Wildlife Photographer of the Year has changed its rules. From this year, baiting is banned outright. Not discouraged. Not frowned upon. Banned.

The old wording “strongly favoured” non-baited images, which let baited shots slide in if they were good enough. The new wording doesn’t leave room for that: “Any form of baiting will be prohibited, except where the photograph is the result of legitimate scientific research, which must be clearly stated in the image caption when submitted.” Feeders, scent, sound, food left out to pull an animal into frame: all of it, gone. The only exemption is genuine scientific research, declared as such.

Think about what that means. The biggest, most respected wildlife photography competition on the planet looked at baiting and decided it couldn’t be squared with “images that celebrate the natural world with respect and integrity.” That’s not a style preference. That’s a verdict.

So here’s the question I keep coming back to: if the practice was fine, why did they need to ban it? You don’t write a rule to stop something that was never a problem. WPY didn’t do this on a whim. They did it because enough images, enough operators, enough manipulated encounters had made the case for them.

Which leaves the paid commercial hide industry with a problem. If the standard-setter says this isn’t legitimate wildlife photography, on what basis do those operators keep charging for it?

And I want to be precise about who I mean, because “hide” covers a lot of ground and I’m not tarring all of it. A reserve-run screen positioned at a known roost, staffed by a conservation trust, funding habitat work with the day fee: fine. That’s not what this is about. I’m talking about the paid commercial setups run by people who found a shortcut into the industry. Buy a patch of land or lease a corner of one, dig a scrape, throw down mealworms or dead chicks, build a plywood box with a lens slot, and sell seats by the hour. No conservation licence behind it. No research purpose. Just a bloke with a wildlife photography Instagram and a bucket of bait, monetising an animal’s hunger.

“The animals would find it anyway.”

I hear this a lot. It’s not true.

Nature already gives scavengers carrion, constantly. Ravens, foxes, buzzards, crows. They’re built for finding food without a stranger throwing it at their feet. What a baited hide does is concentrate these animals in numbers nature never intended. The ravens stop hunting. The foxes stop ranging. They loiter by the hide, fat and dependent, because someone from Leeds paid £35 to sit in the corner with a long lens.

That’s not the same animal behaving naturally in front of a camera. That’s a different animal, one the hide made. And once an animal’s learned that a particular patch of ground means an easy meal, that pattern doesn’t undo itself when the operator’s had a good season and moves on. Somebody else inherits a fox that no longer fears people, or a buzzard that’s stopped hunting live prey properly. That’s not a photography problem any more. That’s a welfare problem with a camera pointed at it.

“We’re educating the public.”

This is the excuse that actually makes me angry, because I think some operators believe it. They point at the family in the hide and say “look at them learning.”

Proximity isn’t education. A kid can learn about scavenging ecology from a decent field guide. They don’t need to watch a badger eat peanuts while their dad pays £20 an hour for the seat. The animals in that hide aren’t being observed. They’re being displayed. There’s a difference between a nature reserve teaching people to read a landscape and a commercial operator teaching paying customers that £20 buys you a close encounter with something wild. One builds understanding. The other sells a transaction and dresses it up as one.

Who’s actually running these

This is the part that doesn’t get said enough. A lot of these commercial hides aren’t run by naturalists who fell into photography. They’re run by photographers, often mediocre ones, who worked out that the fastest way to a portfolio full of “wow” shots wasn’t years in the field. It was a bucket of dead chicks and a captive audience of paying customers who’d never know the difference.

Look at how these operations market themselves. “Guaranteed red kite action.” “99% success rate.” “Book your kingfisher session.” That’s not photography being sold. That’s a vending machine being sold, with a wild animal as the product dropping into the tray on schedule. The operator gets the day fee. The client gets a photo that looks, on the surface, exactly like the one the operator took last week, and the one before that, from the same box, with the same bird, in the same light.

And here’s the bit that should bother anyone who takes the craft seriously: the client walks away thinking they’ve learned something about wildlife photography. They haven’t. They’ve learned to point a lens at a spot where an animal’s been trained to appear. No fieldcraft. No patience. No understanding of behaviour, of light, of how an animal actually moves through a landscape when nobody’s paid to summon it. It’s the photographic equivalent of buying a certificate you didn’t earn, and the person selling it knows exactly what they’re doing, because they built the whole business on skipping the part that actually takes years.

That’s the part WPY’s rule change actually threatens, and it’s why I think it’s going to bite. Not the ethics argument alone, though that matters. The competition credibility argument. Half of what these operators use to sell seats is “as seen in,” “award-winning,” “published in.” Strip baited images out of the biggest competition in the world and a chunk of that marketing collateral stops being true. You can’t put “WPY-calibre” on your website when WPY has told you, in writing, that what you’re selling isn’t eligible.

The business model, plainly

Baited hides exist because photographers asked for predictable action. They wanted the bird in at 10am, feeding for twenty minutes, delivering the composition they’d already pictured before they left home. The operators listened, put food down, and sold the seats.

It worked for years. It worked because the industry never really asked what “guaranteed” meant for the animal on the other end of it, and because a lot of buyers didn’t want to ask either. Guaranteed was the selling point, not the warning sign it should have been.

It’s coming apart now because the photographers who actually care about welfare are opting out. They’re walking away from baited setups and into the field, learning to wait, learning to read behaviour, learning a landscape well enough to know where wildlife will be without anyone putting food there to make it show up.

That’s not the faster route. It’s the harder one. More skill, more patience, more humility required. But it’s the only way to make a photograph that doesn’t betray the animal in it, and it’s the only way to actually earn the competence you’re claiming when you put your name on the image.

The money is real. It doesn’t make it right.

A commercial hide can be a decent little earner. Charge £30 to £50 a head, run six sessions a week through the season, and that adds up fast for very little overhead: some bait, a box, and a lens slot. I’m not going to pretend that income doesn’t matter to the person running it, or that it isn’t tempting when you’ve worked out that a camera and a bucket of chicks makes more than most part-time jobs.

But making money from something doesn’t make it ethical. It makes it profitable. Those are different things, and conflating them is exactly how this went unquestioned for so long. A business model built on manufacturing an experience and selling it as authentic isn’t a grey area just because it pays. It’s the same dishonesty as any product sold under false pretences, except the product here is a living animal’s behaviour, bent out of shape to keep the bookings coming.

What actually works

Not baited hides. Positioned hides. Ones set at nesting trees, hunting perches, migration routes, roosting sites: places an animal already goes, for its own reasons, with or without a paying audience. The kind that require you to understand an animal well enough to predict where it’ll be, rather than summon it with a bucket of roadkill.

The kind where you might sit through three empty days before anything happens, and where the photograph you eventually get actually means something, because nothing about the encounter was manufactured to produce it.

That’s the work. Not the easy money, and not the shortcut dressed up as a masterclass.

This isn’t a one-off

WPY isn’t operating in isolation here. Bird photography societies are tightening their own rules. Conservation bodies are asking harder questions about welfare impact. Wildlife photographers are calling out baited operations publicly, on their own platforms, without being asked.

That matters more than any single rule change. Once the biggest contest in the world draws a line, smaller competitions, magazines, and galleries have cover to draw the same line, and a much harder time justifying why they wouldn’t. The reach of baited work narrows every time another gatekeeper closes the door on it. And for an industry built partly on the credibility of competition wins and magazine credits, that’s not a minor inconvenience. That’s the marketing engine stalling.

The operators who keep running baited setups are going to find their client base shrinking along with their credibility. The ones who can’t square the practice with their own conscience will fold the business. The ones who adapt will learn their landscape properly, reposition their hides where wildlife already goes, stop selling guarantees, and start teaching their clients to actually wait.

Some will close instead. I don’t see that as a loss. It’s the industry catching up to where it should have been all along, and the people whose whole business depended on nobody asking too many questions are the ones who should be worried.

The animals were never the product. They never were. They were always the reason we went outside in the first place. Everything else was the business model, and it turns out it was built on a lie the biggest competition in the world just refused to keep telling.

Time it stopped.

Thank you, WPY

I want to say this plainly, because it matters. Thank you to Wildlife Photographer of the Year for actually taking a stand.

For years, this argument has been made by a relatively small group of photographers willing to say baiting is wrong and take the abuse that comes with saying it in public. Called killjoys. Called purists, Called assholes and worse. Told they were gatekeeping a hobby, moaning about nothing, protecting their own patch by attacking other people’s income. Dismissed as activists with an agenda, which is the easiest way to ignore anyone raising an uncomfortable point: recast them as the extreme, not the argument.

That dismissal doesn’t work any more. This isn’t a handful of photographers with a grudge. It’s the Natural History Museum, running the single most prestigious wildlife photography competition that exists, telling the entire industry in writing that baiting doesn’t belong in legitimate wildlife photography. You can shrug off a photographer with a following. You cannot shrug off the institution every serious wildlife photographer has spent their career trying to be good enough for.

That’s what makes this rule change different from every op-ed and comment-section argument that came before it. It’s not opinion any more. It’s policy, from the body with the most credibility in the field, and credibility is the one thing a commercial hide operator cannot manufacture with a bucket of dead chicks.

So now let’s see who follows.

Sources: Wildlife Photographer of the Ye

ar launches 62nd competition with stellar new jury panel and rule change, Wildlife Photographer of the Year: Rules, Natural History Museum.

I keep hearing the same complaint from other photographers lately: people are getting more militant about “straight out of camera” than I’ve ever been.

Not aimed at me directly. It’s a pattern turning up in conversations, comment threads, group chats won’t touch a slider, treats the flat default of a RAW file as some kind of moral high ground, looks at anyone who processes an image as if they’ve failed a purity test nobody agreed to.

There’s a real push in photography circles right now to glorify SOOC like touching a slider is cheating like the only photograph worth making is the one you nailed on the first click, no adjustments, no thought.

That advice misses the point entirely.

The Straight-Out-of-Camera Myth

Straight out of camera isn’t a style. It’s a default.

Your camera doesn’t have opinions. It doesn’t have taste. It has presets and algorithms built to please the widest possible audience with the least discerning eye. Press the shutter and you’re trusting a piece of plastic and silicon to interpret reality for you. Fine

The SOOC crowd treats the camera’s defaults as gospel. Treats the RAW file’s flat profile as a moral position. Turns a technical limitation into an aesthetic virtue, and somewhere along the way decided that anyone who moves a slider has less discipline than someone who doesn’t. I love to be in that crowd as much as I can be for the record.

Every photograph that reaches an audience has been edited. The only difference is how much, and how honest you are about it.

Ansel Adams didn’t just make the photograph he made the negative, then made the print. Hours in the darkroom, dodging and burning, pushing contrast until it matched what he’d seen in his mind’s eye, or at least the version of it he could justify. The negative is the score. The print is the performance. He’d have told you himself the straight negative isn’t the photograph. The performance is.

So next time someone tells you editing is a phase you’ll grow out of, ask what version of photography they’re actually defending. Because it isn’t photography. It’s not touching things.

The Training Wheels Analogy Is Backwards

The argument goes: you lean on editing while you’re learning, and eventually you’ll need it less, and you’ll “grow out of it.”

The problem is that it assumes editing is a substitute for learning. It isn’t. It’s a mirror. A diagnostic tool.

A musician practices scales, practices technique, learns to play in tune and then learns to mix. Compression, EQ, reverb, sitting in a mix properly. Do they grow out of mixing? No. They grow into it. The craft doesn’t disappear. It deepens.

Photography works the same way. Exposing correctly in camera, reading a histogram, metering for the highlights those are your scales. Developing the RAW file, making choices about contrast and tone and colour that’s the next layer. Not cheating. The next layer.

The more skilled you get, the more nuanced your editing becomes. You stop reaching for global adjustments and start making local ones. You stop chasing saturation and start chasing mood. You stop treating editing like surgery and start treating it like grooming you’re not fixing mistakes anymore, you’re refining intention.

You don’t get there without editing first. You need to push a shadow to understand what a highlight protects. You need to oversaturate an image once, badly, to understand what colour harmony actually looks like. The editing isn’t the problem. It’s the laboratory.

And this is where it stops being about building a digital art piece unless that’s genuinely who you are as an artist, in which case, crack on — and starts being about small, deliberate moves that take an already good image and make it great. Half a stop here. A touch of contrast there. The kind of edit you can look at and be proud of, because it started with something real. Not some fabrication of pixels dressed up to disguise a mediocre beginning.

What Happens When You Edit Blind

I’ll be honest about something nobody likes hearing: a lot of the criticism aimed at editing is really aimed at people doing it badly. And it’s fair, because it matters.

Edit without understanding and you’re not making a photograph. You’re making noise.

Missed the exposure, so you boost the shadows now they’re grainy and muddy, but the image is brighter, so you call it a win. Didn’t wait for the light, so you push saturation now the colours are garish, but it’s vivid, so you call it a win. Didn’t compose properly, so you crop hard and sharpen the details look punchy even though the frame still feels wrong.

You’ve papered over a series of mistakes and told yourself it’s an improvement because it’s brighter and louder than the original. But the original had honesty in it. It told the truth about what happened. The edited version tells a lie about what happened, and you’re calling that progress.

The problem isn’t that the image is flat. It’s that you never understood how to capture flat. The problem isn’t dull colour. It’s that you didn’t understand the colour in the scene before trying to force it back in post.

