Patience is a virtue
I’m not a patient person at all.’ It’s a surprising admission for a wildlife photographer to make, but as Tesni Ward continues, it becomes clear she’s talking about her life outside photography. When she’s sitting, watching, waiting for that perfect shot, it seems, she has the patience of a saint. ‘I take people to see mountain hares,’ she says. ‘People see photos of them running and preening and doing all sorts of behaviours, but when they actually get in front of them, they realise they just sit there and do nothing for hours at a time. I took a lady out the other day. It took us about an hour and a half to get there, two hours to find the hare, about half an hour to get into position, and then it just sat there for about two hours. And then, eventually, at the end, it did the full shebang – stretching, preening – and she was just made up. It was worth the wait.’ Something Ward has little patience for is unethical wildlife photographers who are willing to try to speed things up. ‘As much as it can be frustrating – if you’ve been sat there for hours and the animal has done nothing and you haven’t got a single photo – the temptation to try to encourage something to happen should be resisted,’ she says. ‘If you try to force it to the detriment of the wildlife, why are you doing it?’ And just letting nature take its course brings its own benefits. ‘It’s that much more rewarding when things just spontaneously happen – particularly if you’ve been sitting there for hours and nothing has happened and then suddenly it does. That feeling is indescribable.’
Ward started out doing a mixture of landscape and wildlife photography. ‘But I found that whenever I had the choice of what to do, I always picked wildlife,’ she says. Part of the appeal was the unpredictability. ‘Every single day, every single encounter is going to be completely different. You don’t know what hand you’re going to be dealt. Wildlife is just so much more exciting to me.’
But of course, as alluded to above, wildlife photography brings a particular set of challenges. ‘You take a lot of bad photos – a lot – because so much is out of your control,’ she says. ‘You can’t control their behaviour, you can’t control the light, the conditions. Often the light is fantastic and you’re just sat there with nothing in front of you, dying inside, knowing how good the photos would be. And then, the moment the light’s gone, the wildlife starts doing handstands. You need almost everything to go right for you to get that shot.’
Ward’s overall goal in photography is to try to inspire people to appreciate wildlife, to understand some of the trials and tribulations animals go through.
It’s this that’s motivating her current project on, of all things, feral pigeons. ‘I’m determined to show them in a new light, in a positive light, to make people think, “Hold on a minute. Why do we hate pigeons again?”’