There and Back Again - A photographers tale.

Photography wasn’t the career plan.

For more than 25 years, my working life has been in IT, primarily supporting pharmacies and businesses around New Zealand. It’s a job that has put a lot of kilometres under the wheels and taken me to most corners of the country, but for a long time the camera was simply something I enjoyed rather than something that occupied a serious part of my life.

That changed around the time of the Covid lockdowns.

Like plenty of people, I started paying more attention to what was around me. In my case that increasingly meant birds. What began as an excuse to get outside quickly became something much more consuming, and before long I was learning not only how to photograph wildlife, but how little I actually knew about the wildlife I was photographing.

That has probably been one of the most rewarding parts of it.

Bird photography makes you learn your subject. You start recognising calls, behaviour, habitat and the small clues that tell you what a bird might do next. Eventually you stop simply reacting to something appearing in front of the lens and begin anticipating it. For me, that change made an enormous difference to the photographs I was producing.

It also gave me a reason to explore New Zealand differently.

Work still takes me around the country, but now the camera gear generally comes too. A free morning in Auckland, Wellington, Nelson or somewhere on the West Coast can become an opportunity to find a species I haven’t photographed before, revisit a favourite location or simply spend a few hours seeing what turns up.

Closer to home in Canterbury, I’ve become particularly interested in the birds and environments that are easily overlooked. Not every photograph needs a rare bird or an extraordinary event behind it. Some of my favourite images have come from common species, interesting behaviour and those occasions when everything just seems to come together.

My photography has changed considerably as I’ve become more experienced. Early on, getting a technically sharp photograph of the bird was the achievement. These days that is really only the starting point. I’m much more interested in creating the whole image — the light, the environment, the behaviour and, hopefully, a bit of personality.

I enjoy the creative side of processing as well. I’m not particularly interested in pretending that the photograph finished itself when I pressed the shutter. The camera gives me the raw material; what happens afterwards is part of how I interpret what I saw and how I want the finished photograph to feel.

That thinking has gradually found its way into the rest of my photography too. Birds and wildlife remain a huge part of what I do, but landscapes have become another area I particularly enjoy. Perhaps the biggest change is that I’m no longer quite as concerned with what category an image fits into. I’m more interested in whether it works as a photograph.

There has been plenty of trial and error along the way too. Wildlife photography has an impressive ability to expose whatever you thought you had mastered. You can spend three or four hours walking through a forest looking for a particular bird, hear it somewhere in the distance, convince yourself it is just over the next ridge, and eventually admit defeat and walk back to the truck.

Then you find it sitting in the tree beside the car park.

This has happened to me so often that “I do my best work in the car park” has become something of a personal motto. I’ve even had it printed on a T-shirt. The annoying thing is that it’s not really a joke anymore.

So what started as another interest has now become an important part of how I spend my time and how I see New Zealand. It has taken me into forests, wetlands, coastlines and places I would previously have driven straight past. Along the way I’ve met some wonderful people and made friendships through photography that I know will last a lifetime.

I’m still learning, and I suspect that is a large part of why I’m still enjoying it. Having the judges respond so positively to my work in this year’s NZIPP Amateur awards was a pretty satisfying moment along the way, but I certainly don’t feel like I’ve arrived anywhere. There is always another species, another location, another technique to try, or another photograph that didn’t quite work but might teach me something for next time.

And if all else fails, apparently I just need to go back to the car park.