You know the outtakes phenomenon, where if you stick around long enough at the end of some movies (usually comedies), they show all the bloopers and ad-libs that wouldn’t make it to the final cut, but are funnier than the final cut? I like those.
I remember going to the Rainbow Ascot cinema in Bulawayo with my best mate John to watch an execrable comedy called The Cannonball Run, starring Burt Reynolds, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Junior, Dom Deloise, Farrah Fawcett and Jackie Chan, plus a host of exotic sports cars and such. Although we thoroughly enjoyed the movie itself, we were transported to cackling teenage mirth by the outtakes – Dean Martin, dressed as a priest, gesturing with his rosary and saying, “these bleeds?” Hilarious! Well, perhaps you had to be there.
It’s just a pity you have to sit through the whole production to get to the outtakes. And yet, there’s no point to outtakes unless you’ve gone through the whole production. (It’s this sort of canny thinking that brings the hordes to these pages – quality ruminations, all for free.)
As a persistently mediocre amateur photographer, I too have a comprehensive outtakes reel. It happens when you burn billions of pixels in pursuit of some feathery denizen of the garden, or butterflies in the rose bushes, or some such unexotic wildlife.
So here are a few of mine. They’re not funnier than the shots that make it to Corner Cottage’s Instagram, but sometimes they do have their own allure. There’s an element of what might have been – if only they’d been in focus; if only they’d been in frame. That kind of thing.
This first lot is something I’ve touched on before – or rather, not so much of the touching, but I’ve mentioned how often, when stalking some small brown bird or other, I am finally gifted with a view of its butt. I have a lot of birdy butt shots. It would be churlish not to share.
Then there are the ones when the little critter takes flight just as you fire the shutter. Would that these were frozen in perfect focus, because they’d be nice pics – but they tend not to be, because the little buggers move extremely fast.
Then you have the ones that hop irritatingly from twig to twig, again just as you find focus on what you hope will be a classic Audubon-style pose. You know the kind of thing: the bird, on its twig, looking pensively into the distance in the manner of a corporate CEO’s PR portrait. Instead, it’s making an ungainly leap, showing no sign of executive leadership whatsoever.
You tend to get the move-when-you-shoot effect with the local platypuses too. In fact, the sound of the shutter seems to be what sets them off – and you get pics depicting bits of diving platypus.
And there is the phenomenon of the perfectly obscured feature. For wildlife photography, it’s a good rule of thumb that the animal’s eye needs to be in focus, if nothing else. Otherwise our brains can’t really arrange the visual information into an identifiable beast. And for that to work properly, the eye should ideally have a catchlight in it, which gives it the illusion of life. But sometimes something gets in the way — and these become the ‘might have been’ kind of shot.
And it’s not just birds. These few tendencies seem to be shared by many, many animals.
And it’s not just nature photography, either: those flitting birds of the urban landscape, city cyclists, often seems to suffer from a similar concern: just when you get a good one, they pass behind a lamppost, or a taxi zooms in front of the lens.
Years ago, in another country far far away, I had a wonderful poster of the contact sheet from a black-and-white shoot of BB King playing his guitar. It included the chinagraph pencil notations from some photo editor, revealing which of the frames they thought would look good in print.
What made it really interesting, though, was that not one of the frames was mundane or uninteresting — even the outtakes. The old bluesman was deep into his song; the monochrome was subtle and arty; and taken together, those 24 shots told you more about the man and his music than any one could on its own.
Far be it for me to claim that these photographic bits and bobs could aspire to such heights. But they do tell you something about these creatures that a static Audubon-style portrait can’t – they’re alive, they’re unpredictable, and they have minds of their own. Come to think of it, you wouldn’t really want it any other way.