When I was young, I always looked forward to seeing the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition outcomes. The competition actually began in 1965, but my interest in wildlife photography tracks back to the 1980’s, when in 1984 the Natural History Museum joined with the magazine to create the competition we now know. I vividly remember seeing competition images of Hanuman Langurs elegantly sitting in trees. These beautiful Old-World monkeys are native to India where they occupy forests and lightly wooded zones, including in urban areas. I was captivated by the images in BBC Wildlife Magazine, and promptly placed this “Grey Langur” in my must find and photograph mental filing cabinet.
Achieving this early photographic goal took several years, in fact it wasn’t until 2011 that I visited Rajasthan, and Jodhpur in particular, a really good place to catch these interesting primates. The reason for this article is simple, the competition winners were brilliant portraits and studies of this species in a seemingly perfect natural bubble. The sort of stylised images we all aspire to. However, reality soon kicks in in India, and the Jodhpur Langurs that I met were every bit as photogenic, but way more urbanised and lived cheek by jowl with humankind. The title of this piece is “Telling a More Complete Photographic Story”, and by the time I left Jodhpur, I had beautiful portraits, but also contextual images showing the lifestyle and lifecycle of these primates. The reality is that the competition winners only showed a single facet of this species, one that did not necessarily reflect the animal’s wider biology. I suppose I’m raising an important question about showing the broader truth about an organism versus an idealised abstraction of that truth. We photographers are very good at the latter, but less so the former.
The images here could be taken with any camera system, and any of the great budget zooms that are available. For the record, these primate shots were taken on a Canon system. I suppose my reasoning for this article is to get photographers to look beyond a single image and compile a life story. This can be achieved on a short visit to an interesting location as in Jodhpur, where I added in images of the Menhrangarh Fort, streets and other views to complement baby langurs, adults and night time langur gatherings on electricity pylons (shot at Udaipur) that are anthropogenic substitutes for lost forest trees, or maybe this aerial venue simply allows proximity to easy human food pickings (probably both).
There is a story untold here – on a visit to Vijay Stambh, Chittorgargh Fort, while in Rajasthan, I crouched down to shoot this lady in a pink sari with the tower behind her – next thing I knew I was laying on my back. A dominant hanuman langur had come across and pushed me over onto my back, and all the visitors around me were having a good laugh. Sadly, no one took a picture or video of this, or maybe not sadly in this day and age where I could have become an overnight social media sensation.
The slide show below has more images to illustrate the photographic narrative.
The alternate approach to telling a more complete story is to revisit a specific place several times to catch a fuller repertoire of animal behaviours, or seek out a single species in multiple locations. Rajasthan may seem an exotic location – it was certainly one of the most interesting places I’ve ever visited, but you can also tell a more complete picture in your own back garden or suburb. The following shots of a white-faced heron were all taken within a few metres of one another, but over several months. They show the biology and behaviours of a single, common species, and one that I see on a daily basis around my house.
The images here show hunting, striking, playing with food, taking off, flying, resting, relationship to other birds. This kind of image collection is unlikely to be caught in a single day, but by accruing them over weeks or months they build up into an interesting portfolio or story.
The slide show below has more images to illustrate the photographic narrative.
Sometimes however, a visual story needs something a bit different; we all recognise the classic picture of certain familiar species of birds – the “commonplace look”, but the real magic comes in when you get in close and personal and create a new look, something that is not often seen by the public – the best stories always offer something new. I managed this when shooting the eastern whipbird. Where I lived on the Central Coast of NSW, whipbirds are commonly heard but seldom seen. When you do see them, the best you might hope for is a the classic pert pose showing the whole bird with its crest up, but with patience and a bit of luck you might be able to collect some beautiful, but very different poses – you’ll need a long lens though – I shot these with a 500mm lens on an APS-C camera. They are so different from the classic look, that I’d wager most people wouldn’t immediately know what species they were looking at.
Finally, I feel that sometimes, an entire photographic story can be found within an altered perspective of a single frame. Let me explain. During the winter of 2024 I was keen to shoot some star trails and had one eye on the Kp value indicating when we were likely to see an aurora in the southern sky (we had several that year). I took some great star trails and aurora shots, but whilst not exactly underwhelmed by my images, I’d hoped for something more, something that embodied both the solar storm and the immensity of the sky and its stars, but with Earths nature clearly present in the frame. I finally found what I was looking for by cropping into a frame taken at 12mm (full frame equivalent). The shot shows star trails behind the branches of a dead gum tree, but with a reddish pink glow from the aurora australis. I love this picture, simple, graphic, but loaded with a fascinating story about the cosmos. It was one that had a very narrow timeframe for success.
….good luck creating your own photographic narrative.