Does Your Photography Lack Purpose?

Sharing my personal experience of how creating a book led me to discover 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 all the time!

I have enjoyed running wildlife photography workshops at home and overseas for the last several years. Along the way, many of my 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 personal flexibility and so 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, and for my part, 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. After a cursory glance, they're rarely seen again.

My photography needed a new purpose

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

Creating a Book

I had 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. And no matter how impressive my images may be, no one is going to part with that sort of money.

As a backdrop, I have been working on a project for several years, photographing wild polecats with camera traps and have 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, the book idea remained dormant for a couple of years but as I have grown my portfolio of local wildlife, the notion of a book on the critters close to my home in the Pennines gathered momentum, and I started to compile it in earnest in mid-2023.

Local Wildlife

Of course, it will feature the polecat, but also many other subjects, including red grouse, black grouse, red squirrels, owls, raptors, curlews, and other summer ground-nesting birds. 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. I intended the form of the book would simply be a collection of my best images enclosed in a high-quality book, large enough 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 Issues

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 and I felt the story needed to be told.

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 has been treated as a commodity, for farming, forestry, industry, housing and recreation. So, those animals that survived our onslaught, struggle to find anywhere to live.

UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth and 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

There is a live example right on my doorstep - the use of heather moorlands for shooting driven grouse. Those opposed are pressing for an outright ban on the practice and amongst other things, accuse gamekeepers of illegally killing raptors, burning heather releases excessive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere causing downstreeam flooding of villages and towns.

For their part, the grouse shooting industry refutes many claims against it, saying 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 fully contextualise my photographs.

The main protagonists have their positions and are passionate about fighting for them and I doubt my book (or anyone elses) will 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 is 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 a story. Together, they are intended to evoke an emotional response and make a story memorable.

Ultimately, deciding to shift course in this direction was a no-brainer for me and I will embrace the challenge of broadening my photography, looking beyond the pictures to find underlying conservation stories. 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 progressing well, although there is still more to do. A lot 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.