I once wrote that “what if?” was the central question for creative people. I also once wrote that our expectations of what we hope for—of a place, a subject matter, even an idea—can blind us to the reality of it.
You show up in Venice to photograph the city in fog and experience agua alta, the high flood waters of winter, only to arrive to a sunny week with nothing but blue skies and sunshine. You go to the pyramids to find them under renovation, flanked by scaffolding.
Most recently, I arrived on the Chilcotin plateau in British Columbia, only to discover I’d come too early. What was “right on time” the past five years (the past 38 years, according to my guide, Brian) was poor timing this year. The aspens hadn’t yet turned, the weather was unusually warm, and the salmon that would be the main attraction for the bears once they had spawned and died had themselves only just arrived and still had work to do before they gave themselves to the bears. It was all out of whack, and with the change in schedule (of which I had not been apprised), all my “what ifs” about my time photographing the bears became “what nows.”
It happens more often than I would like. All the plans, the gear lists, and the packing, the shot lists I dream up all go out the window with some frequency. This year, I built a rig to float on the water and get some split shots with the bear in the top of the frame, the salmon underwater in the bottom third. It was going to be epic! But 2/3 of the frame was empty in the absence of the bears, and without tools and some reimagining (read: fabrication), there was no way to use the rig. It never left my truck.
I had another shot in mind, too. So many sockeye salmon wash up on the shores after spawning that I thought it would be easy to put one aside and do some macro work. I had this idea that the green curve of the cheek against the red scales would be a nice image, not knowing the salmon would mostly be alive, still in the water, and too preoccupied with spawning to get ready for their close-ups. Also? When they turn red, they have lost their scales. Well, there goes that idea.
But “what now?” can be as helpful a creative question as “what if?” The latter is proactive, an act of the imagination, and results in plans and daydreams, shot lists, etc. The former is reactive, an act of response. No less imaginative, but a little more grounded in reality, the biggest hurdle is getting over the disappointment and wiping the mental slate clean to make room for new ideas and perceptions.
Now what? I came home with thousands of images, only a few of them contained a bear after one lone grizzly showed up to check things out. Finding his timing was off, I suspect he went back to his colleagues to report: “Not yet, friends. Almost.” In those eight days of waiting before my own timing ran out and I had to move on, I asked myself many times: What now?
The answer was all around me. The Chilco River, cold and turquoise, was running crimson with the most salmon the river system has seen in something like 15 years. Over 3 million of them, if the guy from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is to be believed, and all of them making their way upstream to their natal spawning grounds, a riot of reds and greens that seemed as good a subject as any, and would fill a hole in my work that I hadn’t yet explored. Fleshing out the story, if you’ll forgive the pun. After a while, it captured my imagination enough to become its own “what if?”
What if I could capture this extraordinary colour, this dazzling motion? How would I do that? What tools did I have that might help with that? Weirdly, I had a polarizing filter with me. I never have a polarizer. What made me throw that in at the last minute, I wondered. That would make it easier to get through the reflections on the surface of the water. I also had an Insta360 X5, an action camera I bought this summer (highly recommended!), along with a water case and a 12-foot pole.
Every day, twice a day, we went out looking for bears. We never gave up on them. But as we looked, I played with the salmon, both above and below the water. Fast shutters, slow shutters, intentional camera movements sometimes, and more literal efforts at others. I put the video camera in the water and worked through the learning curve of that, giggling away at both the failed attempts and the unexpected successes. I combed through thousands of frames shot from the surface, looking for one or two that felt right.
In the end, I learned a lot. I found myself infatuated, newly fascinated by the salmon, too. And I got a couple of images and some video that I love—neither of which is disconnected from my existing work with the bears.
So important to bears and the forests in which they spend so much of their lives that we call them salmon forests. Bears drag the salmon by the millions into the forests to eat them, leaving much of their bodies to decompose, their nutrients returning to the forest.
To the bears themselves, the salmon provide the calories necessary to survive the winters and, for the females, the body fat needed to allow the embryos of their future cubs to implant, which only happens when they reach 33% body fat. A bear needs to consume over 20,000 calories a day to prepare for denning in the winter, almost all of which comes from the fat-and-calorie-rich salmon. To say the two species are connected is an understatement.
I didn’t get what I hoped for on this trip. But looking back on most of my trips, I often don’t. I get different, for sure. Sometimes I get better. Rarely do I get nothing. The “what if?” prepares me and gets me thinking, but as long as I don’t let it blind me, it’s the “what now?” that’s usually responsible for the work I actually make. I would be surprised if I were the only one.
