I went to Kenya last month with the usual mix of excitement and worry. Excitement for all the normal reasons, not the least of which was being in front of wonderful things in beautiful light with my camera in my hand. Worry because I really didn’t want to come back with different versions of the same photographs I’ve made before.

I had been taking some of my own advice and asking “what’s missing from my images?”  and I had come up with a couple ideas I wanted to explore. Specifically, I wanted images with more scale, I wanted to do more high-key images, and I really wanted work with a sense of motion.

So much of my existing work felt a little static to me; it definitely felt like I was getting into a bit of a rut with the long lens. My first instinct seems to be to push in tight, so I was feeling like I wanted to make some images with room to breathe, to include a little more context. And, God help me, I really didn’t need another picture of a silhouetted animal in front of the sun. I love that kind of shot, but it has become my low-hanging fruit, and I wanted something more.

I had some very specific ideas of the kinds of photographs I wanted to challenge myself with, and that made such a difference: I wasn’t just looking for subjects, as in, “Oh my God, stop, it’s a rhino!” I have a million pictures of rhinos. Instead, I was looking for ideas. For compositions.

Specifically, I was looking for scenes that would play well if I pulled back and included some scale. I was looking for motion and a chance to play with panning and some slower shutter speeds. And I was looking for subjects that were a little darker against the sky so that, when exposed well, the sky would blow out and isolate them.

An unexpected side effect was that I was photographing subjects I wouldn’t otherwise explore. An ostrich. A starling. A hornbill. (Oh my God, I’m becoming a birder!).

They say we see what we look for, and suddenly I was looking for entirely different things.

That alone made my work different and I think among my best yet, though by best I really mean it’s among my most satisfying.

I think I learned and re-learned more on this trip than some of my others. The desire to do some panning and be less un-ready when those situations arose forced me to learn to use the memory recall on my camera so I could more quickly pull up a slower shutter and tighter aperture when needed. The desire to include more scale made me pickier about my compositions since the more you include in the frame the more you need to keep it simple and direct. I was looking at it all so differently.

Looking for ideas—for specific kinds of opportunities and compositions—rather than just subject matter, made a huge difference!

I want to explore some of this with you in the coming weeks. I think we will always be a little reactive in our photography, a little opportunistic, but when the initial inspiration wears off, when the “Oh my God, a rhino!” becomes a “Well, now what? What do I DO with that rhino?” then we need not just subjects, but ideas. In my case, some of those ideas were about high-key images, others about motion, and others still about scale and context, all of which are ideas that can be applied to any genre of photography.

While I gather my thoughts on some of this I want to invite you to download a short monograph of my favourite images from this trip.

You can download your copy of Mwangaza! by clicking here or on the image above. 

I showed you a few of these photographs two weeks ago when I first got home, this is now a wider, more thoughtful collection of my work from Kenya and I think it will illustrate what I’m talking about. I hope you’ll take a moment to download it, put the coffee on, and enjoy the images.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

This post is accompanied by some of the work I shot over the last 4 weeks in Kenya. What a trip it’s been. I hope you enjoy the images!

My grand-dad was a Scout. At the time he was the highest decorated man in the scouting movement in the UK, a movement whose motto is “Be Prepared.” I like to think some of that desire to be ready for the unexpected has come down to me in my DNA, though I confess to stray from the ideal and tend to be more of a “Be Less Un-Prepared” kind of guy.

The last month in Kenya (I got back yesterday) felt like one big effort at being less un-ready. No matter what I did, I was improvising the entire time. I’d be ready for the lion to move left and he’d move right. I’d be ready for a sighting on one side of the Land Cruiser and the action would be on the other. Or I’d be ready for one exposure scenario, like panning at 1/15s, only to wish I was on 1/1000 instead to freeze the action rather than blur it. These things can’t always be helped; they’re part of the challenge and there’s no meaningful way to prepare for it all. I do, however, have some ideas about being a little less un-ready for the preventable stuff.

Ready Your Gear

Same Things, Same Pockets.
Put your batteries and cards in the same place every time. Same with cameras and lenses. Develop a system so you’re not taking up valuable time. Ideally you can reach into your bag and grab what you need without taking your eyes off your scene. The “throw all you crap into whatever pocket you can find” is great for the free-spirited, but it’s no way to photograph.

Camera On, Every Time.
When I pick up my camera, it has become my habit to flick the camera on so that it’s live and ready by the time it gets to my eye. It doesn’t take much, but when the camera is at your eye it needs to be as ready as you are.

No Lens Caps!
When I get to my location I take my front lens caps off and throw them in my duffle bag and they don’t come out again until I’m packing to leave. I shoot with 3 lenses on 3 bodies and none of them ever have a lens cap. Lens coatings are so good now that there’s a way better chance I’ll miss important shots by using a lens cap than there is that I’ll scratch a lens without one. In 40 years I’ve only ever scratched one lens. Imagine how many fleeting moments I might have missed in that time.

Battery Grips.
Each of my bodies has a battery grip that holds 2 batteries. I change batteries when I can, but this means I always a have a spare: not in my pocket but in the camera ready to go.

Custom Settings.
I don’t use a lot of these, but there’s one I find helpful and if you use your imagination you might find others. Most of the time I’m exposing manually. I set my shutter and my aperture, and let my ISO float with auto-ISO and adjust with EC Comp. Most of the time I’m at 1/000 and wide open, f/2.8 or f/4.0. But I’ve got a custom button set so that if I suddenly need to pan with movement at 1/50 and f/10, I can get there quickly. One spin of the dial instead of 2 or 3, and I’m ready. 

Ready Your Mind

This one’s harder to pin down, and even harder to do: even more important than being ready with your gear is being ready in your thinking.

When you approach your scene are you thinking “Oh my god it’s a (insert subject here)!” or are you thinking about what you’re going to do with that subject? Are you looking at the light and making exposure choices before you even raise the camera? Is it a wide shot or a tighter shot? What are the composition options? Can you anticipate when the moment might happen and what you’ll do when it does, or—just as often—what you’ll do if it doesn’t play out the way you think.

Sometimes we have all the time in the world to work a scene, but other times it all happens very quickly. The more ready you can be, or the less un-ready, the better. When a scene unfolds, no matter what you’re shooting, there is often no time to unzip the camera bag, pull out the camera, and raise it to your eye, much less to fiddle with turning it on only to find that it’s already on but the lens cap is still…drat, the moment’s gone. Maybe next time.

Create habits that allow you to get to the good stuff faster. Keep the camera out of the bag until there is no chance you’ll need. It is more important that you protect the moment than that you protect your gear.

What about you? What do you do to make sure you’re ready (or a little less un-ready) when the moment arrives? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

For the Love of the Photograph,
David