Okay, admittedly I’ve gone for the click bait title to draw the 1-2 people who might read this, if it’s that many! But over the years I’ve seen some great images and have been guilty of thinking “they just happened to be in the right place at the right time.” For sure some images are about being in the right place at the right time, but the shutter still has to be clicked…
Over time as a photographer you come to realise that it’s not always that straight forward. I was very fortunate last year to get short listed in the Close-up Photographer of the Year competition with this image of 2 Small Skipper butterflies that I titled ‘Holding Holds.’ For sure I had to be there but there was a lot more to it than that…
For me this image after 20+ years of photography I still regard as one of my best if not the best image I have taken. Being a unique situation for sure gives the image a little something special (I’ve not come across this scenario again), but this image for me holds so much more. This image is a culmination of 20 years of photography.
There was an element of fieldcraft involved, knowing my subject from weeks and months of walking the same area and observing their behaviour. But once I had found the subject I wasn’t guaranteed to take a decent image… This is where years of practise with composition, lighting and editing techniques paid off. Deciding to create a stacked image so I could blur the background or using a small amount of flash ‘to fill my subject’ were just some of the decisions I had to make in the field.
Of course, none of these decisions matter to the ‘viewer’ of the image, they will either like it or not, and that’s perfectly fine. But maybe next time you see an image, think beyond ‘they were in the right place at the right time,’ because even moments captured in a split second may have taken years of experience to pull off…