitats of the park, the southern boreal forests that exist only above 5,000 ft, happen to play home and habitat for a variety of endemic species of salamanders found nowhere else – all of whom happen to be gravely threatened by climate change.

From sunup to sundown, I crawled around in the moss, looking under logs, checking beneath rocks, and hiking into different locations around the national park and Blue Ridge Parkway searching out these high elevation species. And it was incredible to realize that at any given time there could be 50 or 60 different salamanders within 20 feet of me.

This personal project has since resulted in countless sales. Those salamander photos have been sold to illustrate the diversity of the Southern Appalachians, to discuss how climate change threatens species, to guidebooks, textbooks, scientific papers in academic journals, and so on. And all of this was born out of the personal need to keep myself inspired and stave off the dreaded artistic ennui.

As working photographers, keeping our heads in the game is one of the biggest challenges we face. But it doesn’t have to be. Giving ourselves a challenge and purpose is a guaranteed way to stay inspired and continue creating work that sells.