Learn by Limiting Yourself!
I regularly listen to the Wild Eye podcast by Gerry van der Walt, and he recently mentioned a couple of interesting concepts. The first is ‘the Rut of Competence’—the idea that as you accumulate photographic skills and knowledge, you fall into a rut. The second is that you can improve your creativity by consciously deciding to limit your options—in terms of your equipment, technique or camera settings.
These ideas are obviously related, but can you actually learn by limiting yourself…?
The Problem
Bear Gills
I can totally understand what Gerry means when he talks about the Rut of Competence. I’ve taught myself photography since 2013 by reading articles, watching YouTube videos and experimenting in the field, and I think I now have a thorough grasp of the theory and practice involved. However, it can be very frustrating when it doesn’t translate into better pictures!
Why didn’t I manage to get the head sharp in that slow pan of a cheetah? Why did I miss that lilac-breasted roller taking off? Why didn’t I take a single shot of that charging tiger? Aaaaaarrrrggghhh…!
So what’s the explanation? Why do we get trapped in a rut?
First of all, we’re all loss-averse, so I guess it’s natural to regret the shots you miss more than you appreciate the ones you actually get. That may not be a fair reflection of your abilities, but it can certainly feel real! When I screw up on a game drive, I often get very angry and upset, and it can ruin the whole trip—however good the food, the service, the people and the accommodation.
Secondly, it’s partly to do with the law of diminishing returns. When you pick up your very first camera and play around with it, it’s a very steep learning curve. You start by knowing virtually nothing, but after half an hour, you probably know how to take sharp, properly exposed pictures. That’s an enormous improvement!
However, by the time you’ve been a photographer for five or 10 years, what do you have left to learn? Yes, there may be new species or geographies to cover, but you probably won’t be using any radically new techniques or camera settings.
As a result, your pictures won’t seem to be getting any better—but again, that’s unfair. If you ever suffer from ‘imposter syndrome’, just have a look back at your early work. I can guarantee that your hit rate will have improved massively over time, and even your ‘average’ shots now will beat most of your best shots then!
Thirdly, wildlife photography is a numbers game. When you’re trying to photograph a cheetah chase or create a slow pan shot of a fast-moving leopard, the odds are against you. Even using all the right settings and with perfect camera technique, you won’t always nail the money shot. That’s just a fact of life.
Fourthly, you’re always limited by your equipment. Not many people can afford the latest and greatest mirrorless cameras with fast prime telephoto lenses that cost over 15 grand a pop! That means there’ll inevitably be certain situations when your camera or your lens will let you down. And unless you decide to throw yourself into the photographic money pit, that will always be the case.
Finally, the quality of an image is intimately linked to the rarity of the behaviour or the species. For example, I love photographing cheetah kills, but I’ve only seen around 10 in over 500 game drives. There’s a Pareto effect: the very best action shots account for about 99% of all the wildlife images out there, but they derive from behaviour that only makes up about 1% of the animals’ time!
Equally, I’d love to photograph a black leopard (or panther), but I’ve never even seen one! If you want to photograph rare species or rare behaviour, you have to spend a lot of time and money going to the right places and waiting for the right moments. Otherwise, you’ll simply have to rely on good luck—and Fortune can be a cruel mistress!
The Solution
Eddie the Penguin
So what can you do to climb out of the Rut of Competence? The answer is partly psychological, partly financial and partly experimental.
Psychology
Dust Bird
The psychological element means accepting the limitations of the human brain. Knowing about the Rut of Competence or imposter syndrome is the first step to accepting your limitations and realising that you’re often better than you think you are.
If you still find that your images are getting you down, you can always invent a helpful routine that will let you see the way your photography has improved over time. For example, you could count the number of your favourite images by year. I give my Top 100 images five stars, so I can easily check in Lightroom when I took them. Here are the current figures:
2013: 1
2014: 1
2015: 1
2016: 6
2017: 4
2018: 11
2019: 20 [when I spend four months in Africa!]
2020: 0 [during Covid]
2021: 8
2022: 11
2023: 16
2024: 21
Apart from my annus mirabilis in 2019 and the Covid outbreak in 2020, you can see a clear, upward trend.
Finance
"Tiger, tiger, burning bright…"
If you want the very best tools of the trade, wildlife photography is a very expensive hobby. Until I turned professional in 2013, I can honestly say that I couldn’t have afforded a high-end DSLR with a fast prime lens. Despite a successful career in business, I simply didn’t have thousands of pounds lying around in my bank account!
Fortunately, I had the benefit of a property portfolio, a few chunky loans and another source of income from my career as a private tutor. That meant I could throw money at the problem and buy pretty much any camera, lens or accessory I wanted.
You can read more in Mix and Match, but here’s a quick summary of my current equipment:
Sony ⍺1 with 12-24mm, 24-70mm and 70-200mm lenses
Nikon Z8 with a NIKKOR Z 600mm f/4 TC VR S lens
When I’m out in the field, I take both cameras with me, but I use my Z8 almost the whole time. That’s because Pre-Release Capture is vital for bird-in-flight photography and my 600mm lens has the greatest reach—especially if I engage the built-in 1.4x teleconverter.