You can’t outsource learning to a preset. You can’t shortcut understanding with a filter. You can’t fake discipline.

The Edit as Diagnostic

Change your relationship with editing stop treating it as rescue, start treating it as diagnosis and you start noticing patterns.

Your shots keep coming back underexposed. Not by accident, consistently. And you realise you’ve stopped waiting for the light, because you’ve trained yourself to shoot fast, to chase the moment instead of protecting it, checking the histogram and then ignoring what it’s telling you. That’s useful information, if you’re willing to hear it.

Your colours are muddy, every time, and you realise you don’t actually understand white balance beyond which way the slider moves. You’re applying a solution to a problem you haven’t diagnosed.

Your compositions feel empty no matter how tight you crop, how much clarity you push. Because there’s nothing there. No amount of clarity manufactures a subject that was never in the frame. The edit can’t add intention. But it can tell you when intention was missing and that it needed protecting from the moment the shutter fired.

That’s what growth actually looks like. Not the disappearance of editing the transformation of it. You start spending as much time in the edit as you used to spend in the field, because you’ve realised the most important editing decision is made before the shutter fires. The second most important is made in the develop module. Everything else is polish.

The Photographers I Actually Rate

The photographers whose work I go back to aren’t the ones whose images look like they survived a three-hour processing marathon, and they’re not the ones whose work could’ve been made by anyone with the right preset. They’re the ones whose work feels inevitable like it had to exist exactly as it does.

The light was right. The composition held. The moment was there.

Some of them will still bump the exposure half a stop, darken a corner, nudge the saturation a couple of percent exactly what you’d do if you knew what you were doing. Their adjustments are refinement, not repair. There’s a difference.

I watched a photographer I admire develop a RAW file once. Three sliders, maybe. A touch of contrast. A slight lift on the highlights. A fraction of a stop of exposure. Done. The image already said what it needed to say the edit just helped it say it better.

That’s not someone who’s grown out of editing. That’s someone who understands it at a level most people never reach. They don’t need to touch fifty sliders, because they already know what each one does.

The Valid Creative Choice

None of this means there’s anything wrong with spending three hours on one frame, chasing a specific look, building something from the RAW file that lives closer to your imagination than to reality. If the edit is the art and the capture was just a starting point, that’s a legitimate choice. Go for it.

Just don’t call it discipline. Don’t call it craft. Three hours of editing on a photograph that should’ve taken three seconds in camera isn’t dedication it’s damage control.

There’s an honourable version of heavy manipulation too: the artist who builds worlds from photographs, who composites, who makes something that only exists in the final output. That’s not damage control. That’s a different discipline painting with light and pixels and it’s just as valid.

But call it what it is. That’s not photography in the traditional sense. It’s digital art informed by photography. Fine. Just be honest about which one you’re doing.

What This Advice Is Really Protecting

I think “you’ll grow out of editing” gets repeated so often because it protects people from a harder conversation.

If editing is a phase, the people who don’t edit aren’t lazy they’re advanced. If it’s a crutch, the people who don’t need one are stronger. If it’s cheating, the people who skip it are playing by the rules.

The harder conversation is this: you don’t need to edit less. You need to understand more. And understanding is uncomfortable. It means admitting the image didn’t work, the light wasn’t there, the composition was off, you were shooting too fast with the wrong lens at the wrong time of day.

Editing lets you pretend, if you let it. A bright enough image hides a weak composition. A saturated enough image hides dull colour. A sharp enough image hides a boring subject. It’s seductive precisely because it offers a way out that doesn’t require you to change anything about how you shoot.

That’s not growth. That’s spending the equity of your future skill on the comfort of your present results.

The Honest Conversation

This was never really about editing. It’s about whether you’re willing to look at your own work and understand it whether you’re willing to admit when you got it wrong instead of outsourcing the fix to a tool.

The people telling you to stop editing aren’t wrong because you edit. They’re wrong because they’re using your editing as an excuse to dodge the harder work of understanding what photography actually asks of you.

And the people telling you editing is cheating aren’t wrong because editing exists. They’ve confused a tool with a philosophy, and they’re using that confusion to feel better about their own limits.

You don’t need to stop editing. You need to start understanding why you’re reaching for the slider in the first place. Why the exposure. Why the saturation. Why the crop. What you’re trying to say, and whether the edit is helping you say it or hiding the fact that you didn’t.

Because the edit doesn’t lie. The histogram doesn’t lie. The RAW file doesn’t lie. It’s the most honest part of the whole process — the part that won’t let you hide.

So stop asking when you’ll grow out of editing.

Start asking why you need it.

The photo was fine. The begging was the whole post.

This Isn’t New. The Scale Is.

Photographers have always wanted recognition. Fine. Normal. I wanted it too, thirty-odd years ago, standing in a field at first light with a camera I could barely afford.

What’s different now is that asking for approval has become a substitute for earning it. An entire generation of new wildlife photographers is spending more energy managing an audience than managing a camera.

And the maddening thing is — it doesn’t even work. Not for the photography.

Engagement Isn’t Feedback. It’s Worse Than Nothing.

A like tells you nothing. It doesn’t tell you your shutter speed was wrong for that flight sequence. It doesn’t tell you the light was flat and you shot anyway because you’d already driven two hours. It doesn’t tell you the bird was stressed and you didn’t notice, because you were thinking about the content before you’d even taken the shot.

But here’s what people get wrong: they think engagement is neutral. Harmless at worst, mildly encouraging at best. It isn’t. A pile of likes from a consortium of people who will never critique your work, never tell you the composition’s weak, never mention the distracting branch you should have moved around — that’s not encouragement. That’s a hindrance dressed up as support.

Praise without critique doesn’t leave you standing still. It moves you backwards. It confirms the frame that should’ve been binned. It tells you the mediocre shot was the good one, so you go and repeat whatever you just did wrong, with more confidence and less reason to.

Real feedback comes from failure. From reviewing four hundred frames and finding six worth keeping. From a mentor telling you the composition’s dead center and boring. From going back to the same unglamorous spot for the eighth week running because that’s where the knowledge actually lives.

None of that fits in a heart-shaped icon. And none of it comes from an audience whose only job is to be nice to you.

The Habit You’re Actually Building

Here’s the part nobody wants to hear: every time you beg for a like, you’re practicing something. Just not photography.

You’re practicing performance. You’re training yourself to value the reaction over the reason for the shot. Do it enough and it stops being a habit you switch on for social media — it becomes how you see. You start composing for the scroll, not for the animal in front of you.

Say It Works. Then What?

Nobody asks this bit. Say the begging works. Say you hit your thousand, your ten thousand, whatever the number was. What’s the plan?

Because it will happen for some of them. Keep posting, keep asking, keep tagging the big accounts — the numbers do go up eventually, algorithm being what it is. And then you’ve got an audience. Now what are you going to show them?

The same shot, basically. Rebadged. Same species, same local patch, same level of skill you had when you started begging — because you spent the last year managing the following instead of building the eye. You’re fifteen or fifty years old with three thousand followers and the same technical grasp you had at nine hundred. What happens when the algorithm stops doing you favours and the audience actually looks?

An audience built on asking, not earning, is an audience with no reason to stay. They didn’t follow because the work kept getting better — nothing to compare it to, you never let a gap open up between “this shot” and “the next one that’s actually different.” They followed because you asked nicely and enough. That’s not loyalty. That’s a favour, and favours run out.

Real growth is visible. Someone scrolling your feed from month one to month twenty should be able to see the improvement without you telling them. If they can’t — if the shot from your first week and the shot from your fiftieth week are doing the same thing at the same level — the following was never about the photography. It was about the asking. And asking isn’t a skill that transfers to anything except asking harder next time.

So before you write the next “please like and follow,” answer the actual question: when this works, what are you going to have to show for it?

What Actually Moves the Needle

Field time. Repetition. Getting it wrong in front of no one. Learning a species’ behaviour well enough to predict it, not just react to it. Sitting with mediocre light because that’s what today gave you, and learning to work with it instead of packing up and posting a caption about “chasing golden hour vibes.”

None of that is instant. None of it is engagement-friendly. All of it is what separates a photographer from someone who owns a camera and a following.

The Actual Advice

Stop asking people to like your work. Ask yourself if it’s any good — honestly, with the ego switched off — and if the answer’s no, go and shoot until it isn’t.

Nobody got better at this by being liked. They got better by being out there, missing the shot, and going back tomorrow to try again.

Let me be clear about something before I get into the rest of it: I’d do this weekend again in a heartbeat, heat and all.

Global Birdfair landed this year with the sun doing its absolute best to melt several thousand birders, photographers and conservationists into the grass. I’ve spent enough time in the Mara to have opinions about heat, and even I was wilting by Saturday afternoon. Somebody near the WildArt stand asked me if this was worse than Kenya. It isn’t. It just feels worse because you’re wearing trousers you didn’t choose for the climate and queuing for coffee instead of sitting under an acacia. But nobody left because of the heat. That’s the first thing worth saying. Thousands of people who love birds turned up anyway, sweated through it, and stayed.

The Room Filled Up, and Then a Few People Left

I gave a talk this year called “The Authentic Voice.” It’s the presentation I’ve been building for months, and if you’ve read anything I’ve written here, you know roughly what’s in it: honesty about editing versus fabrication, a hard line on baited and staged hide photography, and a challenge to anyone still pretending that manufactured images and authentic fieldcraft are the same category of achievement.

I didn’t water it down for the room. I’ve done that before, early on, back when I still thought softening an argument made it land better. It doesn’t. It just makes it forgettable.

So I said what I actually think. I named hide photography as a shortcut that trades welfare and honesty for a guaranteed shot. I said that an image taken over bait, in front of a captive audience of photographers who paid for the privilege, isn’t the same thing as a photograph earned in the field — and that pretending otherwise does real damage to how people understand wildlife photography as a craft. I watched a handful of people get up and leave partway through.

Good.

I don’t say that with any relish, and I don’t think making people uncomfortable is a badge of honour on its own. But if nobody in the room is ever bothered by what I say, I’m not actually saying anything. Those empty seats told me the talk was doing its job. The people who stayed — and there were a lot of them, more than I expected, standing three deep at the back by the time I got to the bit about ownership and honesty — stayed because they wanted the real argument, not a curated version of it built to keep everyone comfortable.

The Ones Who Came Up Afterward

The talk itself mattered less than what happened after it. That’s usually true, and this year it was true in a way that actually moved me.

A young woman came up holding her phone with one of the podcast episodes already queued, the one where I talk through why baiting isn’t a grey area. She said she’d listened to it on the drive up and had spent the whole journey arguing with her dad about it, and that she wanted to hear the argument again in person to see if it still held. It did. She left more convinced, not less, and told me she was going to rethink a hide session she’d already booked for the autumn.

That’s the whole point. Not converting people through guilt, but giving them enough of an honest argument that they go and think it through properly on their own terms. A few others told me similar things — that a podcast episode or a post here had made them stop and actually examine what they were doing, rather than just doing what everyone else in their local photography group was doing. That’s rare. Most content in this space is built to be agreed with instantly and forgotten five minutes later. Having people tell me they argued with something, sat with it, and came out the other side with a changed position — that’s worth more to me than any amount of easy applause.

The Young Photographers Gave Me Hope

I want to talk about the younger crowd specifically, because it’s the part of the weekend that’s stuck with me the most.

Birdfair has always had a strong contingent of older, established birders and photographers — as it should, there’s decades of hard-earned knowledge in that generation and I’ve learned plenty from them over the years. But this year I had conversation after conversation with people in their late teens and twenties who weren’t asking me what camera to buy or what settings I use. They wanted to talk about what an image is actually for. What it says. Whether a photograph needs to mean something beyond being technically correct and instantly likeable.

That’s a genuinely different conversation to the one I was having with young photographers five years ago, and it’s a better one.

Because let’s be honest about the alternative, which was also very much present at Birdfair this year: a lot of content. Endless, interchangeable, technically competent, emotionally empty content. Perfectly exposed. Perfectly sharp. Says absolutely nothing. You could swap the photographer’s name on half of it and nobody would notice. I saw plenty of that on stands and screens around the fair, and there’s nothing wrong with people enjoying that kind of work — but it’s not the same thing as image-making with intent, and increasingly there’s a younger generation who can tell the difference and want more than the algorithm-friendly version.

Talking to those young photographers, watching them ask harder questions than photographers twice their age sometimes do, was the best part of my weekend. If that group is the future of this industry, we’re in better shape than the state of Instagram would suggest.

The Industry Is Finally Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud

Here’s the bit that actually surprised me, in a good way.

I had several conversations this weekend with people from serious professional and conservation-focused organisations — Wildlife Photographer of the Year among them — and the consensus in those rooms has shifted further than I expected. Baiting isn’t just something individual photographers are starting to reject. It’s becoming something the institutions that set the standards for this industry are actively moving against.

WPY and WildArt are working toward rules that would ban images taken in baited or staged setups entirely from their competitions. Not discourage. Ban. That’s a meaningful shift, because competition rules set the incentive structure for an entire generation of photographers coming up through the ranks. If the biggest names in the industry stop rewarding baited images, the market for baited hides starts to dry up on its own, without anyone needing to have the argument I made on stage this weekend.

