Work With What You’ve Got

Hi everyone, welcome to the Watts Wildlife Photography newsletter! This is the first of what will become many field journal-esque stories I will be sharing with you via this newsletter, each of which will include either a lesson about photography, a fun shooting story, or both!

Today’s story takes us to back to mid-October, when I was visiting North Cascades National Park in Washington state. A park that is very under-explored in comparison to most national parks (it is the least visited park in the lower 48 states), but that’s scenery rivals that of Glacier, Yosemite, and Grand Teton.

I was on a long day hike deep into the park’s backcountry. It was a chilly day, one of those days that reminds you that summer really is over now, and fog moved through the valleys and around the peaks from the moment the sun rose, constantly hiding parts of the landscape. Occasionally, the fog would clear enough for me to see, rewarding my eyes with the vibrant orange, red, and gold fall colors of a dense temperate rainforest, all of which spilled out from the bases of massive, jagged, freshly snow-capped peaks, turning an already beautiful landscape into something not unlike a Bob Ross painting. I was truly in a mountain paradise. Arguably the most beautiful place I’ve ever been.

Even an iPhone snapshot can make this place look like a scene out of Lord of the Rings.

But I wasn’t there just to take in the scenery. I’m a wildlife guy, and so despite the beauty that surrounded me, what I was more interested in seeing were the species that called this beauty home. On this particular hike, I was in an alpine zone: an area that has little to no tree cover, lots of dense shrubbery, rocky cliffs, and massive talus slopes. It was a seemingly barren landscape in comparison to the rainforests in the valleys below, but it was the perfect place to see one of North Cascades’ smaller, less-appreciated inhabitants: the American pika.

The American pika is a small, hamster-like lagomorph (member of the rabbit family) that thrives in alpine zones throughout North America. They make their living sheltering in the messes of boulders, also known as talus, that often dominate rugged alpine terrain and feeding on perennial grasses they gather and store throughout the summer season.

A talus slope winds through a vibrant array of fall colors deep within the backcountry of the Cascades.

These alpine rabbit-hamsters are about the size of a balled fist, lightning fast, and are some of the most well camouflaged animals I have ever observed. Unless they are moving, they are nearly impossible to spot. They look like just another one of a million rocks on the mountainside. And when they do finally move, it happens so fast that by the time you realize what the movement was, it’s gone again, and you’re back at square-one.

There is a pika in this photo. How long did it take for you to find it?

Based on this description, you’re probably imagining how difficult it might be to get close to and photograph one of these charismatic little mammals. Especially so if your miles deep in the backcountry, and all you happen to be carrying is a 16-35mm lens.

Well today, I was miles deep in the backcountry, carrying only a 16-35 mm lens, and can you guess what I was hoping to do?

Now I will admit, I didn’t start this hike with pika photography in mind. If I had, I would’ve carried my 100-400mm lens as well. When I started the hike, I was bringing my camera purely to photograph the stunning landscapes. This is why I went with a wide angle lens. If I saw wildlife, great. But I hadn’t intended on actually photographing the wildlife I saw. Why I thought I wouldn’t be tempted to photograph any wildlife I saw, I’m not sure. Do I not know myself? Maybe it was too early when I started hiking, and I just wasn’t thinking clearly. Either way, here I was, 7,000 feet above sea level, 6 miles from my vehicle, carrying nothing but a Canon EOS R5 body and a 16-35mm lens, and trying to photograph pika.

So, regardless of the lens I was carrying, the first step I had to take was the same first step we all take when photographing an animal: finding the animal. I was in prime pika habitat, but as I just explained, it is nearly impossible to spot pika in their habitat.

So how was I going to find one? Thankfully, we humans have more senses that just eyesight.

Let’s talk a little more biology. Pikas are fiercely territorial animals. They each have an area of their respective talus slope that they like to call home, and they aren’t very fond of intruders in that area. However, they don’t defend this territory in the way that you might be imagining. They don’t fight each other like wolf packs or African lions would. Instead, they use loud, shrill calls to mark territorial boundaries. A pika will perch on a rock near its den, puff out its chest, and call over and over again. And these calls are no joke. They may be small, but trust me, their voices are mighty. This is how I first realized there were even pikas around me as I climbed through the talus.

So, finding a pika is actually quite simple. Use your ears, follow the calls, and eventually… you will find the caller.

After pulling my camera out of my hiking backpack and following calls for a few minutes, I located a pika, and I was able to move in close to it. As carefully as I could, I laid stomach-down on the steep talus, zoomed in to 35mm, and began firing away.

Now many of you might think, how can you create impactful photos of pika at 35mm? Especially with an animal so small, a telephoto lens is essentially a requirement. You just don’t have the right lens with you.

