Maybe I’m Heading Into a Period of Color

I have barely posted any wildlife photography this year. Not here, and not much on Instagram either.

There are plenty of obvious explanations for that. I have been spending an almost ridiculous amount of time building software, working with AI, running the companies and generally disappearing down whatever rabbit hole happens to interest me that week. Photography has still been there, but the editing and publishing side of it has somehow kept getting pushed away.

The strange thing is that I definitely do not have a shortage of photographs. Just during the last eight weeks or so I have photographed in Shompole in Kenya, spent time in the Pantanal in Brazil and just returned from Zimanga in South Africa. There are thousands and thousands of new images sitting on the drives. Lions, cheetah cubs, jaguars, elephants, wild dogs and probably quite a few photographs I have already forgotten that I took.

Normally that would be enough to make me disappear into Lightroom for days. Instead I have had almost no urge to open it.

I have been thinking that perhaps I am simply occupied with other things right now. And I am. There is definitely some truth in that. But I started working on a few photographs recently and noticed something that might explain another part of it.

I wanted to work on them in color.

That should not be a particularly dramatic realisation for a photographer, but somehow it felt like one.

I have thought of myself for a long time as primarily a black and white wildlife photographer. Most of the images I am happiest with are monochrome. When I look at photographs that feel the most like mine, they are usually black and white. It has become part of how I see my own photography, and probably also part of how other people see it.

And somewhere along the way I think that may have quietly turned from a preference into a rule.

I would open an image, like what I saw in the color version, and almost immediately start thinking about how it would work in black and white. If it worked better in color there was this strange little resistance to it, almost as if posting too many color photographs somehow meant I was moving away from what my photography was supposed to be.

Which is, of course, a fairly stupid box to put yourself in. Nobody told me I have to photograph in black and white. I made that rule myself.

The more I look through the photographs from these recent trips, the more I find myself stopping at color. In some of those photographs, removing the color does not simplify the image or make it stronger. It removes part of what made me stop and photograph the scene in the first place. Perhaps that is what has been bothering me without me really understanding it.

Maybe I have not lost the desire to work on photographs. Maybe I have simply been trying to force the photographs I am currently interested in into the photographer I thought I was supposed to be.

That is a very different problem.

I still love black and white. I do not think that is going anywhere. There are photographs where removing color completely changes the image and lets shape, light, texture and expression take over. That way of seeing is probably always going to be a big part of my photography. But perhaps it does not have to be all of it.

Photography should probably be allowed to move with you. What interested me five years ago does not have to be exactly what interests me today, and what interests me today does not have to become another permanent style that I have to defend for the next ten years.

If you have been reading this blog for a long time, you know I have written quite a lot about photography philosophy over the years. About developing your own style, being selective about what you show, not posting everything simply because you photographed it, and thinking about what you want your body of work to say about you. I still believe all of that. If I was trying to establish myself as a wildlife photographer today, make a name for myself and build a career around it, I would think very carefully about consistency, style and what I put out into the public arena.

Luckily, I am not trying to build a career as a wildlife photographer. Photography is what I do for fun. It is my creative outlet, the thing I do to relax and to free my mind from companies, numbers, software and everything else that is constantly running through my head. And perhaps that also means I should be careful not to turn all the advice I once gave myself into rules that make photography less enjoyable.

Years ago I wrote a post called Photography Is Made to Discover Yourself. A sentence I later learned, through a rather unexpected comment on that post years later, somebody else apparently believed he had invented in 2024 and now owned. I still like the thought behind it, regardless of who is claiming the copyright on the philosophy.

And perhaps that is exactly what is happening again. Maybe photography is letting me discover something new about my own photography. Maybe, after spending years seeing wildlife primarily in black and white, I am starting to see something different in the color that I have been so quick to remove.

I still love black and white. I do not think that is going anywhere. But perhaps it does not have to dictate what I allow myself to show. So maybe I am heading into a period of color. I am not sure yet. Not some grand reinvention, and no announcement that I am suddenly a color photographer. Just giving myself permission to stop converting an image to black and white simply because that is what Michael is supposed to do.

If the photograph wants color, it gets color. Maybe I am just discovering myself again. This time in color.