I’ve been saying for a while now that baiting is becoming more of a pariah practice than it already was. Hearing that echoed back to me by people who actually sit on the panels and write the rules, rather than just readers who agree with a Substack post, was validating in a way I didn’t expect walking into the weekend. It’s one thing to hold a position from the sidelines. It’s another to hear the organisations with actual power over industry standards moving in the same direction, independently, because the evidence and the ethics point the same way.

Old Friends, New Faces

Birdfair isn’t only about talks and arguments. Some of the best parts of the weekend had nothing to do with any of that.

I got to spend proper time with Josh Galicki and Rob Read, two people I’ve known for years and don’t see nearly often enough. There’s something about catching up with people who knew you before any of this — before the talks, before the podcast, before any of it had a name — that resets you a bit. We didn’t talk about baiting or ethics or industry politics for most of it. We talked about actual fieldcraft, bad weather stories, and the kind of shorthand you only develop with people you trust.

That’s the other side of Birdfair that’s easy to overlook when you’re focused on the content of a talk. Thousands of people who love the same thing, in one place, for one weekend. Photographers, birders, conservationists, beginners with their first decent lens, veterans who’ve forgotten more about fieldcraft than most of us will ever learn — all in the same tents, all there because of a shared obsession that doesn’t need explaining to anyone else in the room.

What I’m Taking Away From This

A few people left my talk. More stayed than I expected, and more of them came to find me afterward than at any previous talk I’ve given. The industry’s biggest institutions are starting to move in the direction I’ve been arguing for. A room full of young photographers wants to make images with something to say, not just content to post. And I got to spend real time with people I actually care about.

None of that happened because I softened anything. It happened because I said what I actually think, clearly, and let the room sort itself out.

If you were one of the people who walked out — I’d still genuinely like to hear why, properly, not as a gotcha but as an actual conversation. And if you were one of the people who stayed, who queued up afterward, who’s rethinking a booking you’d already made: keep asking the harder question. That’s the whole job.

See you next year. Hopefully somewhere shadier.

The WildArt Bird Photography Awards are open for entries from 10th July 2026 until 11th October 2026.

WildArt Bird Photography Awards 2026

Having access to Mythos is kind of an interesting place to be as a researcher, it is humbling and a lot scary.

So that’s what this is. My questions. Its answers. My reaction underneath.

Me: What has fundamentally changed the world for the worst, but we as humans haven’t grasped?

It gave me a list. Attention getting engineered out from under us. Algorithms quietly ending any shared version of reality. Factory farming at a scale most people have simply never looked at directly. Supply chains that hide the human and environmental cost of everything we buy. Loneliness becoming a default setting rather than an exception.

Then it added something I didn’t expect, a bit of pushback: “’Haven’t grasped’ is doing a lot of work here. Plenty of people have written entire books on each of these. The issue usually isn’t that nobody’s noticed, it’s that noticing hasn’t translated into behaviour change.”

Fair hit. I’ve sat in enough boardrooms to know the difference between a problem being understood and a problem being acted on. Understanding is cheap. Action costs something.

Me: What about what we have grasped? Are we able to stop the doom, or is it inevitable now?

This is where it got more useful than I expected. It split the list in two.

The tractable ones, it said, move with policy and culture, slowly, but they move. Loneliness. Animal welfare legislation. Things a government or a market can actually shift with the right pressure.

The stuck ones are stuck for a specific reason, and it explained the reason in a way that stuck with me: “The thing causing the harm is also the thing generating the profit, at planetary scale, with no coordination mechanism to stop it. If one platform decides to be less addictive, it loses users to the one that doesn’t.” A coordination problem. Not a knowledge problem. Everyone would be better off with different rules, and nobody can impose different rules on themselves without getting outcompeted by whoever doesn’t.

It compared it to climate change, which I think is exactly right and slightly depressing. Those problems don’t get solved by individual willpower. They get solved by regulation, or by someone building a genuinely better incentive structure before the crisis forces the issue. And historically, it said, it’s usually the crisis that does the forcing, not the foresight.

Me: As you have a billion minds doing a billion calculations a second, it’s interesting to see what you consider a tipping point. Do the amount of billionaires and their vast consolidated resource structure not cause you concern?

I threw that “billion minds” line in half seriously, and it corrected me straight away, which I respected: “I’m not a billion minds running parallel calculations on this. I’m one model. On a question like this I don’t have privileged insight from scale.” No performance, no false modesty either. Just a flat correction before it answered the actual question.

And then it did answer it, properly, both sides.

The case for concern: wealth concentration at the very top has roughly doubled since the 1980s, and the real issue isn’t the number in someone’s bank account, it’s the decision-making power that comes attached to it. A small number of individuals now have outsized influence over media, over infrastructure democracies depend on, over the political process itself. That’s a governance problem wearing an inequality costume.

The case against overreacting: a lot of that wealth is illiquid, tied up in companies people actually built. Some of the concentration is a byproduct of genuinely valuable innovation. The better target might be the rules of the game, not the individuals who happen to be winning it under the current rules.

Where it landed, and I’m still thinking about this line: “The dollar amount concerns me less than the unaccountable structural power. Someone being able to single-handedly reshape a public information platform, or determine whether a country’s satellite internet works during a war, without any electoral or judicial check on that decision. That’s a novel situation historically, even compared to robber-baron eras.”

Here’s why I’m putting this on a wildlife and photography Substack, which I’ll admit is a stretch.

Because I watch this exact mechanism eat my own industry every single day. Open Instagram and the images pushed in front of you aren’t there because they’re good. They’re there because they perform against a revenue model built for Meta, not because a jury of photographers looked at technical skill, or field craft, or twenty years of learning to read light and decided this one earned the top spot. A perfectly exposed owl in flight, years of patience behind it, will lose every time to a saturated, over-sharpened, borderline-fabricated shot that happens to stop the scroll for four extra seconds. The algorithm isn’t judging photography. It’s judging attention, and attention is the product being sold, not the images.

That’s the same mechanism from the middle of this piece, just wearing a camera strap. It’s why newer photographers chase the wrong things: not “how do I get better at this,” but “how do I get the algorithm to notice me.” I’ve said before that real competence takes thousands of hours in the field, not thousands of followers. The two used to correlate. They don’t reliably anymore, and that’s not an accident, it’s a design choice, made by people optimising for something that has nothing to do with the craft.

So no, this isn’t off topic. It’s the same story I usually tell you, just traced back to where it actually starts.

Twenty-plus years in enterprise tech taught me the same lesson this conversation kept circling back to. Organisations don’t fix structural problems because someone wrote a good memo about them. They fix them when the cost of not fixing them finally outweighs the cost of change. I’ve watched that play out at the scale of a single company, over and over. What’s unsettling is realising the exact same logic is running at civilisational scale, and none of us gets a vote on the timeline.

None of it is inevitable. I want to be clear about that, because doom is an easy story to tell and a lazy one to believe. But it’s not fixing itself on any timeline anyone should feel comfortable about either.

Back to the birds next time. This one just needed saying, and it needed saying honestly, including where it came from.

Except no one calls it mobbing. They call it photography.

Let me be clear about what’s actually happening here. These aren’t wildlife photographers. A real wildlife photographer knows the difference between documenting behaviour and disrupting it. They understand the species they’re working with—barn owls, tawnies, eagle owls—and they know what “disturbance” looks like from the bird’s perspective. They’ve read the literature. They’ve done the scouting. They’ve waited. They’ve failed, gone home empty, and come back the next year with more patience.

The people I’m talking about? They show up with a location tag from Instagram and a shopping list of shots.

Here’s what happens next: they press in, the bird abandons the nest or flushes the fledglings, the whole breeding attempt collapses, and then—this is the part that gets me—they go home and post the image within an hour. Location tagged. Caption optimized. Followed by six identical shots from the next weekend.

And then the next batch of people finds the location and does the same thing.

You want to know what image came out of that? A tight crop photograph of an owl. That’s all. Not a contest winner. Not something that will be published anywhere that matters. Just a shot that looks like a thousand other shots of the same bird, taken on the same perch, by people who’ve never bothered to learn what the bird does when it’s not being chased.

There’s a difference between earning an image and collecting one.

Real wildlife photography asks something of you. It requires you to understand a place deeply enough that the animals treat you like background noise. It means going back to the same territory through multiple seasons. It means watching behavior unfold instead of interrupting it. It means accepting failure as part of the process. That’s competence. That takes years.

What’s happening with these owls is something else entirely. It’s the illusion of competence. It’s the assumption that access + a decent camera = photography. And it relies on a simple bargain: harm the bird, publish the image, move on before anyone notices the nest failed.

Then come the excuses.

I’ve heard them all. “I wasn’t harming anything.” “They’re used to people.” “The birds know better than to abandon their nests.” “I’ve studied this bird for weeks.” (Translation: I was there last weekend and the weekend before.) “I know more about their tolerance levels than the researchers do.”

It’s always the same script. Always. And that repetition tells you something important: these aren’t people making individual judgments based on knowledge. They’re reciting lines they’ve picked up from other people just like them. They’ve never read a paper on barn owl disturbance. They don’t know the difference between habituation and tolerance. They’ve never worked with a conservationist or a licensed ringer or anyone who actually studies these birds. They just know the image matters more than the answer.

And that’s the core of it: they don’t have the education to assess harm. Not formally—most of them haven’t read the ethology literature or the breeding ecology studies. Not self-directed either—they haven’t spent years in the field learning where the line actually sits. They just assume that if the bird didn’t visibly flee, they didn’t do damage. And if that assumption is wrong? Well, they’re already home editing the photograph.

Breeding season isn’t a photo opportunity. It’s a biological necessity.

A barn owl pair has maybe two months to find food, incubate eggs, and fledge chicks before the window closes. A tawny owl’s fledglings are vulnerable for weeks—they can’t fly properly, they’re dependent on the parents. That’s when disturbance does real damage. Subtle disturbance. The kind that doesn’t result in a dramatic nest abandonment you can photograph and feel bad about. The kind where the parents are stressed, the feeding intervals shift, a fledgling doesn’t make it.

And none of these people are winning contests. None of them are getting published by the outlets that actually matter. They’re not adding anything to the body of knowledge about these birds. They’re just... collecting the image.

Here’s what I actually want to know.

How many times do we write this article before someone says enough? Because I’ve written versions of this. Other photographers have written versions of this. Conservationists have written peer-reviewed papers about it. Every spring it happens, every summer there’s a post, and every autumn people nod and agree and do nothing.

And I mean nothing. We don’t name them. We don’t post their images with the context of what they did to get them. We don’t message the venues that host their work. We don’t make it socially costly to be the person who posts location-tagged nest photographs every weekend. We just... write articles. Polite articles. Reasonable articles. Articles that ask people to “make a choice” and “start chasing competence.”

And they ignore them. Because there are no consequences. Because being a bag of shit on Instagram is still just being on Instagram. Because the algorithm rewards the behaviour. Because the people who’d actually call it out are too worried about being seen as gatekeeping.

So here’s the real question: are we willing to actually hold these people accountable, or are we going to keep pretending that one more thoughtful post is going to change minds that clearly don’t want changing?

Because if the answer is we’re just going to keep writing the same thing every year, hoping they develop a conscience they’ve clearly never had, then we can stop pretending this is about education. It’s just about us feeling better about ourselves. We get to be the reasonable ones. They get to keep destroying nests. Everyone goes home satisfied.

So what’s the solution?

It’s not Instagram’s job to solve this. Platforms won’t enforce a rule they can’t monitor, and photographers won’t agree on one they didn’t help write. That’s fantasy. The reality is messier: it depends on you.

If you’re photographing nesting owls, the standard is simple. No approaching active nests. No flushing birds. No location sharing. If you can’t get your shot without crossing that line, then you don’t get the shot. The image isn’t more important than the bird’s ability to breed. Full stop.

And if you’re the person buying these images, watching them rack up likes, sharing them with a location—ask yourself what you’re actually looking at. Is it a photograph of a wild bird? Or is it a record of someone prioritizing a pretty picture over an animal’s survival? Because once you know the difference, it’s hard to unsee.

There are barns and quarries and private permissions where this can be done right. Where photographers work with landowners, respect boundaries, and prove—through their restraint—that they actually understand what they’re photographing. Those people exist. They’re not posting every weekend.

The rest of you need to make a choice: keep chasing the shot, or start chasing competence instead. Because right now, you’re just noise. And the owls can’t afford the distraction.

A very relaxed baby.

I’ve been slow getting this out. Not because it’s complicated — it’s not. I was basking in the creation of a word I really liked. AIarrrhea. Spent more time than I should have just enjoying the landing of it, the way it felt to write, before moving on to the next thing. But here we are.

Here’s what I actually see: Most Wildlife Photographer of the Year winners aren’t shooting on safari. They’re shooting home.

I say that flatly because it matters. The pattern is there in the data, and it contradicts the entire narrative the workshop industry sells. You’ll hear endless talk about “destinations” and “once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.” But the photographers actually winning — the ones whose work gets displayed at the Natural History Museum — are usually the ones who knew a single patch of ground so well they could predict what an animal would do before it did it.