I thought the same thing when I first heard the shrill call of a pika while climbing the steep, colorful embankment of one of the many Cascade peaks surrounding me.

But let’s ask ourselves, what is the “right” lens? 400mm? 600mm? 800mm? The longer the better? Is there such a thing as “right” in photography?

I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase, “art is subjective.” Well let’s not forgot that photography is art. And rights and wrongs cannot exist when subjectivity is, by definition, opinion.

Therefore, if photography is art, and art is subjective, nothing can truly be “right” in the world of photography.

Many photographers, myself included, often look at a scene and think “I need a longer lens.” We are all obsessed with getting closer, and closer, and closer. With getting the tightest shot we can possibly get using the longest telephoto lens money can buy. We think we must have that longer lens to create good photos.

But is this always truly the best decision when creating photographic art? Do all of our shots have to be taken at an ultra-high focal length? Is a longer focal length truly what’s “right?”

Or, sometimes, can we make a shorter focal length work just as well as a long one, or dare I say, even better?

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes, you do simply have to have a longer focal length if you’re looking for a very specific shot. You shouldn’t be close enough to a Yellowstone grizzly to fill the frame at 35mm. However, most of the time, we can make artful photos of wildlife using any focal length. You just might have to get a bit more creative, and come up with compositions you hadn’t considered before.

With 35mm being the maximum focal length I could use, I knew I had to go for environmental portraiture. Trying to create a creamy, simplistic, blurred background just wasn’t realistic without that longer lens I just spoke about not needed. Was that creamy background shot the first shot I envisioned when I got close to the pika? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean it’s the only shot I can possibly take of this animal. This situation called for me to think outside the box and place some focus on not just the pika, but its environment as well.

Would I have liked to have had a longer focal length to capture more intimate portraits as well? Sure. But in the world of wildlife photography, we have to learn to deal with a lack of control. We can’t control the animals, the lighting conditions, the weather… the list goes on. In this case, I had very little control over my focal length either. So, I worked with what I had. I worked with the hand both mother nature, and I, when I decided not to bring a longer lens, had dealt.

Some of the compositions I tried worked, and others didn’t.

One of the compositions I’m not too fond of. Granted this is unedited, and the compositions that I like (which you’ll find below) were meticulously processed in Lightroom, but even still… no amount of editing can save a bad composition.

The composition above has a good pose on the pika’s part and a nice wide view of the landscape, but it doesn’t work as well as many of the other photos I took. There’s nothing to make the pika stand out in the frame, and while the wide angle shows a lot of the background, it just doesn’t capture the most interesting parts of the landscape. When the story of a photo is so reliant on the environment too, this isn’t acceptable. You’ve got to find the most interesting parts of the landscape, the parts that best tell the story, and place those in the composition around the animal. So after a bit of repositioning, I found the angles I liked best. The angles that both showed this cute little lagomorph in all its glory, and the habitat it lives in at its grandest and most beautiful. The photos below are the result.

Notice that in all of these photos, parts of the talus are shown, parts of the distant autumn colors are shown, and some snowy peaks and fog are shown. In addition to this, the pika is instantly noticeable and recognizable in each photo. All of this was intentional. All of this was done to create a photo that both highlights and tells a story about the wildlife, and highlights and tell a story about the environment that it calls home. A person can learn from these photos what a pika looks like, where it lives on a small scale (talus slopes), where it lives on a larger scale (high in rugged mountainous terrain), and what the climate is like where it lives (Snow and autumn colors are both present, telling us that this is a temperate environment).

This is environmental wildlife portraiture at its best. This is how you tell a story with your environmental portraits. But I’m getting sidetracked. This isn’t about how to create good environmental portraits, although I hope you’re able to take that away from this article too.

This is about working with what you’ve got. These are my favorite pika photos I’ve ever taken. In fact, they are some of my favorite photos I’ve ever taken, period! And the most shocking part? I never even picked up that long telephoto lens we all thought, I even thought, I needed. In fact, I used one of the widest lenses on the market.

So next time you’re out in the field and you see an animal you’d like to photograph, but you don’t have the “right” lens, or the “right” lighting to work with, remember to work with what you’ve got. Remember that “right” is all in your head – “right” doesn’t exist in art, in photography.

 If you use your creative tools correctly, if you think like the artist you are, you can create beautiful, powerful wildlife imagery with whatever conditions are thrown your way, with whatever camera you use, with whatever lens you did or didn’t bring on your hike in the mountains. It might not be the shot you had originally envisioned, but you can make an artful shot with what you’ve got.

A bonus photo: A pika on its front porch, just taking in the views… :)