Tag:postcards from…
Not 20 minutes after my arrival at Kutali Camp on the Zambezi River in Zambia, a large bull elephant strode through camp, walked up to the lunch table, and sampled—then summarily rejected—the cucumber salad that was due to be my lunch. Two mornings later, I woke to find him outside my tent at 4 am, walking right past the tent door (door? It was a screen with a zipper). Lying in bed, wearing neither a stitch of clothing nor the prosthetic […]
I once wrote that “what if?” was the central question for creative people. I also once wrote that our expectations of what we hope for—of a place, a subject matter, even an idea—can blind us to the reality of it. You show up in Venice to photograph the city in fog and experience agua alta, the high flood waters of winter, only to arrive to a sunny week with nothing but blue skies and sunshine. You go to the pyramids […]
My best photographs are usually a surprise to me. Long after I’ve made them, they feel familiar and almost inevitable as I look back on them, but not one of them could I have really ever anticipated at the time. The light, the composition, even the subject—I often never see them coming. Sometimes, the surprise is that the image even worked at all, as is the case with my image of a common merganser in flight against golden water. Last […]
I came home from Zambia with a small handful of images I love. Maybe eight. The jury is still out. But a couple of them I really love. The rest are just meh, a collection of sketch images that don’t make me lean in or quicken my heart. Far from failures, they’re what it takes to get me to the good stuff. Between game drives last week, I found myself telling one of my guests that I was experiencing something […]
Lying in a mud hole, looking up at a white rhino snuffling just inches from my camera, I was having a tough time not giggling or wetting my pants. I might have been a little nervous, but mostly, it was the thrill and the absurdity of it. To be this close to a massive rhinoceros with no remote gear—just me and my camera—was a dream. No guidance counsellor in any high school anywhere would have suggested this as a viable career […]
There’s a curse among photographers, if you believe in such things (curses, that is, not photographers), and it’s this: Sometimes what we do not see can blind us to what is in front of us. Go somewhere with a certain kind of photograph in mind and you might look so hard for that kind of image that you never see what’s actually there. Our expectations can be our biggest blind spots. I went to Zimbabwe and South Africa last month […]
My work in Kenya didn’t go as planned. Story of my life, right? But I’m not referring to the fact that my first two days in Kenya were spent in bed in a tent in the bush, with an IV fluid and antibiotic drip, trying to get a fever down. I’m not referring to the fact that unseasonable rains changed everything, including the presence (scarce!) of animals that we were there to photograph. I don’t even mean the fact that one […]
Every year, off the coast of Vancouver Island, the place I call home, the herring spawn by the millions. The usually dark green water turns a magnificent chalky blue-green as the herring do the reproductive dance that makes them a keystone species, while at the same time drawing in an astonishing number of animals: gulls, seabirds, bald eagles, sea otters, harbour seals, sea lions, orca, grey and humpback whales. What an experience! At times, I could turn 360 degrees and see dozens […]
Ten years ago, I got off a de Havilland Beaver, the quintessential bush plane of the Canadian north, and stepped into the Khutzeymateen Grizzly Sanctuary for the first time—and it was love at first sight. The long inlet not far from the border with Alaska is flanked by mountains and cliffs, all covered in evergreens draped with flowing moss, and ends in an estuary that’s impossibly green and home to grizzly bears safe from the guns of hunters. If you’ve […]
There is a powerful argument to be made for photographing what intrigues you, what you love, or that by which you are obsessed. Making photographs takes time, so that curiosity, love, or obsession serves you well when your best work demands not fractions of a second or even minutes, but hours, days, or—in the case of longer projects—even years. Bears have become a growing obsession for me. I don’t know where it comes from or what part of me these bears touch […]