The Pattern Nobody Talks About

Look at the 2024–2025 WPY winners. Shane Gross won overall in 2024 photographing western toad tadpoles in Cedar Lake on Vancouver Island. That’s his home region, British Columbia. He didn’t fly there once; he snorkelled through carpets of lily pads for hours, knowing what he was looking for because he’d been there before. Wim van den Heever took the 2025 grand title with a brown hyena in the Namibia desert — his home territory as a South African photographer.

The Bird Behaviour category — the one you probably care about — went to Qingrong Yang in 2025 with a moment at Yundang Lake in Fujian Province, China. A ladyfish snatching prey from under an egret’s beak. That’s the kind of shot you only get if you know the feeding patterns, the time of day, the season. Jack Zhi won it in 2024 with a young peregrine practicing on a butterfly above its sea cliff nest in Los Angeles. Again: timing that comes from knowing a place, not visiting it.

Then there’s Luca Lorenz. Twenty years old, German, won the Star Award with a portfolio of harbor seals on Heligoland. Not a safari destination. His home waters.

I’m not cherry-picking outliers. This is the consistent pattern. The photographers winning the major categories are masters of a specific place, not globe-trotters collecting exotic checkboxes.

What I Actually Did

When I won with a consumer-grade camera body, I wasn’t winning on equipment. I wasn’t winning on a trip. I was winning because I photographed the same location nearly every single day. Same light windows. Same bird movements. Same perches, same feeding times, same patterns — refined down to the point where a behavior became predictable.

I had the permits. I had the knowledge. I had shown up so often that the birds stopped treating me as a threat. That’s not a weekend visit. That’s not a week-long workshop. That’s earned familiarity.

And yes, I used a pro lens on that consumer body. Gear wasn’t irrelevant. But the winning image wasn’t won because the camera was good. It was won because I knew what to expect when.

The Hide Problem Is Bigger Than People Realize

This is where I’ll say something uncomfortable: a hide — a fixed, constructed setup where animals are habituated to humans — produces photographs that all look the same. Generic. Flat. Because the animals aren’t behaving naturally; they’re performing a routine inside a constructed space. You get a competent image because the animal is predictable. But you also get the same image everyone else gets who’s paid to sit in that hide.

Local knowledge is the opposite. You’re watching real behavior unfold in real conditions. You’re seeing the variation. You’re learning what “normal” looks like so you know when something unusual is happening. A caracal hunting flamingos in the Serengeti — that’s rare. Dennis Stogsdill got that 2025 Behaviour: Mammals award because he’d spent enough time there to recognize that moment as worth photographing. A casual visitor wouldn’t even know that was happening.

Why This Matters Beyond Contests

Here’s the thing most photographers won’t admit: you don’t need to win WPY to care about this. Even if you never enter a competition, your best work will come from the area you frequent most. Not the destination you dream about. Not the place you fly to once every two years. The place you actually know.

Frequency beats destination. Understanding beats novelty.

A garden near your house. A local patch of woodland. A river you can get to in an hour. That’s where you’ll see behavior most people miss because most people don’t stay long enough to see it. You’ll recognize a pattern in movement that only makes sense if you’ve watched the same bird a hundred times. You’ll know the light at 6 AM in February because you’ve been there at 6 AM in February before.

That’s not poetic. That’s empirical. And it shows in the work.

The Honest Answer to “But Exotic Locations Are Better”

They are. But only if you commit to them.

A week on safari is tourism with a camera. A month is still tourism. You’ll get decent images because exotic locations are visually compelling. But you won’t get the behavioral insight. You won’t predict. You’ll react, and you’ll get what’s obvious.

Go on trips. But go with photographers you genuinely respect. Go to learn from someone whose work you actually value, not to collect passport stamps or get a winning image. A week in the Mara with someone who knows what they’re doing — someone who’s built their own expertise — teaches you something real. You’ll see how they move, how they predict, what they prioritize. You’ll build skills watching someone who’s earned them.

What doesn’t work is the false promise. Don’t pretend a workshop trip is a substitute for the slow work of mastering a local patch. And don’t go expecting a winning image. Go for the skills. Go for the experience of learning from someone good. Go because you respect how they think.

The photographers winning contests are the ones who chose depth over breadth. Repetition over novelty. One place understood completely rather than ten places understood casually.

What You Actually Need to Do

Pick a patch. Not the most photogenic patch. Not the most exotic. Somewhere you can get to regularly. Somewhere you can visit in different seasons, different weather, different light.

Photograph it constantly. Not obsessively — just consistently. Build a relationship with it. Learn what lives there, when they move, what they eat, how they behave when it rains versus when it’s clear. Understand the place so completely that you stop thinking about composition and start thinking about prediction.

Your first hundred visits will feel repetitive. Your second hundred will start to feel like you’re learning a language. By your third hundred, you’ll see moments other people don’t even recognize as moments.

That’s when your best work happens.

And that’s where the WPY winners actually come from.

I scrolled through my Instagram feed yesterday and had this moment of dread. You know that feeling when you recognise a pattern and can’t unsee it? Yeah. That.

Post after post: a slightly soft-focus shot of a sparrow in someone’s garden, paired with a caption that reads like a rejected TED talk. “The interplay of shadow and luminescence reveals the quiet majesty of the often-overlooked.” It’s a fucking sparrow. In Yorkshire. At 3 p.m.

And the thing is—I can feel the AI. You know what AI sounds like? It sounds like someone who’s never actually been outside with a camera, trying to sound like they have. It’s all “golden hour embraces” and “patient observation yields revelation” and zero actual observation. Just... word soup.

But here’s what really got me: the photo is as mediocre as the caption.

Let me be clear about something: this isn’t editing. This is fabrication.

The Problem Has a Name

AIarrrhea (noun): When an AI writes your Instagram caption and it shows. The uncontrolled discharge of elaborate, syntactically impressive, completely hollow text paired with mediocre photographs. It’s what happens when you decide your actual thoughts aren’t fancy enough, so you feed your image to a chatbot and let it generate three paragraphs of thesaurus-activated nonsense.

The dead giveaway? Nobody talks like that. Real photographers—even the verbose ones—don’t describe their work in AI-generated adjectives. When you see it, you just know. The caption sounds like it was written by someone who has read about photography but has never actually stood in a forest at dawn waiting for light.

And then you look at the image. And you realise: yeah. That checks out.

Why This Matters

Here’s what you’re actually doing when you farm out your voice to an AI: you’re telling your followers that you don’t trust them enough to be honest. You’re saying your actual thoughts—the real, specific, sometimes clumsy observations you made while you were out there in the field—aren’t good enough. So you substitute something that sounds authoritative instead.

Why It Matters (Or: What You’re Actually Saying)

When you ask an AI to write your caption, you’re basically saying: “I don’t trust my own voice. I don’t think what I actually thought about this moment is good enough. So I’m going to feed it through a machine and hope nobody notices.”

Spoiler: they notice.

Your followers didn’t follow you to hear a chatbot’s impression of what a thoughtful photographer might sound like. They followed you because you saw something and captured it and had thoughts about it. Real thoughts. Clumsy thoughts. Confused thoughts. Disagreeable thoughts. Whatever—just yours.

There’s a weird irony here. The more elaborate the AI caption, the more obvious the laziness becomes. Because no actual photographer, standing in the field with a camera, thinks in terms of “the delicate interplay of shadow and luminescence.” They think: Shit, the light just got better. Did I get it? Did I get it? That’s the real thought. That’s what people want to read.

The Real Problem

The photographers I see doing this aren’t victims of a caption-writing problem. They have a work problem. They haven’t learned to sit with light. Won’t wait for the right moment. Haven’t spent enough time in the same place to understand it. So they’re compensating with fancy words.

And here’s the thing: you can tell. Because the image doesn’t lie. A technically mediocre, compositionally uninteresting photograph is still a technically mediocre, compositionally uninteresting photograph, no matter how much you dress it up in prose about “capturing the essence of being.”

The gap between the caption and the photo is actually pretty funny if you stop and think about it. A soft-focus robin in someone’s garden, with text that makes it sound like a profound meditation on mortality. A snapshot of a common bird in harsh midday light, paired with paragraphs about “patient observation and the gift of witnessing.”

The audience feels it. They look at the image, read the caption, and think: Yeah. Something’s off here. This doesn’t match.

That mismatch? That’s AIarrrhea in action. I am so going to over use this word….

The Pattern

Here’s what I’ve learned: shortcuts in one place reveal shortcuts everywhere. When you outsource your voice to an AI, you’re basically saying: “Trying is optional. I just need it to sound good.”

That mindset doesn’t stop at captions. It bleeds into everything. You skip the location research. You don’t bother learning manual focus. You shoot in auto mode and hope the algorithm figures it out. You collect gear instead of developing an eye. Because if you can fake the caption, why not fake the rest?

The photographers I actually respect—the ones whose work is undeniably solid—don’t do this. They write in their own clumsy voice. Their compositions are intentional, sometimes awkward, but theirs. They’ve put in the hours. It shows in both the photo and the words.

And honestly? That version is so much more interesting to follow.

Own It. Actually Own It.

So here’s my challenge: write your own captions. Yes, they’ll be imperfect. Sometimes you’ll use the wrong word. Sometimes you’ll contradict yourself. Sometimes you’ll sound a bit rough around the edges.

Perfect.

That’s what makes it real. That’s what makes people actually believe you when you post a photo. Not because it’s polished. But because it’s yours—rough edges and all.

Your voice is the only thing a chatbot can’t generate. Don’t waste it.

The last post clearly touched a nerve. I got dozens of messages from photographers and guides I respect—people who’ve been in this for decades—all saying the same thing: yes, this is exactly the problem, and we’ve been frustrated about it for years.

What came through in those conversations was something deeper than just criticism. It was clarity about what actually works. And it’s not another workshop. It’s mentorship.

The Difference That Actually Matters

A workshop is a transaction. You show up for a week or a weekend, you follow an itinerary, you learn some general principles about composition or field craft, and then you leave. The instruction is broad. It has to be. There are six other people there with six different problems.

Mentorship is different. It’s sustained. It’s personal. It’s built entirely around your specific gaps—not the gaps you think you have, but the ones someone with real experience can actually see.

A mentor looks at your work and says: this is what you’re missing, and here’s why it matters, and here’s how you fix it. Then they check your work again three months later. Then six months. They know your learning curve. They know where you get stuck. They can spot the moment you’re about to hit a ceiling and push you past it, because they’ve seen it a hundred times before.

A workshop instructor says: here’s composition, here’s light, here’s how to approach animals. Then everyone goes home and figures it out (or doesn’t).

Why This Matters

Here’s what I’ve learned from the mentors who shaped me: the real breakthroughs in photography don’t happen in a group. They happen in the space between feedback and your next attempt. They happen when someone who knows your work intimately can say: you’re solving this the wrong way, and I know you’re solving it that way because I’ve watched you do it five times now.

That takes time. That takes attention. That takes a mentor who actually cares whether you improve, not just whether you book the next tour.

A workshop can teach you technique. It can show you where to stand. It can tell you about shutter speed and aperture and when to use them.

But mentorship teaches you why. It teaches you philosophy. It teaches you to see the problem before it becomes a problem. It teaches you to think like a photographer instead of follow instructions like a tourist.

The Real Skill Transfer

I’ve taken workshops. Some were excellent. But the photographers I know who genuinely broke through—who went from competent to actually good—all have the same story: they found someone who believed they could improve, and that person spent years holding them to a higher standard.

Mentorship scales differently than workshops. You can’t mentor fifty people a year and do it well. You mentor five. Maybe eight. And those five people actually become better photographers. They don’t just have nice memories of a trip.

The workshops? Most people go home and revert. They don’t have the structure to push past the discomfort. They don’t have someone checking their work. They don’t have the relationship that makes them want to keep improving.

The Pushback You’ll Hear

I know what comes next. The people running the current workshop economy will say this is elitist. That mentorship is only for the privileged few. That it’s gatekeeping.

They’ll say it without actually having an argument. They’ll just get defensive, because what they’re really hearing is: what you’re offering isn’t good enough. And they know it. They know their workshops are a hustle, not a genuine education. They know they’re not capable of the depth that real mentorship requires.

So they’ll attack the idea instead of defending their own practice. They’ll say: but everyone deserves access, as if a mediocre workshop at a low price is somehow better than no workshop at all. (It’s not. It wastes your money and your time and gives you false confidence that you’ve actually learned something.)

The Commodification Problem

Here’s what’s actually happening: wildlife photography has been turned into a commodity. Safaris are marketed as “photography workshops.” Travel agents with cameras are calling themselves educators. Nice trips are being sold as education.

There’s nothing wrong with a safari. There’s nothing wrong with showing people how you work in the field. But there’s a massive difference between a nice trip where you learn some things and actual education that changes how someone photographs.

The market has collapsed these two things into one offering. Everyone’s running a “workshop.” Everyone’s an “educator.” And the supply of people doing actual education—deep, sustained, work-focused mentorship—has basically disappeared. The demand is enormous. People want to genuinely improve. But they can’t find it, because it’s buried under an avalanche of commodified trips.

You Can’t Google Your Way Into Knowledge

Here’s what separates a real educator from someone pretending to be one: they’ve actually done the work. They’ve lived through the problems they’re trying to solve. They know why certain approaches fail because they’ve failed at them. They understand the ethos—not because they read it somewhere, but because they’ve built it through years of field time and ethical decisions made under pressure.

