The Golden Merganser: About the Image

My best photographs are usually a surprise to me. Long after I’ve made them, they feel familiar and almost inevitable as I look back on them, but not one of them could I have really ever anticipated at the time. The light, the composition, even the subject—I often never see them coming. Sometimes, the surprise is that the image even worked at all, as is the case with my image of a common merganser in flight against golden water.

Last week I once again found myself sitting on the banks of a northern river—the aspens just starting to turn gold, the air full of the smells of autumn. I was there for three short days to photograph grizzly bears, and while I came home with a couple of photographs I love in which a bear is the star of the show (below), the one I am most in love with, and surprised by, is my golden merganser (above).

Back to the merganser. The simple version of “here’s how I made this photograph” is this: 1200mm (600mm + 2x), 1/30s, f/10, ISO 125.

But that’s not really a “how,” is it? That’s the math, but it’s not the method.

To begin with, this was supposed to be a photograph of a bear; that’s why I was there. But in this moment, the bear had chosen to be elsewhere, ignoring (not for the first time) the art director whose directions about the art had been clear: be there. He wasn’t. While I waited there, the river rushing past me, I had time to look around and really take things in. A patch of river to my left caught my eye, the reflections of the aspens turning the otherwise silty water a beautiful gold. The odd merganser (but then all mergansers are a little odd, are they not?) would drift through that water, and eventually I turned my lens towards them.

Mergansers are weird little diving ducks. They bob and weave through the water, ducking below the surface to fish before coming up and thrashing around and flapping their wings in something that looks like a bit of a ritual and a little bit like a seizure. Drying off (or showing off), they’re goofy little creatures, and if you watch them long enough, your indifference towards them can turn to fascination, even affection. And I don’t say that lightly because I am not (emphasis heavily my own, and a little defensive, which is hard to show with italics) a birder. I digress.

It was in one of these moments of fascination, the bear long forgotten (but seriously, where was he?), that it occurred to me that my efforts to photograph these birds were not stirring my imagination. They were still just ducks on the water, and the behaviour that most interested me was translating poorly into a photograph at 1/1000s: just very sharp pictures of ducks.

There was something there—I could feel it—and I had nothing but time to try to find it. I also had nothing to lose. To say I wasn’t invested in the pictures I was making would be an understatement, and that was probably part of the problem. I simply didn’t care. There was no challenge. Just a bored photographer making boring pictures.

For a moment, I turned my attention to the moving water, spun the shutter to 1/30s, and started playing with the shapes and colours as blurred by the slow shutter speed. There was something magical in that. I know, it should have all been so obvious to me, but it took a while to shift my thinking from the literal to the more creative. Now I needed a merganser in that moving water!

It is not uncommon for my photographs to improve dramatically when I finally say “f*ck it!” and start to play, to experiment with my process with no real concern for the resulting image. It’s a shame I can’t get there faster, but it seems necessary for me to pass through the boredom and the “nothing else is working” first. By the way, I’m trusting you to keep this to yourself: I’m pretty sure the “real photographers” out there can jump straight to the part where they make brilliant images, but that’s never been my path, and I would hate for them to find out just how defective I really am.

I’d like to now explain the magical thinking that ultimately led me to make this image, which I am very much in love with, but I can’t. That’s usually what happens when you’re playing. One “let me try this” leads to “that didn’t work at all” which leads to “hey, this might be cool!” and somewhere in there I saw one of these daft birds taking off, which is a hell of a process and exhausts me just watching it, so I panned with it in a wild “this will never work.” And that’s when the magic happened.

No it didn’t. Not even close. It was a disaster. It didn’t work at all. Some frames were just a little blurry head sticking into the frame; others were nothing but tail feathers, also very blurry. Sh*t! Sorry, I say salty words when I play and start to get too invested in the results. But I saw something I liked. A glimmer of hope. So I tried again. And again. And after years of talking about panning and knowing exactly how to do it (even pulling it off once every couple of years or so), one of the frames was good. It made my heart leap. Not perfectly sharp, but that wasn’t really the point. Perhaps perfectly sharp would have ruined it, I don’t know. To me, it was poetic, and that’s better than perfect. To me there’s an echo of Robert Henri’s “paint the flying spirit of the bird, not its feathers.” I loved it, and there was no “I love it, but….” Just that giddy feeling you get when you make something that thrills you—something that feels like magic.

For those of you who skipped to the end: I just used a long lens, a slow shutter speed, and panned with the duck. Easy peasy. 😉

For the Love of the Photograph,
David

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