Heron Dance

Wouldn’t it be great if every time we headed out on a photo safari everything magically fell into place? If only the weather was always perfect, and the animals showed up in the right light, at the perfect angle, and on schedule! Great nature photographers make it seem like they have fairy godmother’s resting on their shoulders, but what you don’t see are thousands of images that were deleted or gathering dust on the floor in some digital corner.
When I wake up from the demands I’m placing on any given moment I become fascinated at how I dared to expect the weather and the animals to give a flip about me or my photographs! Although I can do my fair share of grumbling about inopportune circumstances, I figured out a long time ago that it’s best to relate to wildlife and the weather like temperamental traveling companions. Both my subjects and the elements they move through are co-creators in the art that moves through me. It’s their dance, really. And I’m lucky to be granted permission to join them on their journey.
Which brings me to this picture. Depending on how you look at it, the conditions the heron and I were working with last weekend
“Join the club!” is what I kept thinking as time after time the advanced focusing system in my camera missed locking onto my subjects. There just wasn’t enough contrast in the tonalities of the birds and their surroundings. My dad, who is 84 years old, kept complaining from his spot in the front seat. “What in the world are you taking pictures of? I can’t see anything! There’s nothing out there. Can we go home?”
Can you blame him?
To make matters worse, it was dark! To stop the action of a dancing bird requires at least a shutter speed of 1/900 of a second. To achieve this I had to crank up the ISO setting
Although 10k ISO isn’t the fastest or grainiest setting on my camera, shooting that high in daylight isn’t, shall we say, ideal in the mind of most photographers. Clearly, I was not most photographers that morning. We spotted just two other tourists with professional gear on the four loops we drove around Black Point Road that morning compared with dozens just a few days later. (The smart guys with their big lenses who probably slept in well past dawn were home drinking hot coffee while post-processing brightly lit award-winning images. Maybe they knew something I didn’t know?)
But I figured it was worth a card full of crappy images
And so it went with my Dancing Heron. When I found her while tabbing through hundreds of shots in post-processing a part of me thought, “Oh shit! I wish the light had been better!” I easily could have kept tabbing along, but I decided to experiment and find some semblance of a pulse deep within this sweet shot.
Regardless of what anyone thinks I love it. And that’s exactly what art is about – dancing with the fear that inevitably arises when you finally start listening to the sweet syncopation in your own tender heart.
The color was so bad I just drained it all out and converted over to black and white. The next step was a gentle boost in contrast to the
In the writing of this
No one has ever learned or achieved anything worthwhile without persevering in the midst of difficulty. Don’t give up when the conditions aren’t perfect and don’t throw out an image because the bird has its back to you. Instead, strengthen your work with frequent doses of emotional labor.
Who cares if a herd of photographers
Art isn’t safe and taking risks is the only path toward finding your own unique voice in a world filled with imitators.
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Feel free to leave a comment below.
Photo Credits: Heron Dance by Susan J. Preston, Black Point Road, Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge, Florida © 2019, all rights reserved
Technical: Fuji XT-3 | 386mm (XF 100-400mm F4.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR) | 1/900 sec | f5.6 | ISO 10,000
I love this dancing heron and your thoughts about looking at the follow up work as a dance. It’s a great metaphor, because as fun and as lovely as dance is, it’s also the result a lot of hard, sweaty, and sometimes tedious work!
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Nancy! It’s helpful to hear the reflections of other readers – how ideas land – and yes, it is hard work!