A fake educator can Google “wildlife photography ethics” and compile a list. They can find a framework online and present it. But they can’t tell you what it feels like to choose not to take a shot because the animal’s stressed. They can’t explain why you walk away from a situation because they’ve never been in one that mattered enough to teach them. They can’t put the philosophy into practice because they’ve never had to live by it.

A real educator can. They’ve made those choices. They’ve paid the price for getting it wrong. They know the difference between knowing something and knowing something—the kind of knowledge that comes from doing it, failing, and doing it better.

And that’s the gap. The market is flooded with people who can recite ideas. The supply of people who can actually embody them—who have the competence and the lived experience to back up what they’re teaching—is almost nonexistent.

What Needs to Change

The photography community needs to stop conflating a safari with education. A safari is valuable. It’s an experience. You see amazing wildlife. You take good photos. You go home happy. That’s fine. Call it what it is.

But education—real education—is different. It’s sustained. It’s personal. It’s built around your specific work and your specific gaps. It requires a mentor who’s invested in your improvement over years, not weeks.

If you want to improve, find a mentor. Someone who’s actually better than you. Someone who’s been doing this long enough that they’ve hit every wall you’re about to hit, and they know how to help you through it. Someone who will push you when you’re comfortable and hold you accountable when you’re coasting.

And if you’re thinking about taking people into the field? Do it. Safaris are great. Show people what you do. But don’t pretend it’s education if it isn’t. Don’t call yourself an educator if you’re just a travel agent with a camera.

And if you genuinely want to educate someone? Find someone who wants to actually improve, and commit to their improvement for years. That’s the work. That’s the only thing that actually changes people.

Everything else is just a nice trip with a camera—which is fine, as long as you’re honest about it.

Coaching & Contest Is Coming

I’ve spent the last six months building something I’ve wanted to offer for years: a mentorship programme that doesn’t pretend to be what it isn’t.

It’s not a course. It’s not a portfolio review service. It’s not a shortcut.

Coaching & Contest is twelve months of real work designed around a single truth: contest-ready images come from genuine quality in the images themselves. Everything we do is a process that builds that quality.

Four phases. Thirteen modules. A nine-dimension rubric. Monthly critique. Live sessions where we talk through your editing decisions and your approach. The same file lives in the system for twelve months—we refine it, prune it, build a coherent body of work.

You’ll learn what the rubric means when you’re deciding whether an image submits. You’ll edit ruthlessly, because you’ll know why. You’ll study which contests reward the work you’re actually doing. You’ll understand the difference between a nice shot and a contest-strong image. By month twelve, you’ll have submitted images you can defend, placed or learned precisely what to do differently, and built a portfolio you genuinely stand behind.

Three tiers. Shortlists (six months). Core Mentorship (twelve months, full programme). Premium (twelve months, more direct support). I’m capping mentees at 37 a year.

This isn’t for the faint of heart. You need to be willing to cut images you love but don’t work. You need to trust the process and be wrong sometimes.

But if you’re serious—if you know the problem isn’t your camera but you’re not sure what it is, if you’ve entered contests and felt like you were throwing things at a wall—this is for you. Watch this space.

There’s a thing happening in wildlife photography right now that I find both predictable and sort of darkly funny. People with a few years of half-decent shots under their belt are launching “workshops” and “guided tours,” and because the barrier to entry is basically zero—you need a camera, confidence, and a willingness to tell people you know what you’re doing—the space has become crowded with people who absolutely do not.

That’s not inherently the problem. Competition is fine. Ambition is fine.

The problem is what happens next: they realise they’re all chasing the same tiny pool of customers, and instead of doing the actual work—spending a decade in the field, building real knowledge, earning legitimacy—they start fighting with each other like seagulls over chips.

You Need to Earn the Right to Teach

Here’s the thing that nobody wants to hear: being a decent wildlife photographer does not make you qualified to teach wildlife photography. And being able to take people on a walk does not make you a guide.

Teaching requires a completely different skill set. You need to understand composition well enough to see what’s wrong with someone else’s shot and explain it in a way that sticks. You need the confidence that comes from years of field time—enough that you’re not defensive when someone questions your advice. You need ethics embedded so deeply that you don’t have to think about them; they’re just what you do. And you need the humility to know what you don’t know and say so.

Most of the people trying to monetise wildlife photography education right now have maybe five years of experience. Some have less. They’re teaching because the algorithm promised them they could, or because they had a good season and thought that meant something, or because they looked around and saw someone else doing it and thought: why not me?

The answer, often, is: because you’re not ready.

The Desperation Spiral

What makes this funny—sad-funny, but funny—is what happens when two or three of these people are circling the same customer base. They start competing. Not on quality. Not on what they can actually teach. On price, on marketing noise, on whatever edge they can manufacture.

And then, inevitably, someone gets angry. Someone feels threatened. Someone makes a comment online, or there’s a confrontation at a known hotspot, or both of them are suddenly talking about the other one in a way that makes it crystal clear: they’re not fighting about what’s best for students, or for wildlife, or for the integrity of the craft. They’re fighting because they’re scared.

They’re scared because they know, on some level, that they don’t actually belong there.

And they should be. Not in a cruel way. But in the way that someone should feel fear when they’re pretending to be an expert in something they’ve barely learned.

The Problem It Creates

Here’s what bothers me about this: it pollutes the space for people who are actually doing the work.

A genuine educator—someone who’s spent twenty years in the field, who knows how to read light and animal behaviour and the legal and ethical landscape—gets lumped in with the noise. Students can’t tell the difference. The price gets undercut by someone who doesn’t understand the value of what they’re selling. And the whole thing starts to look like a con.

Worse, the wildlife suffers. People who don’t have the field knowledge or the ethical framework are taking groups to sensitive areas, disturbing nesting birds, getting too close, not respecting the animal’s welfare, because they don’t know any better. And they don’t care enough to learn.

What Actually Happens

The good educators keep working. They don’t fight. They don’t need to. Their reputation is built on years of consistent, competent, honest work, and students find them because the work speaks. They’re booked out. They can pick their clients. They don’t have time to argue with anyone on the internet.

The pretenders? Some of them will burn out. Some will get lucky and actually learn something and eventually become legitimate. And some will keep fighting each other for scraps, wondering why it’s so hard to make this work, never quite admitting that the problem was always them.

The thing is: you can’t workshop your way into legitimacy. You can’t market yourself into it. You can’t undercut the price until someone buys it. You have to actually earn it. In the field. Over time. By knowing more than you did yesterday, and being honest about what you still don’t know.

Until you do that, you’re not a wildlife photography educator. You’re someone with a camera and a spreadsheet.

And if you’re fighting with another person with a camera and a spreadsheet over who gets to be the one, you’ve already lost the plot entirely.

The Comfort Zone Trap

Let me be clear about something: I see this all the time. Photographers out in the field with capable cameras, interesting light, and absolutely nothing to show for it. Same aperture, same shutter speed, same focal length. Day after day. They’re not adapting to conditions—they’re hiding in them.

It’s not laziness, exactly. It’s fear dressed up as consistency.

The difference between a photographer who’s learning and one who’s stalled is usually this: one takes risks, the other takes the same shot over and over and calls it practice.

The Settings Become the Excuse

You know what I hear? “I shoot at f/5.6 and 1/1000th because that’s what works.” And yeah, maybe it does—for one light, one subject, one moment. But the field isn’t one moment. It’s constantly changing: clouds moving in, a bird dropping lower in scrub, golden hour turning coppery, mist rolling across the plains. A photographer worth anything adjusts. A photographer stuck in settings? They just wait for conditions to match their dial.

The camera doesn’t run the shoot. You do.

I spent twenty years in tech watching people cling to what they knew. Same processes, same tools, same excuses. “It’s what we’ve always done.” Growth stopped the moment they stopped questioning it. Photography’s the same. You can’t learn depth of field if you never change your aperture. You can’t master shutter speed if you’re locked into one number. You can’t understand light if you’re not willing to shoot into it, bracket it, fail with it.

Creativity Doesn’t Live in Your Favourite F-Stop

I’ve heard someone say their favourite aperture is f/5.0. And yeah, you could see it in their work. Every frame, regardless of subject, regardless of light, regardless of moment—f/5.0. The subjects were stunning. The behaviour was there. The light was doing interesting things. None of it mattered. The work was bland. Mediocre sameness. Safe, consistent, utterly forgettable mediocrity.

That’s what happens when the camera settings run you instead of the other way around.

Creativity isn’t a thing that lives in your comfort zone. It lives in the demands of the moment. That moment might ask for f/2.0 to crush the background into submission. It might ask for f/16 to render every blade of grass sharp because the composition demands it. It might ask for something in between that you’ve never tried before. If your answer is always the same number, you’re not being creative. You’re being repetitive.

There’s expensive camera gear out there—thousands spent on precision lenses, pro bodies, weather sealing. I’ve seen photographers with that exact setup treat it like a very expensive point-and-shoot. Same settings dialled in on day one, never touched again. All that capability, all that investment, reduced to a single aperture, a single shutter speed, a single way of seeing. It’s almost obscene.

You don’t spend that kind of money to limit yourself. You spend it to have options. And options only matter if you use them.

Risk Looks Like Mistakes

Here’s what separates someone who photographs for five years from someone who learns for five years: the second person has a folder full of failures. Blown highlights they pushed for. Soft frames they took at 1/125th because the light demanded it and the risk was worth it. Images where they changed everything because the moment required it.

The first person has a folder of safe, consistent, interchangeable frames.

When you lock your settings and refuse to adjust, you’re not being disciplined—you’re being cautious. And caution is the enemy of growth. It feels safe. It is safe. It just doesn’t get you anywhere.

I’ve watched photographers in the Mara with incredible light and interesting behaviour decide not to shoot because their settings weren’t “right.” That’s not professionalism. That’s the settings running the photographer.

You Learn at the Edge

Every photographer I respect—and I mean respect, not follow—got there by doing the uncomfortable thing. Shooting wide open in bright sun and managing the consequences. Pushing ISO into the grain because the moment was worth it. Dropping shutter speed and nailing focus because the behaviour demanded speed over safety.

That’s not recklessness. That’s informed decision-making. You know the rules well enough to break them deliberately.

But you can’t break rules you won’t examine. And you won’t examine them if your settings are locked down like a checkbox list.

Own the Decision

Here’s the thing: I’m not saying there’s a right way to photograph. I’m saying there’s a conscious way and an unconscious way. Conscious is when you’ve tested your settings, know why you’re using them, and change them because the situation demands it. Unconscious is when you’ve defaulted into a rhythm and never questioned it.

One grows. One stagnates.

Go out tomorrow and break your own rules. Shoot something at settings you’d normally consider wrong. Let yourself fail. Learn what happens at the edge of your comfort zone instead of cementing yourself in it.

Because the field doesn’t care about your consistency. It cares about whether you were brave enough to adapt.

I’ve been photographing wildlife for long enough to watch the same quiet places get buried under footfall, noise, and rubbish. I’ve also been on the receiving end of “just tell me where you saw that”—as if ten years of field time should come with a GPS coordinate attached.

There’s a real conversation to have here. But it’s not about gatekeeping. It’s about what you’re actually protecting, and why. Scott Keys out a great video on this topic, have a look for it.

Two different things wear the same name

Gatekeeping usually means keeping people out. Creating an exclusive club. Deciding who deserves access and who doesn’t. It’s about hierarchy and control. And yes, that happens in wildlife photography—the gatekeeping that’s rooted in ego, status, or just plain snobbery. That’s worth calling out.

Location protection is different. It’s about recognising that some places can’t handle what happens when they go viral.

The confusion matters because they sound the same until you actually look at them. One is about the people. The other is about the place and the wildlife in it.

What happens when a spot blows up

I’ve been to places the day after they hit Instagram. You can read it in the landscape. Trampled banks where animals drink. Nesting sites with a clear perimeter of footprints. Rubbish tucked into reeds because people assume it’s okay here. Parking overflow on verges that used to be habitat.

The wildlife doesn’t stay. Why would it? It’s stressed, disturbed, sometimes nesting birds abandon. The very thing that made the place worth photographing—the quietness, the habituation, the chance of seeing something wild—that disappears first.

And then you get the restrictions. The ropes. The rangers. The access limits. The place becomes less wild, not more.

That’s not gatekeeping. That’s consequence.

When I choose not to share a location, it’s rarely about you. It’s about whether that place can survive being shared. Some can. Plenty can’t.

The harder question: whose spot is it anyway?

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable, because honest people will admit mixed motives.

Yes, some of my reluctance to share is conservation. I genuinely believe certain places need quiet. But some of it is also personal. I’ve spent years finding and refining spots. I’ve invested time, effort, and solitude into knowing how the light falls at different times of year, where animals move, how to position myself without disturbing them. That knowledge matters to me. Handing it over to strangers online doesn’t feel like generosity—it feels like giving away something I’ve earned.

So let me ask directly: who’s being selfish? The photographer who doesn’t broadcast coordinates, or the person who does minimal legwork and demands exact locations from strangers on the internet?

Both can be true. Both can be self-interested. But they’re not equivalent. One is about protecting something you’ve invested in and something wild that depends on quiet. The other is about wanting a shortcut to someone else’s work.