The new Sony ⍺1 II is a much better camera with pre-capture, improved focusing and a more flexible and convenient LCD, but it’s not worth the money. I just wouldn’t use it enough. And unless and until Sony starts to build telephoto lenses with built-in teleconverters, that won’t change any time soon…
Experiment
Eye of the Rhino
Gerry van der Walt obviously believes in the old idea that limits can make you even more creative. It seems like a paradox, but there’s logic behind it. Gerry now freely admits he sometimes leads ‘iPhone safaris’. He obviously asks his guests’ permission in advance (!), but the point is to force people to photograph Nature in different ways.
If you only have a smartphone rather than a heavy-duty camera, your main limitations will be the sensor size and focal length. If you only share your photos on social media, the number of megapixels isn’t really an issue, and if you really want to hang a print on your wall, you can always use the upscaling feature in Photo AI or a similar software program.
When it comes to focal length, the iPhone can manage 5x magnification. That’s the full-frame equivalent to 120mm. Most wildlife photographers have lenses that are 400mm and above, so 120mm is not very long at all! However, you can always redefine the ‘problem’ as an ‘opportunity’.
What do I mean? Well, long lenses are valuable because of their reach. You don’t have to get so close to small or skittish subjects to fill the frame. The downside is that the perspective is fixed. All shots taken at focal lengths of more than around 200mm ‘look the same’ because light rays arrive from the subject in parallel, which means the image is ‘flattened’. By comparison, wide-angle lenses exaggerate the distance between the foreground and the background by changing the relative size and scale.
If you’re able to get close to your subject, you might find it’s actually a better option to use a wide-angle lens (such as the one on your smartphone) because it allows you to force the perspective. Paul Goldstein often shoots stills and video with his iPhone—especially wide-angle close-ups of elephants. This lets him emphasise the size and strength of the animals in comparison to the vast plains and skies of the Masai Mara.
Only taking an iPhone on safari is obviously a fairly radical step, but you don’t need to go the whole hog. You can always leave your camera at home for one game drive or a couple of hours in a hide. It’s a continuum. You can experiment for as long as it takes to get the shots you want and then go back to your regular kit.
In addition, you can set yourself other limits. They can be just about anything you like, but the main ones are probably focal length, shutter speed and aperture. If you force yourself to shoot everything at 24mm or f/16 or 1/30 of a second (as Gerry once did!), you’ll add variety to your portfolio and gain valuable experience. That might lead to unique images that you’d never have taken otherwise.
One of the problems I always have as a wildlife photographer is the lack of action. Wild animals (especially the big cats) spend most of their time doing very little at all. They lie down in the shade of a tree and might not move for hours! That’s one of the main reasons wildlife photographers have to be so patient. You have to wait for the action…
Now, the crucial point is about what happens while you’re waiting. You might just hang around, either chatting, telling stories or playing games, but that gets old very quickly. Alternatively, you can fill your time by taking portraits.
It seems like a good idea as you won’t be ‘wasting time’—but there’s a price to pay. Action can happen very suddenly and unexpectedly, so if you’re busy taking portraits (with all the wrong settings!), you’re more likely to be taken by surprise and miss the crucial shot when the cheetah jumps down from the tree or the lions start mating.
You can partially solve that problem by having two camera bodies, but it’s not a perfect solution. In the old days, I used to have two DSLRs, the Nikon D810 and D850, which meant I could take portraits and keep one in reserve for action shots. However, I had different lenses on each camera with different focal lengths. If I needed my 800mm lens to take portraits, I’d be forced to switch to my 80-400mm for any action—which might then be too far away!
That’s the trade-off you’ll always face when trying to do two things at once, and that’s where setting yourself artificial limits might help. If you want to improve your slow pan technique, you can limit yourself to taking all your shots at 1/30 of a second, say. That means there’s virtually no point trying to take portraits of static subjects because you’ll just end up with a blurry mess!
Instead, you can wait for any kind of action and try to make it work as a slow pan. Paul Goldstein is the expert at this. Any time an animal or bird moves, he immediately slow pans his subject to try and capture the movement with creative blur.
Verdict
Dustbuster
So there you have it. The Rut of Competence, imposter syndrome and diminishing returns are very real problems, but they are soluble through various means, whether psychological, financial or experimental. The greatest of these is experimenting with artificial limits to free yourself to concentrate on the shots you might not otherwise take—either because you’re distracted by ‘make-work’ such as portraits or because you’re just too stuck in a rut to escape your comfort zone of shooting wide open at 1/1000 of a second!
Part of creative thinking is doing things differently, and if you force yourself to stick to a certain focal length, shutter speed or aperture, you’ll be more likely to be ready when the action happens and give yourself the chance to capture unique images that you’d never otherwise have taken.
If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.
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