Six hours. One brief, blurry glimpse. Zero usable photographs. Genuinely worth it anyway.
I have been trying, on and off, for the better part of two years, to properly photograph the kingfisher that occasionally, unpredictably, appears along a particular quiet stretch of river a short cycle from my flat, and I dedicated an entire Sunday this past week specifically to the attempt, six full hours crouched in increasingly damp, increasingly cold undergrowth, camera ready, patience tested in ways I genuinely was not prepared for, and came home with precisely nothing to show for it beyond cold feet, a stiff back, and a considerably deeper respect for the actual professional and dedicated amateur wildlife photographers whose work I have, until this specific Sunday, somewhat taken for granted.
The kingfisher did appear, briefly, somewhere around the fourth hour, a flash of genuinely startling blue moving low and fast along the water’s surface for what I would estimate was under two full seconds before it vanished around the river bend, considerably too fast for me to actually raise the camera, let alone focus and shoot, leaving me with nothing more than the memory of the colour itself, which was, I will admit, genuinely spectacular even reduced to that brief a glimpse, the specific electric blue of a kingfisher in flight remaining, in my own experience, one of the natural world’s more reliably startling sights regardless of how many times you have previously witnessed it.
I spent the remaining two hours of my six-hour vigil turning over, somewhat ruefully, everything I thought I understood about wildlife photography before actually attempting it properly myself. I had, I now realise, always assumed a certain baseline level of luck was doing most of the work in the striking wildlife photographs I regularly admire online and in print, without properly appreciating just how much patience, genuine physical discomfort, and repeated, often entirely unrewarded attempt sits underneath even a single successful frame. Six hours for zero usable photographs is, I now understand from actually living through it, a genuinely ordinary ratio in this specific pursuit, not some unusual personal failure on my part.
That reframing has left me with considerably more admiration for a specific category of patient, largely uncelebrated work I suspect gets systematically undervalued precisely because the finished product, a single striking image, arrives looking effortless, stripped entirely of the six cold, largely unrewarded hours that actually produced it. I think this pattern extends well beyond wildlife photography specifically, into a great deal of the natural world documentation and advocacy work I write about regularly in this column, work that similarly tends to be judged only by its polished final output rather than by the genuinely unglamorous, repetitive patience required to actually produce that output in the first place.
I am going back next Sunday, weather permitting, better prepared this time with a proper camping stool rather than crouching directly on damp ground, and with, I hope, slightly recalibrated expectations about what a “successful” day actually looks like in this specific pursuit. Perhaps I will get my photograph. Perhaps I will spend another six hours accumulating nothing beyond cold feet and further respect for a discipline I clearly underestimated. Either outcome, I have decided, counts as a reasonably worthwhile way to spend a Sunday, which is a considerably more generous assessment than I would have offered before actually trying it myself.
The kingfisher, wherever it currently is, owes me absolutely nothing, and I intend to keep showing up regardless, on the entirely reasonable theory that patient, repeated presence is, in this specific pursuit as in a great many others, simply the actual price of admission.
A dog walker who passed through my particular stretch of riverbank twice during those six hours, once early on and once near the end, stopped the second time specifically to ask, with what I choose to interpret as genuine rather than mocking curiosity, whether I had actually caught anything worth showing for the entire day’s effort. I told her, honestly, no, nothing at all beyond a two-second glimpse of blue I could not photograph, and she laughed, not unkindly, and said that sounded, in her own words, “like a very committed way to spend a Sunday doing essentially nothing,” which I have decided, on reflection, is a genuinely fair and not unwelcome description of the entire enterprise.
I told her I intended to come back next week and try again. She wished me luck with what I choose to remember as genuine warmth rather than polite indulgence, and continued on her walk, leaving me alone again with my camera, my damp trousers, and my considerably recalibrated respect for anyone who manages to actually capture this specific bird properly on film. I suspect I will be back on that riverbank a good many more Sundays before I manage it myself, if I ever do at all, and I have, somewhat to my own surprise, made a genuine kind of peace with that uncertain timeline.
I have started, in the days since, telling this story to a handful of friends who know me as someone reasonably competent and reasonably patient in most areas of my life, and have been genuinely amused by how many of them assumed, before I corrected them, that six hours for zero photographs must represent some kind of unusual personal failure on my part rather than simply the ordinary cost of this specific pursuit. I think that assumption says something worth noting about how thoroughly a polished final image can obscure the genuinely unglamorous process behind it, in wildlife photography and, I suspect, in a great many other pursuits I have never personally attempted closely enough to properly understand.
More from this author at Öko Angebot, prat.uk.