There’s no obligation to give away years of knowledge because someone asks. That’s just entitlement dressed up as community spirit.

Inclusion doesn’t require GPS pins

This is where I think the real opportunity sits. You can open doors without broadcasting addresses.

Teach people to read habitat. Show them why birds choose particular perches, how light changes across seasons, what soil type tells you about water access. Help them understand that discovery—finding something themselves—makes it matter more than being handed coordinates. Skills travel. GPS pins die the moment they’re shared.

Some of my best spots came from learning to see the landscape differently, not from asking around. The joy of that is different. It’s harder. It’s also deeper.

You can welcome people into wildlife and photography and community without putting a spotlight on places that can’t handle it. That’s not gatekeeping. That’s stewardship.

A question worth asking before you post

Before you share that location photo with the exact spot tagged, ask yourself something: What happens if this place becomes popular?

Not “will people enjoy it.” Of course they will. But what happens to the habitat? To the animals? To your ability to return and find it quiet again? To people coming after you?

Sometimes the answer is fine—that place is robust, it’s already known, it can take it. Share away.

Sometimes the answer is “it would change.” And then you have to decide what matters more: the credit for knowing the spot, or the spot itself staying the way it is.

Neither answer makes you a bad person. But one makes you honest about your choice, and the other lets you pretend it’s community spirit when it’s really just exposure.

The wildlife doesn’t care about your followers. It only cares about being left alone.

There’s a difference between investment and avoidance. A big one.

I see it constantly — photographers dropping thousands on new bodies, lenses, travel, paid hide access. All before they’ve genuinely pushed what they already own. It’s not about the gear being insufficient. It’s about the thinking being lazy.

Here’s what I know: my Wildlife Photographer of the Year image was shot on a Canon R7. A consumer-grade body. Yes, with professional glass — that lens matters — but the camera itself was decidedly not the limiting factor. The limiting factor was me. Twenty years earlier, it would have been me again. Gear would have changed nothing.

The Real Upgrade

Skills compound. Gear doesn’t.

Spend three months learning light, composition, and animal behaviour on your local patch, and you’ll see a tangible shift in your work. Buy a new camera and you’ll see... a new camera. You’ll make the same mistakes faster. Better sensor won’t fix your timing. Faster autofocus won’t teach you patience.

Your local area — whether that’s a woodland twenty minutes from home or a coastal reserve you can visit weekly — is where real learning happens. You return to the same places. You watch the same birds across seasons. You learn when they’re active, where they position themselves, how light moves through that space across the year. You make mistakes in familiar territory, and mistakes teach faster than anything else.

Most WPY winners aren’t making their impact from expensive expeditions. They’re making it from knowing their patch so thoroughly that when the light, the moment, and the subject align, they’re ready. That readiness isn’t bought. It’s earned.

The Hide Lie

Paid hides are the clearest example of this backwards thinking.

You’re paying someone else to position you, often in front of habituated animals, sometimes with bait or setup involved. You’re not learning where animals naturally occur or how to approach them ethically. You’re not solving problems — you’re outsourcing them. And you’re doing damage. Habituation changes behaviour. Repeated disturbance stresses wildlife. The animals suffer so you can get an easier shot.

Worse, you’re training yourself that convenience equals competence. It doesn’t. Every image from a hide is an image you couldn’t have earned in the field. And you know it.

The skill you should be upgrading is the one that lets you find, approach, and photograph wildlife on its own terms. That’s not available for hire.

Push Your Current Kit to Its Limits

Before you spend, ask yourself honestly: have you truly exhausted what you’re holding right now?

Have you shot in every light condition your location offers? Have you spent time understanding your autofocus system deeply enough to know when to trust it and when to override it? Have you tested your lens’s sweet spot under pressure, or are you still working within a comfort zone? Have you studied how your sensor handles shadow recovery, or are you guessing?

Most photographers haven’t. They hit a plateau that feels like a gear problem when it’s actually a competence problem. New gear feels like progress. It’s not. It’s procrastination in expensive form.

My R7 taught me that. Before WPY, I’d owned far more sophisticated bodies. None of them made me better because I wasn’t better yet. The R7 wasn’t special — my approach to using it was.

Look At What You’re Actually Shooting

Here’s another habit worth breaking: the blasting approach.

Get out there. See something. Start shooting. Fire frames until something sticks. That’s not photography. That’s hope dressed up as work.

Real attention looks different. You arrive. You spend time looking — not through the viewfinder, but at the actual space. You notice where light falls. You watch how the subject moves. You think about why you’re making this image and what would make it matter. Then you shoot.

Slow down enough to actually see. The world doesn’t owe you an image just because you showed up with expensive glass.

Find Real Mentors, Not Social Media Feedback

Social media is an echo chamber. Hearts and comments reward novelty, not craft. They reward the bright, the unusual, the technically impressive — often at the expense of the honest.

Find photographers you respect. Real ones. People who know the difference between a good image and a sharp image. People who understand ethics in the field and can articulate why they make the choices they do. Then ask them to critique your work seriously. Not cheerfully. Seriously.

A mentor who tells you when your composition is weak is worth infinitely more than a thousand likes on work that’s technically sound but artistically lazy.

The Simple Truth

Upgrade your skills. Do it locally. Do it repeatedly. Do it with intention.

Your gear will be fine. Your local patch will teach you more than anywhere else. Your mentors will push you further than any camera ever could. And when you’re finally ready — when your skill has genuinely outpaced your equipment — you’ll know exactly what to buy, and you’ll use it properly.

Until then, stop looking for shortcuts. They don’t exist.

Let’s be honest. You want to be a wildlife photographer. You’ve scrolled through Instagram. You’ve seen those pristine shots of big cats, epic bird moments, golden hour perfection. You think: I could do that. Maybe you drop three grand on a decent mirrorless camera and a 100–400mm lens. Maybe you book a week in a hide somewhere. You show up, sit in the dark, and wait for the animals to do their thing.

Then you go home with a hard drive full of images. Some are sharp. Some are properly exposed. Maybe one or two are actually good.

And you think you’ve learned something.

You haven’t.

The Shortcut Trap

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: shortcuts in wildlife photography don’t exist. But we’re all desperate to find them.

The shortcut mentality goes like this:

“If I just get to the right place at the right time, with the right gear, the right lighting, the right subject in front of me—then I’ll get good photos. Then I’ll be a real photographer.”

Wrong on every level.

That mentality keeps you broke, frustrated, and fundamentally stuck. Because it’s built on a lie: that photography is about output—collecting pretty pictures. It’s not. Photography is about seeing. And you can’t buy that. You can’t shortcut your way to it. You have to earn it, one failed frame at a time.

Why Hides Are a Dead End

Now, let me be clear: hides aren’t evil. Professional wildlife photographers use them. Conservation hides serve a genuine purpose. But if you’re using a hide as your primary learning tool, you’re crippling yourself.

Here’s why:

1. You’re not hunting. You’re waiting.

In a hide, the subject is pre-positioned. The frame is given to you. The challenge isn’t “How do I find and position myself to capture this animal behaving naturally?” It’s “Can I press the shutter fast enough while this creature stands in front of me?”

That’s not wildlife photography. That’s technical execution. And technical execution is maybe 30% of what makes a great wildlife image.

The other 70%? Understanding animal behaviour. Predicting movement. Reading light. Positioning yourself in the landscape. Failing catastrophically and figuring out why. Learning to see something worth photographing before you raise the camera.

2. You’re developing the wrong habits.

Hide shooting teaches you to be passive. Sit down. Wait. Hope. React when something happens.

Real wildlife photography teaches you to be active. Move. Look. Fail. Adapt. Investigate. Stay curious about what you might see next, not what’s already in front of you.

When you spend three hundred hours in a hide shooting preened subjects, you’re training your brain to expect curated moments. But the actual natural world doesn’t curate anything. It’s messy, unpredictable, and 90% of what you encounter will be boring, distant, or completely unexpected.

3. You’re not learning composition.

In a hide, composition is accident and restriction. The bird is where it is. The light is what it is. You adapt your frame to fit what’s there.

Out in the landscape, you choose the frame. You move ten metres and everything changes. The light relationship shifts. The background becomes a story or a distraction. The subject exists in context—foreground, middle ground, depth, edge placement. You learn that a technically perfect shot of a mediocre composition is just a technically perfect mediocre shot.

Hides strip away 90% of the compositional decisions you need to learn.

Why Failure Is Your Best Teacher

Now let’s talk about failure, because this is where the real magic happens.

You go out at dawn. The light is wrong. The wind is against you. The animals are skittish or absent. You spend six hours seeing three birds, none of them within 300 metres. You get nothing. Nothing at all.

You failed.

Great. That’s where the learning starts.

Because now you’re asking better questions:

Why were the birds so skittish? (You learn about approach angle, wind direction, human silhouette.)

Why were they in that location and not here? (You learn habitat, food sources, seasonal patterns.)

What would I have done differently? (You start building intuition about where to position yourself before the light even rises.)

What did I notice that I’ve never seen before? (This is the big one. Curiosity.)

When you get failure at scale—real, painful, frame-empty failure—something shifts. You stop chasing the shot. You start chasing the observation. You start noticing the small things: a bird’s alarm call pattern, the way light hits water at a specific angle, how predators move differently in open terrain versus scrub.

You start seeing.

And that’s when your photography changes.

Getting Out and Looking

Here’s what actually develops a wildlife photographer:

Thousands of hours outdoors. Not in a controlled environment. In the real world. Where the light is unpredictable. Where subjects are distant or absent. Where you have to problem-solve on the fly.

Repeated failure at recognizing what’s worth photographing. Most of what you see won’t be. A majority of what you shoot will be forgettable. But every now and then, you’ll notice something—a moment of behaviour, a light quality, an interaction—that stops you. That’s the muscle you’re building. Not your trigger finger. Your seeing.

Active positioning, not passive waiting. Get yourself into the landscape. Move. Read the wind. Watch where birds are arriving from and departing to. Position yourself not for what’s in front of you, but for what might come next. This is the difference between taking pictures and making photographs.

Accepting the season, the time, the conditions—not fighting them. Bad light? That’s teaching you. Rain? That’s teaching you. No subjects showing up? That’s teaching you where they’re not. Over months and years, you build a real understanding of how the natural world actually works.

Developing your own eye. When you’re constantly forced to make your own decisions about composition, framing, and what’s worth shooting, you start to develop personal visual language. Your images start to look like you, not like a hundred other photographers who shot the same hide, the same angle, the same moment.

The Real Timeline

Let’s talk about time, because this is the bit nobody wants to hear.

You’re not going to be good at wildlife photography in a year. Probably not in two years. Three years of serious, weekly practice? You might be competent. Five years of constant engagement? You’re approaching real skill. Ten thousand hours? Then you might be genuinely exceptional.

That’s not a shortcut. That’s the actual timeline.

Every photographer you admire has put in that work. Every single one. They’ve failed thousands of times. They’ve forgotten shots. They’ve blown exposures. They’ve positioned themselves wrong. They’ve spent dawn-to-dusk days and come home with nothing.

And each failure has built their eye.

The hide seduces you with the promise of skipping that. “Just go here, sit down, and get good images.” It’s a lie. You’re buying pictures, not developing photography.

The Only Shortcut That Works

Here’s the one thing that actually accelerates your learning: deliberate practice with feedback.

Not random practice. Not casual weekends. Deliberate practice: showing up consistently, with a specific focus, analyzing what worked and what didn’t, adjusting your approach, and doing it again.

Go out with a question. “Where are the woodpeckers in this habitat?” Spend a morning looking for the answer, not for the shot. Take notes. Observe. Come back and check your hypothesis. Over weeks, you’ll have a real understanding of woodpecker ecology in your area.

Next week, a new question. “What’s the light quality at this time, in this location?” Shoot the same scene a hundred times. Watch how it changes. Learn the light.

Next week, focus on composition with a specific species. How do you frame it in context? What’s the story?

This is how you actually learn. Not faster, but smarter. Focused. Purposeful. And yes, still full of failure.

The Payoff

Here’s what happens when you put in the real work:

You start seeing things other photographers miss. Not because your camera is better. Because your eyes are better. You notice a bird’s posture that suggests a meal’s coming. You recognize that light quality 40 minutes before sunrise that means the day will be exceptional. You position yourself not where the action is, but where it’s about to be.

You develop a personal visual language. Your images look like you, not like every other person with a 100–400 and a hide booking.

You take risks. You try compositions that might not work. You chase light and behaviour that fascinates you, not what’s been pre-packaged for Instagram.

And yes—you get images. Real, meaningful images. Not because you got lucky or booked the right hide, but because you’ve learned to see.

So What Now?

Stop looking for the shortcut. Delete the Pinterest boards of “best wildlife photography locations.” Book fewer hides, not more.

Instead: Pick a location 20 minutes from your house. Go there. For the next year, go every week. Rain, wind, wrong light, no animals—doesn’t matter. Watch it change through seasons. Learn it. Fail spectacularly. Succeed occasionally. Build your intuition.

Study animal behaviour through observation and reading, not through watching YouTube tutorials about “the best time to photograph eagles.”

