In August, a publication invited me to participate in an extended interview and it ended up not working out. I am sharing it in two parts on my website instead. You will find part one below.
Seek by iNaturalist is one of your favorite apps. How do you use Seek, and any other naturalist apps, as part of your nature photography practice?
Seek is like a field guide in reverse. With a traditional field guide, you need some knowledge to know where to start in identifying something you come across in nature (for example, the terminology used for different parts of a plant or the different structures of a mushroom). With Seek, you can point your phone at a subject or load a photo from your camera roll and the app suggests an identification. This identification offers up the information you need to do more research if you want to.
When using the app in an ecosystem where I have more knowledge about the local plants, I find Seek to be accurate about 85 percent of the time (still amazing and fantastic!). This means that I do not fully rely on it for photo captions or descriptions but use it as a place to start. Even if the identification is not accurate, it is often close enough to make the research and confirmation process easy. Seek makes gaining knowledge about the natural world far more accessible for people like me who do not have any formal education in the natural sciences.
My other favorite naturalist apps include Merlin and iBird Ultimate. Merlin has a sound recording feature through which the app identifies birds around you based on their vocalizations. It is exciting to turn on Merlin during a hike and then see bird species pop up in the app’s identifications list. Once I know a bird is present, I can observe more closely and see birds I would not have otherwise noticed. iBird’s Photo Sleuth is a more accurate version of Seek for birds. With Photo Sleuth, you can load a photo of a bird, even a blurry one, into the app and it almost always has an accurate or close-to-accurate identification. Both of these apps have helped me increase my knowledge and awareness of the birds all around me, which enriches my time outside.
Curiosity about the natural world is one of the main things that keeps me motivated to pursue nature photography. Apps like Seek, Merlin, and iBird help cultivate this cycle of curiosity and connection. An example: when we visited the California deserts last spring, using Seek to identify wildflowers motivated me to look harder for species I had not seen or noticed before. The process of learning about new flowers made me feel more connected to the subjects I was photographing. I also found many new subjects for photography because I was moving more slowly and noticing more, even in very familiar locations. I have 791 observations recorded in Seek, 648 of which are plants. The cycle of observing, learning more, photographing what I see, and then wanting to see more has been very positive in terms of motivation and excitement about the natural world.
Photos from spring in the California desert. The Seek app helped me identify or confirm the identity for each of these plants and motivated me to look more closely so I could see other new-to-me species, too. From the top left: Astrella, Dudleya, Desert Apricot, and Mojave Yucca.
First: a lot of nature photographers live far away from scenic locations like national parks and might have only a week or two per year to travel for photography. Second: building a relationship with a landscape is often important for creating personally meaningful photos but this can be challenging with only a short time to visit a place. Do you have suggestions for photographers in this situation, especially those who might consider their local areas to be boring or uninteresting for photography?
Some photographers, like Bruce Percy, place significant emphasis on choosing the “right” places to create photographs. Percy has written in his newsletter about how choosing locations with certain qualities is an essential part of his photographic process and as a result, he has recently chosen to work in minimalist landscapes like the Icelandic Highlands, the Bolivian Altiplano, and Hokkaido, Japan in winter. For a photographer with this approach, many things need to align to find photographic opportunity—financial resources, time for longer trips, experience with traveling in challenging climates, comfort with international travel, and all sorts of other factors. If a photographer thinks this approach is necessary to build a portfolio, it can feel totally unattainable.
There is no right approach and we all have different circumstances, so I will share what has worked for me without judgement about other people’s practices. To start, I have a totally different approach than the one described above and by comparison, far fewer things need to align for me to find photographically fulfilling opportunities. I think that beauty and inspiration can be found in any natural landscape if I bring an open mind. I am also happy to work in any natural setting, from the sparse desert to the chaotic forest, and my portfolio includes a full range of locations and subjects from a very diverse range of ecosystems, including the park in my neighborhood and plants growing in my yard. For the photographer described in the question, testing out this approach could help in a few different ways as I discuss below.
First, there is a culture in landscape photography that promotes the idea of photographing only when conditions perfectly align. Otherwise, it is not worth taking your camera out of the bag. Instead of bringing this attitude, I think it is essential to cultivate a mindset that values practice. Regularly go out into your “boring” local area. Practice different approaches to composition. Work with light throughout the day. Try exercises that help build your observation skills. Experiment a lot, play with new ideas, and photograph unfamiliar subjects.
Second, for the photographer described in the question, finding opportunities to photograph outside of special trips starts with open-mindedness and open-mindedness starts with thinking differently. The photographer’s mindset is the single most important thing to address. If a photographer lives in a place they consider boring, that photographer is going to have a hard time feeling inspired because of their self-imposed mindset. If that same photographer approaches their local landscape with curiosity and avoids comparing their own situation with that of the world-traveling landscape photographer, they will likely find much more to photograph. That simple flip in perspective can make a huge difference.
When I lived in Denver, I started regularly visiting the Denver Botanic Garden to practice. At the time, I had no interest in photographing plants and just wanted to stay familiar with my camera between trips. This practice time turned into one of my favorite portfolios of work. I think the same can happen for any photographer living in a place with more subtle scenery: with the right frame of mind and time spent deeply exploring a landscape, even just for practice, any landscape offers the opportunity to produce a meaningful body of work if you approach it with curiosity and open-mindedness (see: Brent Clark photographing Wisconsin). With this consistent commitment to practice around home, a photographer will keep their skills sharp and will be able to seamlessly move into connecting with any landscape while traveling.
