My Dog Would Make a Great Photographer

I’d like to introduce you to my dog, Maddie. She’s an 80lb Flat-coat Retriever, with maybe another breed or two thrown in for variety. She isn’t going to win the Nobel Prize anytime soon, but she’s sweet and enthusiastic about life. I think, if she had opposable thumbs and could understand how to operate a camera, she’d make an awesome photographer. But since she can’t, I instead need to take her unrealized photographic skills and try to learn from them. Here are a five things Maddie is teaching me about photography:

1. Expect Novelty. Every morning when we let her out, Maddie walks out onto the deck, and promptly sits down on the top stair leading down to the yard. From her perch 5 feet above the surroundings she surveys everything she can see. Her ears perked, she looks right, looks left, up and down, and sniffs the air. She will spend a minute or two examining things, before eventually wandering down the stairs to go pee. She doesn’t expect the world to be the same every day. Each morning is new and different with the possibility of the unexpected, looming like a moose in the shadows of the forest.

I however, groggily open the door and stumble out to the car or down to the wood-shed without barely a glance around. I have literally walked within 15 feet of a giant moose without realizing it until Maddie loudly informed me of the fact. Maddie is teaching me to look, and lose my expectations about what the day will hold. When I am successful, I see things that I did not before: the first sunlight on the hill across the valley, frost on the gravel of my driveway, the squirrel sitting quietly on the outer branch of a spruce. And of course, I will stand a better of chance of not being trampled by a moose when I stagger bleary-eyed into the yard.

2. Curiosity. Each evening, Maddie and I take a walk on the trails around our cabin. Sometimes we make long loops, other times we just wander out and back the same path. I tend to zone-out and listen to a book or a Radiolab podcast on my iPhone as we walk. But not Maddie, she explores. It doesn’t matter if we’ve walked the same route every day for the past month, she will zip in and out of the trees, and down the rabbit trails. If I had the kind of curiosity that pulled me up those tiny trails on hands and knees, or down into the creek bed, or through the brambles, I wonder what kind of images I’d find along the way?

3. Focus. This isn’t a characteristic I often think of when I consider my dog. But it occurs to me that it isn’t that she lacks focus, rather, she just doesn’t always turn her attention where I think it should go. When something draws her focus, she is single-minded. A few days ago on our evening walk, we were ambling up a trail a half mile or so from home when three Spruce Grouse flushed off trail in front of us. In a blast of wings, feathers, and rushing air the birds rose straight up into the trees above, where they settled to eye us closely. Maddie stopped dead at the sound of their flight and watched the birds intently as they landed in the trees. Once they were out of her reach, she returned to the trail and trotted on.

For those few seconds, Maddie was entirely involved in the flight of the grouse. I’m certain the rest of her world became quiet and dark while she watched them. That is the kind of focus I try to attain with photographic subjects. The moment, like Maddie and the grouse, need not be long. But the single-minded concentration, blocking out the rest of the world, if for only a few seconds, can be enough to create the composition that works. Then, like the dog, I can move on to the universe of exciting and beautiful things that lie up the trail.

4. Slow-mindedness. Maddie is not a bright dog. Not stupid, necessarily, but not particularly smart. She isn’t encumbered by over-thinking. While I’m not striving to drop my IQ to Maddie’s level, I would like to learn from her inability to over-think. Often when I’m working in the field, I can’t quiet my mind enough to see what I need to see. The excitement of perfect, but ephemeral light, or nearby wildlife, forces me to rush. My mind scurries along double-time, part worrying about finding the right composition, another part fussing with camera settings, my hands working to erect the tripod, while my feet are carrying me to some undetermined location. There is too much going on and the one thing I’m not doing is appreciating the scene. A rushing, over-thinking mind inevitably leads to rushed, over-thought photographs. Maddie does not have that problem, she does her thing, simply, without extraneous elements distracting from task. Exactly how I hope to work in the field.

5. Unbridled Joy. A tennis ball, a squeaky toy, a bowl full of kibble, a treat, a walk, getting brushed, a peanut-butter filled bone, cuddling, playing fetch. These are all things in Maddie’s daily life that bring her to a state of near-ecstasy. Joy is very easy for her to find. I dearly wish it was so easy for me. I’m not an unhappy person, quite the opposite in fact, but if happiness were a competition with the dog, I’d have thrown in my towel in the first round. The ease of her joy, passion, and enthusiasm for life are the traits I would most like to emulate. My best images of the outdoors were made when I was grasped by joy.

A few times over my travels this summer I was so taken by the beauty of an evening, or the events of the day that I was brought to tears by its end. It is that depth of emotion that drives creativity, and creativity that generates compelling photographs. Certainly other emotions: sadness, fear, awe, pain, anger, and even frustration can all be the catalyst for creating lofty images, but Joy is the most pleasurable to experience. Sublime photos are made not through technical expertise, but through feeling and passion. Maddie has the unbridled joy part down, and I’d like to start with that.

These are things that Maddie is teaching me. I expect there is a lot more to learn, if I have the patience to listen.

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