Focus on composition through failure. Shoot the same subject a hundred times. Bad light, good light, all of it. Learn where you want to stand.

Accept that you’re not going to be good at this quickly. And that’s where the real satisfaction comes from—the slow accumulation of thousands of small decisions, failures, and observations that actually make you a photographer.

The shortcut doesn’t exist. But the path is clear.

It just takes everything you’ve got.

There’s an old adage that says you can’t see your reflection in boiling water. It’s a metaphor for anger—that state where you’re so fired up, so turbulent, that clarity becomes impossible. You can’t think straight. You can’t see yourself. You’re just... boiling.

When you calm down, though? The water settles. Your reflection reappears. Clarity returns.

That’s a lesson worth taking with you through everything in life—not just photography, though obviously that’s what this is about. Everything.

Why I Upset People (And Why It Matters)

I know I get a lot of people upset. That’s not because I thrive on rage or because I’m some edgelord chasing engagement. The opposite, actually. I’m quite calm. And it’s precisely that calmness that allows me to formulate ideas that challenge people, that make them think.

“But why would you actively upset someone to get them to think?” Fair question.

It’s simple: people have become content-fed zombies.

We’ve all been algorithmically spoon-fed our entire lives. Everything you see, hear, and read has been filtered through a system designed to show you what you want to see, not what you need to hear. If that spoon delivers something that tastes bad, you spit it out and cry about how unconstructive it was.

Critical feedback? Challenging ideas? These don’t arrive on your feed by design. They arrive by accident.

The Mango Fly Larva of Thought

Here’s the thing about getting upset: it’s often a sign that something’s landed. And that something might be true.

When someone gets bothered by what you’re doing—genuinely bothered, not just momentarily annoyed—it means you’ve given them something to sit with. Something that doesn’t fit neatly into their comfortable narrative. It gets under their skin like a mango fly larva or a tapeworm. It’s there, silently growing, a persistent reminder.

Then, if they ever calm down, they have a choice: block it out and retreat into their echo chamber, or sit with it. Actually think about it.

Some people choose the first option. They get so defensive, so protective of their fragile self-assessed mental health, that they can’t tolerate anything that isn’t constant validation. They need to be told they’re amazing 24/7, and anything less feels like an attack. Those people will block you, unfollow, and tell themselves you’re toxic. That’s fine. That’s on them.

But some people? They sit with it. And when they do, something shifts. New ideas start to seep in—ideas they didn’t come up with themselves, ideas that might actually have value. Imagine that.

Don’t Get Comfortable With the Gnawing

But here’s where most people miss the real opportunity: they sit with the discomfort for about five minutes, feel that mango fly larva wriggling around, and then just... learn to live with it. They get used to it. It becomes background noise. That’s not growth. That’s just numbness with a guilt chaser.

The gnawing is only useful if you actually work with it.

That’s where introspection comes in. Real introspection, not the Instagram kind where you post a sunset photo and call it self-reflection. I’m talking about sitting down and asking yourself hard questions: What specifically are they right about? Where is my work actually weak? What have I been avoiding?

This is where the creative process gets interesting. Because once you’ve identified what’s actually true in that criticism, you have a choice: stay comfortable with knowing it, or actually do something about it.

That’s the push. That’s the real challenge.

I know this because I do it constantly. When someone points out something about my work—the composition, the narrative, the shallow thinking buried in a pretty image—I don’t just sit with it. I use it. I tear into my own process. I ask myself what I could do differently, better, with more depth. I push myself to improve because that gnawing feeling is fuel if you’re willing to use it.

You can make a negative into a positive. You absolutely can. But only if you’re willing to do the work. Only if you’re willing to challenge yourself with real intent, not just nod along and feel better about yourself for “being open to feedback.”

The creative process gets sharper when you stop being comfortable with your own bullshit. When you demand more from yourself than anyone else ever could.

The Hardest Lesson

Here’s what I’ve learned: I’ve never learned a single thing from myself. Not one thing. Everything meaningful I know, I learned from someone else.

But here’s the other part: I wouldn’t have been able to use what I learned from others if I wasn’t willing to challenge myself with it. To sit with the discomfort and then push past it.

If you spend your entire life in a positive feedback loop—if you only consume content that validates you, only listen to people who agree with you, only seek out ideas that make you feel good—your reality becomes skewed. Dangerously skewed.

You stop being able to handle anything that isn’t that relentless positivity. You start craving it. You seek it out obsessively. And anything that falls outside that narrow bandwidth? You deem it harmful. Unconstructive. Toxic.

Well, how precious of you, flower.

The Water Settles

The people who actually grow are the ones who can sit in that boiling water for a moment, feel the heat, and not flee. They sit with the discomfort. They ask themselves: Is there truth in this? And sometimes—often—the answer is yes.

Then they calm down. The water settles. And they see themselves more clearly than before.

That’s the reflection I’m after. Not for me—I’m not your mirror. For you.

So when you’re upset about something I’ve said, before you block and move on, ask yourself: Is there something here? Is there something true that I don’t want to admit?

If the answer’s no, fine. Move on.

But if it’s yes? Sit with it for a while. Let it grow.

That’s where the real work happens.

A follow-up to my conversation on the Wildlife Conversations Podcast

After my recent chat with Jen Ritchie on the Wildlife Conversations Podcast, it’s become clear that a few people have come away with the wrong idea about where I stand on post-processing. So let me straighten this out once and for all.

I am not anti-editing. I am anti-fabrication. There’s a massive difference.

What I do

My personal approach is minimal. Contrast, exposure correction if I didn’t nail it in camera, sharpening — the kind of adjustments that help the image reflect what my sensor actually captured. That’s it. That’s my choice, and it’s rooted in how I think about photography.

But here’s the thing — it’s my choice, not a prescription for everyone else.

What you do is entirely up to you

If you enjoy spending hours in Photoshop, removing distractions, perfecting the sky, building a composite — great. You’ve crossed from photographer into digital artist, and I mean that without a shred of condescension. Digital art is a legitimate creative discipline. Own it. Say so. Done.

If you want to make the image feel like it felt when you were standing there in that moment — the light, the atmosphere, the emotion — and that takes some heavy lifting in post? Fine. Own it.

If you want nature to look perfect in your frame? Go for it. Own it.

See the pattern?

Here’s where it goes wrong

Photography isn’t complicated at its core. It’s physics. You’re controlling the light photons hitting a sensor or piece of film, and the result is written. You can get it right, and then you can make whatever creative choices you want with that file. None of that is the problem.

The problem is lying about it.

And people do lie. Constantly. Especially in wildlife photography, where the stakes of authenticity feel higher because we’re supposedly documenting real animals in real situations.

I’ve seen ground fog that somehow only appears around the feet of a bird of prey — a bird that’s standing on a conveniently placed dead animal. I mean, come on. Anyone who knows, knows. You’re not fooling the people in the room. You’re just making yourself look like a liar to the exact audience you’re trying to impress.

Why does lying about a photograph bother me so much?

Because if it was nothing, you wouldn’t lie about it.

Think about that. If removing that branch from the background or placing that carcass was genuinely inconsequential — if it really didn’t matter — you’d just say so. The fact that you don’t, the fact that you feel the need to present it as pure and unmanipulated, tells you everything you need to know about how you feel about what you did.

You aren’t lying because it’s nothing. You’re lying because it’s something.

The long and short of it

I don’t care what you do in post. Truly. Do whatever makes you happy with your images. Edit minimally, edit extensively, make digital art, make documentary photography — all of it is valid as long as you’re honest about what it is.

But if you feel compelled to hide it? If you can’t put your hand up and say “yes, I removed that” or “yes, this was staged”? Then sit with that feeling for a minute. Because that discomfort isn’t coming from nowhere.

Authenticity isn’t about how many sliders you touched in Lightroom. It’s about whether you’re willing to be honest with your audience — and more importantly, with yourself.

Own your work. All of it.

There’s a particular brand of confidence that shows up in photography forums, workshop Q&As, and the occasional angry email to a competition organiser. It sounds something like this:

“I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. I think I deserve more recognition by now.”

And there it is. That word. Deserve.

Let’s talk about that.

The Tenure Trap

Somewhere along the way, a lot of photographers have picked up the idea that longevity equals expertise. That time served is a qualification. That if you’ve been getting up before dawn with a camera for long enough, the universe is eventually going to notice and hand you something back.

It won’t. The universe is spectacularly indifferent to your alarm clock history.

Here’s the thing about fifteen years of experience: it’s only worth something if those fifteen years actually changed you. If year three looked meaningfully different from year one, and year seven pushed you somewhere uncomfortable, and year twelve made you question things you thought you’d already settled — then yes, fifteen years means something. You’ve been growing the whole time.

But if you’ve been making the same image, from the same angle, at the same type of location, with the same approach, and you’ve just done it a lot — that’s not fifteen years of experience. That’s one year of experience, repeated fifteen times. And no amount of grey hair or expensive glass changes that.

Progress Requires Friction

The photographers who actually develop over time are not the ones who get comfortable. They’re the ones who keep finding new ways to be uncomfortable. They shoot things that confuse them. They look at their best work and ask what’s wrong with it. They seek out people who will disagree with them. They enter competitions they’re not sure they’re ready for. They fail, often, and in public, and use it.

The ones who plateau are usually the ones who stopped doing any of that. Not because they got lazy, necessarily — some of them work incredibly hard. But they’re working hard in a circle. Covering the same ground with slightly better kit and slightly worse excuses.

Hard work without direction is just expensive repetition.

Competition Is Not a Reward System

Competitions, in particular, seem to generate this sense of accumulated entitlement. People enter year after year and start to feel like the shortlist is something they’re owed for persistence alone. That if they keep showing up, eventually it will be their turn.

It won’t work like that, and it never has.

The photographers topping the shortlists at Wildlife Photographer of the Year, at competitions that actually mean something, aren’t there because they’ve waited long enough. They’re there because the image in front of the judge is, on that day, undeniably excellent. The judge doesn’t know how many mornings you got up at four. They don’t know what you’ve sacrificed or how long you’ve been at it. They’re looking at the frame. Just the frame.

And they’re looking at it alongside work from people who may have been shooting for five years but have progressed faster, pushed harder, and made something genuinely more compelling. That’s not unfair. That’s just how it works.

Talent accelerates. Complacency decelerates. Time, on its own, does neither.

Some People Work Incredibly Hard and Never Win

Here’s the uncomfortable bit, and I’m going to say it plainly because I think it needs saying.

There are photographers who have put in decades of serious, committed, improving work — genuinely talented, genuinely dedicated — and have still never won anything significant. Never got the cover. Never got the shortlist. Some of them have work I’d hang on my wall without hesitation. The world has not rewarded them in the obvious ways.

That happens. It’s real. It’s not fair, and I’m not going to dress it up as fair.

What it is not, though, is a reason to lower the bar. The existence of talented unrecognised photographers does not mean that everyone who hasn’t been recognised must therefore be talented and unrecognised. Those are not the same thing. The former is a genuine injustice. The latter is wishful thinking.

If you want to point at the genuinely brilliant people the industry has overlooked as evidence that the system is flawed — fine, I’ll stand next to you on that one. But don’t use them as cover for the idea that your own lack of recognition is down to luck or politics, if you haven’t done the honest work of asking whether the images are actually there yet.

The Question You’re Probably Avoiding

Because here’s the thing. Most people who feel like they’re owed a win aren’t asking the hardest question, which is: is the work good enough?

Not “is it better than it was?” Not “did I work hard on it?” Not “do people on Instagram respond to it?” Those are easier questions with more comfortable answers.

Is it good enough, against the best work in that field, right now?

That question is brutal. It requires you to look at your images next to the work of people who are operating at the level you’re aspiring to, without any of the context of how long it took you or how much it cost or what you gave up to make it. Just the images, side by side.

If you can look at that comparison honestly and still feel your work belongs in the same conversation — that’s useful information. That’s not arrogance, that’s calibration. You’re in the right territory and the variables you need to keep working on are probably fine-tuning.

But if that comparison is uncomfortable in a way you keep finding reasons not to sit with — that’s also useful information. More useful, probably.

What You Actually Owe Yourself

You don’t owe yourself a win. Nobody does.

What you do owe yourself is honesty about where you actually are, and the willingness to go after the gap between where you are and where you want to be with something more targeted than just more time and more effort in the same direction.

Because showing up is the minimum. It always was. The photographers who get recognised aren’t the ones who showed up the longest. They’re the ones who kept changing what they did when they got there.

More time in the field is not the answer if you spend it making the same mistakes with better light.

Figure out what’s actually in the way. Then go after that.

There’s a podcast episode doing the rounds right now — Episode 45 of the WildArt Wildlife Photography Podcast — where hosts Rob Read and Josh Galicki ask the question: Is wildlife photography becoming too staged?

And honestly, I appreciate them asking it. I do. But I also want to be clear that the answer is sitting right there in the question, wearing high-vis and waving a flag.

Yes. It is. Enormously.

The fact that we’re even having this conversation in 2026 tells you something. Not that the problem is new — it isn’t — but that it’s grown to a point where people who run major photography competitions are openly talking about it on podcasts. That’s not a casual debate. That’s an industry quietly admitting it has a problem it doesn’t quite know how to fix.

