Does Your Photography Lack Pupose?

Sharing my personal experience of how creating a book led to a newfound purpose as a wildlife conservation photographer.

5 minute read

Background

Do you have a hard drive full of photographs you don’t know what to do with? Do you ever question why you are taking pictures? My wife does it all the time!

I have enjoyed running wildlife photography workshops at home and overseas for the last several years. Most images have been used to market my business in various ways and make occasional print sales.

However, I have made several lifestyle adjustments for work (non-photography) and other reasons for greater flexibility. Running workshops is no longer an option for me.

What to do with my photographs now?

If you are anything like me and have accumulated thousands of images, you may occasionally wonder what on earth you are going to do with them all. The opportunities are almost endless. If you are happy with the quality, you could hang framed prints on your wall. But there is only so much wall space in one’s home, certainly not enough for them all, nor do I have enough storage to periodically alternate framed pictures.

Social media can provide a great platform to share your content quickly. However, your artistic creations are often buried among countless other photos and videos. They're rarely seen again once given a glance and scrolled past.

My photography needed a new purpose

If post-workshops, I was still going to be a photographer, I needed an outlet. My photography needed a purpose.

Creating a Book

I have considered producing a photography book for sale for a couple of years. I create a family album annually and have produced a few large books of my professional work. However, these albums are not cheap; the higher-end ones cost over £250. No matter how impressive my images may be, no one will part with that sort of money.

I had been working on a project, photographing wild polecats with camera traps. I had accumulated dozens of high-resolution shots. The unpredictable polecat didn’t make a sensible subject for a workshop, but I decided it was a good subject for a book.

Anyway, this book idea remained dormant for a couple of years. As I grew my portfolio of local wildlife, however, the notion of a book on the wildlife close to my home in the English northern Pennines gathered momentum, and I started to compile it in earnest in mid-2023.

Local Wildlife

Of course, it would feature the polecat, but I also had a growing portfolio of other subjects, including red grouse, black grouse, red squirrels, curlews, and other summer ground-nesting birds and birds of prey. Some critters are unique to the area; others can be found across the UK. No matter, I felt I had enough images to make a start.

The form of the book would be simple – a collection of my best images with captions, enclosed in a high-quality printed book at a big enough size to do them justice. What could be simpler? There would be a brief introduction and caption for each critter, and I might include some information of interest to photographers at the end. I started writing.

Conservation Controversy

Conservation in the UK

I hit a snag. The more I read, the more I realised that there was a bigger story to tell about the controversial conservation issues surrounding my subjects. They increasingly became the elephant in the room.

For millennia, we have shaped the planet on which we live for our benefit. Wildlife, flora, and fauna have become resources for us to exploit in many ways and those creatures that impacted our lives negatively, in whatever way, were exterminated.

Likewise, the land is there for our use: farming, forestry, industrialisation, housing and recreation. So, those animals that survived our onslaught struggle to find anywhere to live.

Conservation, protecting what is left or restoring what has been lost, is generally considered a good thing.

The UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth. If we want to reverse that change, some tough choices must be made—for example, decisions about land use and whether abundant animals should be sacrificed to protect vulnerable species.

Inevitably, those choices affect different interests in different ways. There are winners and losers, and both fiercely fight their corner in proportion to what they face losing, such as land, tradition, livelihood, and money.

When it affects you directly, conservation is profoundly political and polarises opinions.

Grouse Moors

I found controversial conservation issues in the uplands near my home.

The use of this land for shooting sports is controversial in its own right. Still, those seeking to ban this land use also accuse gamekeepers of unnecessarily killing (legally) vast numbers of predators such as foxes, weasels, stoats, and crows while illegally persecuting birds of prey such as hen harriers.

Further, they say the heather burning that provides the new growth to feed the red grouse exacerbates climate change by releasing excessive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and damaging the carbon-carrying capacity of the underlying peat bog.

For their part, the grouse shooting industry refutes many claims against it. They say that without the grouse moor management, birds like the curlew, black grouse, and others would become extinct in the UK.

My Response

Of course, I could produce an excellent book of wildlife images for the coffee table, or I could take the opportunity to enlighten others about how I had been and tell the controversial story that lurked beneath.

The main protagonists have their positions and are passionate about fighting for them. My book will not change their minds. However, I want to illuminate the issues for those who have yet to learn about the subject or are still deciding.

There was a story besides my photographic tale, and I felt it needed to be told.

Conservation Photography

Powerful photographs of wildlife that stop readers in their tracks can work alongside those that contribute to filling gaps in the story. Together, they should evoke an emotional response and make a story memorable.

A Fresh Purpose

Ultimately, deciding to shift course in this direction was a no-brainer. I will embrace the challenge of broadening my photographic approach, looking beyond the photography to find underlying conservation stories, and developing from ‘single-image’ to' portfolio’.

This new way of working with photography offers me the flexibility I need right now and, most importantly, gives me a new purpose.

My Book

My book's photography and writing are well-advanced, although there is still more to do.

As I outlined earlier in this post, producing a book for commercial sale requires printing enough copies to achieve an economy of scale and make the project viable.

Even after deciding to self-publish and considering the marketing, it is still an expensive investment. I can only achieve this through a crowdfunded approach.

To that end, I will start a Kickstarter campaign later this year or early next to raise sufficient pre-orders to proceed to printing.

If you are interested in registering an interest or following my progress, please subscribe or submit the form below.