Taking pictures inside the small mammal, primate and reptile houses at the Philadelphia Zoo is an interesting technical challenge. I’ve tried using tripods and circular polarizers but the quality of the light and the thickness of the glass in most cases still keeps me from getting a good shot, particularly because often the animals are far enough away that I need a telephoto. Occasionally I get a good close shot that’s visually interesting but technically flawed.
This time I was at the gibbons and there was a new mother. Every once in a while, she’d move around and her baby would be visible. So I waited. (That’s the other problem with taking pictures in this context: my family gets a little bored waiting for me to get done or give up at a particular enclosure.) Finally the moment came and I got the shot.
I was really pleased with the madonna-and-child outcome. It was even a fairly good low light shot in technical terms. I posted it right away to Flickr and maybe elsewhere on social media, if I remember right. About six months later, we went back to the zoo and outside the gibbon enclosure in the Great Apes House, there was an explanatory plaque up about the new (at that point, not so new) baby, and to my astonishment, there was my picture. Or so I thought. It really was identical. I called up my shot on Flickr on my smartphone and had my wife and a couple of bystanders verify that the two images were identical.
I wasn’t angry, but it would have tickled me to have an acknowledgement. So I wrote to the Zoo’s management and said: hey, I’m delighted for you to have it, but how about an acknowledgement? They wrote back and said, “We see why you think it’s your shot, but at the exact moment you took your shot, we had a staff photographer out there trying to snap the new baby too, and she was right next to you—she even remembers there was a man trying for the same image.” I thought about it, and yeah, they were right—there was someone right next to me the whole time, waiting for the same chance, with a good camera rig. We might have even had a little conversation about the technical challenge. So I felt pretty stupid about complaining.
That’s just two photographers trying to capture the same moment, a moment that won’t come again. Increasingly in the wider world, both moments and places are under the gaze of thousands of cameras, all of them primed to take the same shot. The same spectacular landscape taken from the same exact camera position. I’d love to see some of the famous slot canyons of the Southwest but I’m not taking my camera if I go. Nobody needs to see another shot of that same beam of light from that same angle with those same camera settings. At some events and occasions, there’s a hundred cameras pointed at the same action, where only the most expensive rig and maybe the most patient or anticipatory eye is going to produce a memorable image.
To make images worth sharing—that aren’t just a way to anchor personal memory—you have to find moments that other people are watching, or places that no one looks at, and see something there. Digital photography is close to costless once you have the gear, so the temptation is just to point the camera at everything and shoot continuously, looking for the random gold in a pile of dross. The value of a day with a camera in a given place for me is how it makes me see, which means only shooting with great intention, with my eye through the viewfinder. At times, that means I’ll walk away having seen something for the first time that I’ve passed by hundreds of times before. But at other times, no matter how much I think I’m alone, my eye is the same as any other, and I’m part of a fellowship of strangers who’ve witnessed the same ordinary scene and seen the remarkable vision inside of it.