The Spectrum of Deceit

Here’s the thing about staged wildlife photography — nobody ever calls it that. They call it “controlled conditions.” They call it “assisted capture.” They call it “maximising your time in the field,” which is my personal favourite, because apparently the field now includes a dimly lit wooden shed with a bowl of roadkill in it.

It exists on a spectrum. At one end you’ve got a peanut feeder attracting a nuthatch to a photogenic mossy log — fine, whatever, knock yourself out. At the other end you’ve got paid experiences where trained animals perform behaviours on cue while a group of photographers in matching gilets kneel in the mud feeling like Attenborough.

The problem is, both ends of that spectrum produce images that look, to the untrained eye, absolutely identical to the real thing. And that’s the point, isn’t it.

But somewhere in the middle of that spectrum — and this is where it gets murky — is a vast grey area that the industry has collectively decided not to look at too hard. Baited perches. Roadkill-lured raptors. Habituated foxes. Owls trained to fly to a post on command. None of it is quite as egregious as a fully staged photoshoot, but none of it is wild either. It’s a series of small compromises that have been normalised through repetition and monetised through workshops, until the line between authentic and manufactured has become genuinely difficult to find.

And a lot of photographers — not all, but a lot — have stopped looking for it.

The Instagram Wishlist Problem

There’s another layer to this that doesn’t get talked about enough — and it starts with a scroll.

Someone opens Instagram, sees a jaw-dropping shot of a buzzard perched on a mossy log, tearing into a rabbit, perfect light, every feather sharp, and thinks: I want that shot. Not a shot like it. Not their own version of it. That exact shot. So they find the workshop, pay the fee, and two weeks later they’ve got an almost pixel-perfect replica sitting in their Lightroom catalogue.

What they haven’t stopped to ask is: what is the value of an image that a dozen other people already have?

The answer, commercially and creatively, is close to nothing. Magazines aren’t buying it. Agencies aren’t licensing it. And in a competition, a judge who’s already seen seven versions of the same buzzard on the same mossy log is not going to be reaching for the gold star.

Social media has essentially turned wildlife photography into a shot-list. People are curating their portfolios like a shopping trolley — I’ll have one of those, two of those, oh and definitely one of those — without ever considering that originality is the whole game. The image that stops the scroll is the one nobody has seen before. You cannot buy that in a weekend workshop.

What’s particularly ironic is that the very platform driving this behaviour — Instagram — actually rewards originality. The images that go viral, that get picked up, that build real followings, are almost never the ones that look like twelve other images already on the feed. They’re the unexpected ones. The ones with a story behind them that couldn’t have been manufactured. But people see the polished end result and assume the path to it is replication, not exploration. So they pay for the replica and wonder why it doesn’t land the same way.

Portfolio Bagging — The Trophy Hunting of Photography

The episode also tackles what they call “portfolio photo bagging” — the practice of systematically ticking off headline species and behaviours through controlled setups rather than, you know, earning them.

It’s trophy hunting with a Canon. Go to the right facility, pay the right fee, tick off your otter-catching-a-fish shot, your barn owl-against-a-sunset shot, your fox-jumping-through-autumn-leaves shot. Done. Portfolio sorted. Instagram fed. Workshop sold.

Meanwhile, some idiot (me) is standing around a muddy field at 5am for the third consecutive morning, slightly hypothermic, waiting for a barn owl that has absolutely no intention of appearing.

But here’s the thing — the bag-it-and-tag-it crowd and the field-dwellers are competing in the same competitions. Submitting to the same magazines. Selling to the same clients. And the images are visually indistinguishable unless someone’s checking EXIF data against location records and asking awkward questions.

Which most people aren’t.

The deeper issue with portfolio bagging is what it does to the photographer’s development. When you remove the difficulty — the waiting, the failing, the reading of animal behaviour, the understanding of light and habitat and season — you also remove the learning. You get the image without acquiring the skill to have earned it. And that gap shows, eventually. Not in any single photograph, but in the body of work over time. Photographers who’ve bagged their way to a portfolio tend to plateau. There’s nowhere to go when you’ve already bought the destination.

Why This Actually Matters

Rob Read runs WildArt Photographer of the Year. He’s not asking this question idly — he’s asking it because he has to make judgment calls about what gets in and what doesn’t, and the line is getting harder to draw.

And that matters because when staged images flood competitions and publications, a few things happen:

• Authentic field photography gets devalued — not because it’s worse, but because it becomes indistinguishable from the shortcut version

• Editors and judges start trusting images less, which is bad for everyone

• The commercial value of genuinely wild photography erodes, because the market can’t tell the difference

• Viewers form a completely warped idea of what wildlife actually looks like and how it actually behaves

That last one is the part that really grinds my gears. Wildlife photography, at its best, tells the truth about the natural world. It documents. It reveals. It makes people care about things they’d otherwise never encounter. The moment you start staging that story, you’re not a wildlife photographer anymore. You’re running a very expensive puppet show.

And there’s a conservation angle here too that rarely gets mentioned. When the public’s understanding of wildlife is shaped by images of animals performing behaviours they’ve been conditioned or baited into, it distorts conservation narratives. It makes wildlife look more accessible, more predictable, more manageable than it actually is. Which is precisely the opposite of what good wildlife photography should be doing.

The Workshop Economy

It would be naive to talk about staged photography without acknowledging the economy that sustains it. Photography workshops and hides are a significant and growing industry. For many professional photographers, they’re a primary income stream. And that’s not inherently wrong — teaching is legitimate, and there’s real value in putting students in situations where they can learn.

But there’s a meaningful difference between a workshop that teaches fieldcraft, patience, and the skills to find and photograph wild animals, and one that essentially sells guaranteed outcomes. The latter isn’t really a workshop. It’s a vending machine that takes four hundred quid and dispenses a tawny owl photograph.

The market for those vending machines is enormous, because patience is hard and guaranteed results are appealing. And as long as that market exists, the incentive to keep building more of them isn’t going away. Which is exactly why conversations like the one Rob and Josh are having matter — because the only thing that pushes back against it is the industry collectively deciding that authenticity has value worth protecting.

Where I Stand

I work in the field. And the field does not care about your shot list, your deadline, or the fact that you’ve been standing in the same spot for four hours. Animals do what animals do — they move the wrong way, they disappear into cover, they completely ignore the beautiful light you’ve been waiting on since before dawn. I have no ability to change that. More importantly, I have no desire to.

If I fail a hundred times and succeed once, that’s not a bad day — that’s just wildlife. That’s the job. That single frame that actually happened, in real conditions, with a wild animal doing exactly what it wanted to do regardless of my presence — that’s worth more to me than a hard drive full of guaranteed shots.

And that’s the thing about paying for time in a hide, or a controlled session, or whatever we’re calling it this week — the moment you can just buy the outcome, you’ve taken all the actual wild out of wildlife photography. What’s left is just photography. Which is fine, if that’s what you want. But let’s not pretend it’s the same thing.

The craft lives in the uncertainty. In the mornings that produce nothing. In the understanding you build over years of watching animals in their actual environment, not a managed one. That knowledge — how a barn owl hunts in different wind conditions, how a predator reads a landscape, what a particular posture means before a behaviour unfolds — that is what separates a wildlife photographer from someone who bought a nice picture of an owl.

And no workshop, no hide, no controlled session is selling that. Because it can’t. You have to go out and earn it, one muddy morning at a time.

What do you think? Is controlled photography a legitimate tool or a slow corruption of the craft? Let me know below?

Oh no, he’s going to rant again…

Not really. I’m just going to say what I see.

You know those people who seem to have unlimited funds or time in the field and somehow keep producing the same drivel on repeat? Day after day, new location, same image. I scroll their feed and honestly can’t tell one trip from the next.

It blows my mind how many folks are stuck in a rut of their own making, like their creativity just quietly died and nobody told them.

Lately I’ve been seeking out the opposite: people with limited time, limited budget, maybe limited gear – but maximum intent. They squeeze everything out of their patch, their conditions, their few days a year. That stuff can be incredible.

This isn’t a money or class rant. I don’t care if you’re loaded or broke – I care if you give a shit. I want to see that you understand your subject and how it lives in its environment. Not in a creepy “I love owls” way, but in a “I’ve actually paid attention to this thing” way.

Here’s the harsh bit: if you’re spending 100+ days a year in the bush and you’re not building a body of work that could genuinely compete with the best out there, something’s off. Either you’ve fallen out of love with what you’re doing, or you never really put the work into mastering the craft you claim to care about.

And please don’t hit me with “I don’t care about awards or recognition.” If you’re investing that much time pointing a lens at something, you do want your work to land. The problem usually isn’t that you don’t want it; it’s that you’ve stopped caring enough to push it there.

You can see the difference in high‑level work immediately. Those images are deliberate. Conscious. The photographer is involved in every part of the frame. It’s a labour of love, not a random snap that happened to be sharp.

So why am I even saying this?

Because I keep hearing from people who’ve quietly fallen out of love with their work. They still write long, earnest captions about how much they “love” a species, but the images are flat, recycled, and emotionally checked out. Then they come to me and want me to fix it.

I can help with technique. I can help you see differently, compose better, experiment more. What I cannot do is make you passionate again.

I also can’t, in good conscience, take someone’s money when they’re clearly not invested in their own growth. Some people expect results without effort – no discomfort, no risk, just a shortcut. That’s not how this works.

So what do you do if this is you? Honestly: take a break.

If your time in the field feels mundane, that feeling will end up in your images. Step back and pay attention to how you actually feel out there. If it’s boredom and autopilot, that’s what you’re photographing.

Then, deliberately add new energy to your world. Bring someone into your circle who’s clearly on fire for what they do. Shoot with people whose work you respect and see how they approach the same subject. Passion is contagious. So is curiosity.

I say this all the time: I’ve never learned a single new thing from living entirely inside my own head. I’ve stumbled onto ideas, sure, but I’ve progressed because other people taught me, challenged me, or showed me another way to see.

One more thing: if you do invite someone into that process, don’t show up as a hard‑headed asshole. You can’t just throw money at a mentor, ignore everything they say, and expect magic. You are part of the equation. Be willing to change, or don’t bother starting.

In short (yes, finally): without passion for what you’re shooting, it will never translate into images that truly land. Take a break, bring fresh humans into your orbit, and remember this is a marathon, not a sprint.

Hook

Why on earth would you put your entire learning life into one guru, one course, one “sky wizard,” or one guy with a camera and a van? It’s like catching the “woke mind virus,” but somehow more boring, so boring, HUUUUGE.

One brain isn’t enough

The nonsense terms idiots (47) fling around are fun to steal and repurpose, because they think they’re saying something profound when they’re mostly just leaking brain juice in public. That probably got you to read this far, which is lovely, but here’s where the spell breaks.

People will follow a single person down a single path and never look left or right. If it’s religion, fine, follow your chosen cloud-dwelling management team and go for it. But for real-world skills, like wildlife photography, that’s a terrible way to grow.

The comfort trap

On trips, it’s wild how often the same folks keep booking the same guide, again and again, like a direct debit for inspiration. There is a hard ceiling on what one person can give you; it is not boundless and it is absolutely not infinite. If you never look beyond that one source, you are choosing stagnation and calling it loyalty.

Getting attached is normal. You make friends, it feels homely, sometimes even like family, which is genuinely lovely. But if seeing “other people” makes the relationship weird or Stormy, you have to ask whether it was a friendship or just a slightly needy transaction dressed up as one.

From the mentor side

If you’re the one mentoring, there is only so much you can pull out of your kit before you’re repeating yourself and everyone’s pretending it’s still fresh. You don’t want to stagnate your students, and you shouldn’t want to stagnate yourself either. Sending people out to learn from others means you can level up too, so if they do come back, you actually have something new to give them.

Treating students like meal tickets in a creative field is delusional. No one wants to pay indefinitely for the privilege of not progressing. Unless you are so sick of winning? Expecting a mentee to keep handing over money while you quietly run on fumes is, frankly, a bit gross. At the end I’ll offer you my special bible.

Creativity needs cross‑pollination

Photography is a creative medium, not a franchise. People should be pushed to experiment, to be uncomfortable, to chase new ideas and perspectives from other knowledgeable people. That’s how they grow, and if you’re any good, it’s how you grow too.

A student going elsewhere doesn’t mean the friendship changes. At least, it shouldn’t. If your affection for someone is pegged directly to them paying you, that’s not mentoring, that’s emotional drop-shipping. If life is that transactional, it’s pretty bloody grim.

Let them fly

Send the birds into the wind. If they come back, great: you’ve got more to give and they can see it. If they don’t, they needed something you didn’t have, and that’s ok. You’re not Donald; you don’t get to demand loyalty oaths and badge scans at the door. Students should be free-thinking, capable, and confident, not cult members with cameras.

Selfishly, you should want a diverse flock around you, because they return with ideas, techniques, stories and angles you’d never have found on your own. Imagine that: students who actually bring knowledge back to you. It happens. A lot. Everyone you meet can teach you something, if you’re awake enough to notice. Sleepy Donald.

The actual point

So the short version of this long blather: encourage people to leave, enthusiastically and without sulking. If they return, they’ll likely come back sharper, more excited, and with a better eye for what you genuinely offer. And if you’re only in this for the money? Then honestly, you probably just want them to return and shut up about it. Or not.

No bull.