Thousands Of Miles and No Photos to Show For It

I’d been chasing the shot for two years, and this year, I was spending a month in one of the best locations in the U.S. to chase it again.

Two birds, synchronized, necks arched like question marks, feet churning the surface of the water white as they sprint side-by-side in perfect unison. It lasts maybe four seconds. Five, if you're lucky.

I was leading two back-to-back wildlife photography workshops in floating blinds, and I had watched it happen again and again. Dozens of times, actually. Every time it happened, I was facing the wrong direction. Or the birds were too far from the reach of my lens. Or I was repositioning my blind to follow a different pair. There are a dozen reasons and excuses I could give, but they all land in the same spot: I was never in the right place at the right time. 

Everyone else in the second workshop, though, went home with multiple versions of that photograph, just not me. One gentleman (that’s you, Chuck!) seemed to be the “grebe whisperer” — he was front and center for at least half dozen of those rituals, and the only thing equally as good as getting “the” photo myself is when people on a workshop with you get “the” shot, instead. 

This past week, I was leading my online workshop on birds in flight and toward the end, someone asked me a question I really appreciated, and I didn’t have a chance to answer it live.

“How often do you come back from a day in the field with nothing?”

Here's what I told them, and what I'm telling you now: More often than you'd think. More often than Instagram would have you believe. More often than most photographers want to admit.

Somehow, this kind of honesty is rare in wildlife photography — especially online, where algorithms reward only the final image, not the labor that went into it. You don’t see all the outtakes where the animal was too soft or we accidentally lopped off the subject’s foot. Or when we have a momentary heart attack that something happened to our camera, not realizing we accidentally just bumped the lens sending it into manual focus. You only see the banger shots, the “hell yeahs.” And when you follow professionals or influencers, it’s easy to think we’re just out there nailing it every time. Frame after frame. Epic after epic.

We live in an age of curated perfection, where every photographer's social media feed looks like a highlight reel of impossible success. Those influencer types posting from Jackson Hole or the doorsteps of other national parks — places where the wildlife is so abundant you can practically trip over a bison on your way to photograph a great gray owl — they make it look effortless. Drive down the road with your morning coffee, snap a few shots, go around the bend for a few more, then head home for lunch. And if you time the light just right, an hour or so on a Tuesday can turn into an award-winning photo outing.

That doesn’t make those photographers any less skilled, but it’s important context. For those who don’t live inside a postcard, the effort-to-image ratio looks quite different. For most of us, working the harder places, the less obvious locations, the spots that require patience and persistence and a willingness to fail spectacularly (and do so over and over again) it’s a different story entirely. 

There are times I’ve driven over a thousand miles and come home with nothing to show for it but dust on my lens and gas receipts in my pocket, not one image made that is worth keeping. There are times I do that several weeks in a row; that was this spring for me, thousands of miles and a handful of images that made it into my stock archive only. Sometimes I spend an entire month trying for one particular photo and walk away with nothing more than the humbling reminder that wild animals don’t dance on cue.

Here’s the thing I want you to know: that’s not failure. It’s part of the process.

Every professional I know has been skunked more times than they can count. I don’t know why we don’t talk about this more, because we should.

The lifestyle of “being a wildlife photographer” that shows up in reels and feeds is nothing more than a Campbellian myth. We all want to live out our childhood “Nat Geo fantasies” and there’s nothing wrong with that. But as someone whose actually worked on television shows and documentary productions and done the legwork for a variety of media, I can tell you that unless those images don’t also include hundreds of scabbed over insect bites, sunburn, pure exhaustion, and the monotony of getting the same exact footage day after day after day so it can be edited into the perfect sequence despite actually being a dozen different birds of the same species doing the same motion, it’s likely more “inspired by” a true story than the truth itself. 

The lack of disclosure of how an image was made is a similar issue. There are near-daily instances I want to call out pro or influencer photographers for their description of an image and experience. Sure, it might be technically accurate, but only due to carefully crafted use and thoughtful omission of words. It’s easy to spot when you’ve worked in many of the same locations and know a scene like the back of your hand. Or, on more than one occasion, you were standing just up the way creating the same image at the same time, and found it to be a much more mundane encounter.

I worry these myths make too many talented photographers question their abilities or their potential. I worry that it keeps people from trying, or from appreciating their own learning curve. Worse yet, I have seen first-hand how it breeds comparison and the sense that everyone else is learning it faster, doing it better, and more consistently. That’s just not true.

So let me say it again, this time a little bit louder for the ones in the back: even the pros get skunked.

In what I consider a good year, I add maybe 12 new images to my portfolio. 12. Not 12 from a single outing, or 12 from a month of shooting, but 12 from 365 days of effort. 12 images I consider portfolio-worthy, that represent something new in my understanding of the natural world. That capture not just the animal, but the essence of its place in the larger story from my point of view.

That’s not to say I only keep 12 a year, because I make thousands to submit to editors, license to stock, images for pitches, projects, assignments, etc. But portfolio-worthy? The kind of images that feel like the culmination of vision, effort, timing, and wild magic? If I end up with a dozen, it’s been a stellar year.

Those 12 images are built on the foundation of hundreds of failures, thousands of almosts, and countless mornings like the ones with the grebes when Mother Nature seemed determined to shut me out.

But here’s what I’ve learned over the years, and what I hope you’ll remember the next time you come in from the field discouraged or empty-handed: those “failed” days aren’t failures at all. They’re education. They’re the slow accumulation of knowledge about your subjects and light and behavior and timing. They’re frustrating and they stink and they’ll make you question why you even bother to do it sometimes.

But you have to keep showing up. Because in the end, those failed days are the price of admission to the moments that matter.