Welcome to 2023! (yes, I realized it’s almost February, but like birds, time flies….)
There is a difference between birding and bird photography, and as I reflected on the past year, it became clear that 2022 included more of the former than the latter.
What is the difference, you might be wondering? While making the best possible image is always on my mind, photography is secondary when birding. When chasing a rarity or a new “life bird” (a species I have never seen before), capturing any image is a challenge and a thrill. Getting close, waiting for good light, and careful composition — the makings of great bird photography — are typically not on the menu. Thus while this past year of birding yielded many images of fascinating new species and amazing experiences I would not trade or alter, it resulted in fewer “calendar-worthy” frames. For the first time in five years, I found myself with a calendar to make and not enough photos to make it.
To resolve this dilemma, and to hopefully quell my growing anxiety, I decided to try something counter-intuitive: I imposed a constraint. For each month, I decided to limit my options to only those photos taken in the same month of the last year. January 2023’s image would have to be from January 2022, February 2023 from February 2022, and so on. In the face of a shortage, rather than seeking new options, I took options away, and something surprising happened. As if by magic, the image selections fell into place almost immediately. This is not to say the choices were all easy, but they became almost instantly clear.
Contrary to what one might expect, adding a constraint did not create a bigger problem; it solved one. My photo selection constraint was self-imposed and the stakes were admittedly low, but life is full of hard choices we cannot avoid on issues far more significant than bird photo selection. Life’s requisite choices inevitably result in thousands of amazing places we will never see, countless experiences we will never have, and untold hours we will not spend with the people we care about most. What we choose in each moment necessarily rules out something else. To decide means literally “to cut off.” Yet in this cutting off of possibilities, there is richness and beauty that would not exist if our options were unconstrained. Our choices matter precisely because we have to make them. Creativity is not limited by constraints; it blossoms in their presence. That which is constrained is “bound together,” and so we all are, here with the birds and all the inhabitants of this tiny green and blue sphere. From that perspective it seems clear that what we choose has meaning not in spite of our constraints — our bound-togetherness —but because of them.
This calendar represents another twelve months of choices, constraints built of days, weeks, and months. As you turn the pages, may you find the beauty in the necessary decisions you will make this coming year, even the hard ones. May your awareness of the finitude of these next 365 days increase the joy in every one of them. May we all be bound together.
Wishing you all the best in the year to come,
Greg