There’s a large body of research on expertise — much of it built on the work of psychologist Anders Ericsson — and one of its central findings is counterintuitive: the number of hours you spend practicing something matters far less than how you spend them. Doing things you already know how to do, in roughly the same way you’ve always done them, doesn’t move you forward. What does is practicing specific elements, purposefully, and repeating them until they’re automatic.
For wildlife photography, that’s easy to say and harder to actually do. Here’s what it looks like in practice.
It starts with reviewing my photos honestly. Not just culling for the keepers — actually asking, for each image, what would have made this better. And I mean all of them, including the ones I’m proud of. There’s almost always something. Maybe the shot is technically clean but there’s no behaviour in it, and the lesson is to stay longer next time. Maybe it’s not as sharp as I’d like, and then I need to think back to what was happening in the moment, what my settings were, and what I could have controlled.
Early on, I kept clipping the wings on birds in flight. I photograph a lot of raptors, and when one would lift off I’d find myself too zoomed in — tight on the portrait I’d been working on — and suddenly I’d have a head and no wingtip. For a long time I’d just feel disappointed and move on. Deliberate practice meant stopping at that image and asking: what would I have had to do differently to get the full bird? The answer was simple, it turns out. Zoom out a bit while the bird is still perched. Anticipate, rather than react. Once I’d named it, I could work on it.
I keep a note on my phone of these realisations — small, specific things to bring into the field. Before any outing, I read through them. And if the thing I need to work on is something I can repeat in a controlled way, I’ll go and repeat it. The zooming-in problem, for example: I spent a morning at my local pond photographing ducks. A few tight portrait shots, then zoom out, take the wider frame. Repeat until it stops feeling deliberate and starts feeling automatic.
The zooming-out problem doesn’t occupy any space in my head anymore when I’m in the field. It just happens. And that’s the point — once something becomes automatic, it frees your attention for the next thing you haven’t solved yet. There’s always a next thing. But the list gets more interesting the further into it you get.