When I lived in Denver, I spent a lot of time at places like the Denver Botanic Garden and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal Wildlife Refuge looking for and photographing patterns and repetition. This practice helped me be prepared to see similar opportunities in a place like Death Valley National Park.
Continuing on the theme of the previous question, nature photographers sometimes struggle to build a relationship with the landscapes in close proximity to where they live. How can such photographers learn more about and connect more deeply with their local area?
Building a relationship with any landscape starts with curiosity and continues with time spent exploring and experiencing a place. To start, you can cultivate curiosity by using some of the apps I discussed above and following up on the identifications to learn more about what you are seeing. Start reading nature-oriented publications, like nonprofit newsletters, for your area. They will often be filled with information about the special nuances of a landscape that could lead to a photography project or a new type of exploration.
Consider going on nature walks with people who are passionate about the area because their excitement could help you see the landscape in a new way. Nature centers, local Audubon clubs, environmental education nonprofits, native plant societies, botanic gardens, and volunteer stewardship groups are a good place to look for classes, nature walks, or naturalist programs. Invest time in some of these programs and you might see your enthusiasm for a place grow in ways you wouldn’t have expected.
Learning more about your local ecosystem and actively cultivating the cycle of curiosity can help with motivation, too. Once you tune into which subjects spark the most interest for you, consider creating a long-term photo project focused on that theme. As I have learned more about the plants growing in my area, for example, I have wanted to get out and hike at different elevations so I can see and photograph new-to-me species as they emerge, flower, and go to seed. Over time, these explorations have helped me create new portfolios of work that I would never have expected to create when I initially moved here.
I’ll go back to mindset one more time. In working with a lot of photographers in very scenic places during workshops or at conferences, I find that they are constantly comparing their local landscape to the places they visit for photography. Instead of comparing, try to appreciate your local landscape on its own terms. If you are constantly thinking that your local landscape is not as interesting as Death Valley or Patagonia, you will be placing a mental barrier between you and the place that will interrupt your ability to see it deeply and connect with it.
Practicing Cole Thompson’s photographic celibacy helped me become more comfortable with my photographic instincts, like finding value in photographic quieter scenes and working with softer light.
You have talked about your experience practicing Cole Thompson’s photographic celibacy. Why did you decide to do this, was it valuable, and do you recommend the practice to other photographers?
Cole describes his practice in this way:
“As I analyzed how I was working, I came to the conclusion that when I studied another photographer’s work, I was imprinting their style onto my conscious and subconscious mind. And then when I photographed a scene, I found myself imitating their style rather than seeing it through my own vision. To overcome this tendency I decided to stop looking at the work of other photographers, as much as was practically possible.”
Before talking about how this practice helped me, I think it is important to separate the ideas of inspiration, influence, and admiration. Almost none of my inspiration for photography comes from other photographers or their photographs—it comes almost exclusively from the process of engaging with the natural world and being outside.
While I admire many photographers, seeing their work does not help me feel motivated to create for myself but when I look at a lot of photography, other people’s ideas are sometimes imprinted in my mind and influence my thinking about places and subjects. Photographic celibacy helped me deal with the negative effects of this influence on my photography practices. (Anyone who finds significant inspiration and motivation through viewing other people’s photographs will likely have a much harder time with photographic celibacy—a dynamic that Cole Thompson briefly touches on during this short video discussion.)
For photographers who would like a break from this influence, I would absolutely recommend photographic celibacy (for example, if you are having trouble “finding your voice” or “style”). When we bought our Airstream trailer and started taking longer trips, I naturally had less time for social media because I was spending a lot of time outside and doing travel-related things. This made the transition to photographic celibacy unintentional at first but then I started recognizing the benefits so I continued doing it for about a year and a half. At the time, I was feeling very dissatisfied with my photography. I was pursuing and sharing mostly grand landscapes with darker, heavy processing. I was motivated in large part by external validation but that was starting to feel hollow and pointless.
By stepping away from the constant noise of social media and visual onslaught of photography, I quieted the external influences. This allowed my more genuine interests to bubble to the surface. I started understanding what it meant to connect with a landscape and create more personal interpretations of a scene. I also started understanding my motivations more deeply and found more confidence in my work. I think this period of time was probably the single most important part of finding a better, more personal direction for my work and helping me better control how other people’s ideas seep into or too heavily influence my own ideas about a landscape.
Now, I regularly look at nature photography online and in books but do not feel like doing so keeps me from hearing or listening to my photographic voice. Conversely, it is my understanding that Cole considers photographic celibacy a permanent practice. For me, it was helpful for that specific period of time and I now only turn to this practice in shorter bursts, like around trips (I never look at high-quality photos when I am planning a trip, for example). As with everything else in photography, no single approach will work for everyone so this is practice is not a magical path to personal expression. It has been particularly helpful for me and I am grateful that I heard Cole talk about this practice at the time I needed to hear it.
Sarah Marino is a full-time photographer, nature enthusiast, and writer based in southwestern Colorado. In addition to photographing grand landscapes, Sarah is best known for her photographs of smaller subjects including intimate landscapes, abstract renditions of natural subjects, and creative portraits of plants and trees. Sarah is the author or co-author of a diverse range of educational resources for nature photographers on subjects including composition and visual design, photographing nature’s small scenes, black and white photography, Death Valley National Park, and Yellowstone National Park. Sarah, a co-founder of the Nature First Alliance for Responsible Nature Photography, also seeks to promote the responsible stewardship of natural and wild places through her photography and teaching.