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 like “diminishing returns.”

But that’s not it. Sure, the returns are fewer, but they’re also much better. I’m using a different metric than I once did, measuring my best work in single or low double digits instead of the bigger numbers, hoping I’d come home from a trip with many more workable photographs.

These days, I don’t want workable. I want WOW. I want wonder.

These latest images might not be your wow, but they are mine. That’s what I’m aiming for, and if I hit that target, then the returns aren’t diminished at all.

But there’s something else I’ve noticed. The longer I do this, the more I get a sense of what works and does not work for me, the more I know what gives me that “Hell, yes!” response to the photographs I best love, the more I am willing to leave the camera in my lap and give myself over to the wonder. Or to pick up the camera—photographs be damned—and let it pull me closer to that same awe but relax into the watching, into absorbing the light, the moment, and the wild thing that has allowed me to share its space.

There is nothing diminishing about wonder. Or being in the moment and letting it pull you above the fray of your daily life and the din of the endlessly chattering monkey brain.

I’ve noticed something else. This freedom to simply watch, with no expectation that what I’m looking at might become a photograph, often becomes exactly that: a photograph. More times than I can count, the camera has revealed something that I didn’t know about myself. It has proven me wrong so many times. And from that comes curiosity and exploration, and often, the kind of new perspective that leads to new work.

“I don’t like baboons,” I’ve said so many times. Nasty little buggers. And yet this time, my camera showed me backlit baboons, and I let my gaze linger a little longer, finding myself first questioning my prejudices, then succumbing to the wonder.

I said the same thing about hyenas (evil critters!) until I saw a mother tending her cub so tenderly that I fell in love. Watch a white-backed vulture for long and you’ll find all kinds of things to fully draw your interest, if not your emotions. And don’t even get me started on hippos, but somehow I found myself eye-level at a hippo pool, having the time of my life—and from the looks of it, so was the hippo!

It’s not just wildlife, either. The camera has this amazing way of showing us everyday things in new ways, if we let it. I woke on one of the eternal flights home, somewhere between my connections in Nairobi and Frankfurt to the light of dawn painting red squares on the cabin wall, pairing as best it could with the blue of unlit clouds, and it took my breath away.

What’s that quote? Life is not in how many breaths we take but how many moments take our breath away? Perhaps the same could be said of photographs: it’s not how many moments we capture, but how many moments captivate us.

I may make fewer photographs than I once did, but there’s nothing at all diminishing in the evolution of my craft. With or without it in my hand, the camera has amplified my life, extending the briefest of moments into years of enjoyment. I’m guessing it has done the same for you. More than trophies, the best of them are a collection of silent whispers: “Remember when? Wasn’t that…incredible?” They allow us to drop an anchor, of sorts, into the fast-flowing current of time, to hold ourselves within it for much longer than our forward-looking minds seem to do on their own.

We learn young to look ever-forward, but as time pulls us along and so much of our life is converted to memories, the ability to hold still within that tidal pull of time becomes more important. Not to always be looking back, but to have a present imbued with the flavour of all that we’ve lived. These things don’t pass us by; they accumulate. More so when we have a net to catch them with. The camera has helped me widen that net and tighten the spaces between the holes. Maybe it’s the net itself. I wonder at smaller things now than I once did, and where there is wonder, there’s a chance at not only a photograph, but a life.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

Do you photograph wildlife? My publisher has had a lapse in judgment and is letting me write another book, this time about photographing wild things. Before I get too deep into it, if you photograph wildlife, would you be willing to answer a couple of questions? Take the time and I’ll draw three names for a signed copy of the book when it comes out. Click here to take the quick survey.