Photograph by @andyparkinsonphoto/@thephotosociety Coot at full throttle – A few years’ ago I spent about a year working with these photographically overlooked, yet fantastically accessible birds, documenting their lives and marvelling at the spectacular range of their behaviours. When I mentioned the project to another professional photographer his immediate response was ‘coots, how are you going to make that pay?’. My response was ‘I don’t care!’. It still strikes me today as a bewildering and slightly depressing thing for him to have said, reducing the thrill, the pleasure of giving a voice to these beautiful and highly intelligent creatures to a mere monetary calculation. Trying to work out how much money I’m going to get from producing images of a particular species is about as far removed from my way of working as anything could be. My primary consideration is usually what kind of image will I be able to produce, what new thing can I learn and how much of their lives can I document. I see little point journeying to the far flung corners of the UK when, just around the corner from where I live I can document the entire life cycle of a bird/mammal, a species that displays a spectacular range of behaviours and that gives me the opportunity to work with them every day, in the most exquisite dawn and dusk light. Talk about a no brainer! As it turned out BBC Wildlife magazine ended up publishing the coots as a photo feature, one of ten such features that I’ve completed for the magazine and whilst I still have exactly zero idea how much the coots project cost me, or how much selling coot images has earned me my response is still a big, fat ‘I don’t care’. I became a wildlife photographer to make a contribution, to give a voice to those with none and to hopefully reveal the staggering beauty of our natural world and the importance of protecting it. I didn’t get in to wildlife photography to make money and in that regard I’ve been spectacularly successful!! ?Please #followme at @andyparkinsonphoto to keep up-to-date with my images @andyparkinsonphoto @natgeo @thephotosociety #coot #worklocally #ethicsbeforeimages #phototips #educateandinspire #nature

thephotosocietyさん(@thephotosociety)が投稿した動画 - 2017/05/01 20:56:49