Why I Take My Own Reference Photos

On my last day in Japan I had a few hours to kill before my flight, so I walked to Ueno Park in the middle of Tokyo. It is a busy public park, full of people, not the sort of place you go looking for wildlife. I was mostly killing time. I hate travel days!

Then as I approached the corner of the pond, I spotted a female kingfisher perched on a rope strung across the water, about twenty feet away.

I took the photograph. Actually I took a LOT of photos, and spent at least 20 minutes just watching this bird going about its business until it disappeared into the trees. A few months later, back in my Sheffield studio, I picked my favourite shot, and it became a painting called Waiting. In the painting I swapped the rope for a branch, because – repeat after me: You don’t have to paint everything that’s in the photo!

That is the whole argument for taking your own reference photos. I can tell you where I was standing and what I was doing there and how close she was. I can remember how I was feeling and what I was listening to at the time. If I had bought that photograph from a stock library, there would be no story behind the painting and I’d feel less emotional connection to it.

The bird was there

Almost everything I paint is a bird or animal I have seen myself, usually either in my back garden, within a few miles of my house, or out on the moors above Sheffield. The robin in Stripe is a specific robin. He has a spot by our garden pond and he is there most days, flashing his distinctive stripe.

So when somebody buys that painting, they get a particular bird, on a particular afternoon, at the pond he has decided belongs to him.

Most people who buy my work are people who already love the animal it depicts. They feed the birds, they walk in the Peak District, they know the difference between the call of a coal tit and a great tit (or they use the Merlin app if they’re not sure!) They are buying something they recognise. It seems only fair that the thing in the painting is something I’ve actually seen.

I am not precious about it

While I try to stick to my self-imposed rule whenever I can, not every painting comes from my own photograph.

When I started painting again after a long break, the first thing I finished was a starling, from a photograph by TheOtherKev on Pixabay. My first blue tit painting was the same, until I finally captured some decent shots of our own garden blue tits. More recently I painted Once from a photograph on Pexels, because it was a specific challenge and I had nothing suitable of my own.

Whenever that happens I credit the photographer on the product page. It is their photograph and their patience that made the painting possible, and hiding it would be a strange thing to do.

But I try to make it the exception, and it has become easier every year, mostly because I have got better at the part that has nothing to do with painting.

How I actually get them

If you are hoping for camera settings, I’m afraid I will disappoint you. You can find countless great tutorials on YouTube if you want to learn the basics of wildlife photography. The useful skills in my case turned out to be almost entirely about the animal.

Learn the bird before you learn the shot. Kingfishers fly fast, low and dead straight, and they follow the line of the water. They also come back to the same perch, and when they catch something they return to that perch to beat it against the branch before swallowing it head first. Once you know that, you stop chasing a blue flash and start pointing the camera at a branch instead.

Then you wait. Find the perch, get comfortable, and be prepared to be bored. Almost every decent wildlife photograph I have is the result of sitting still for far longer than I would have liked. Take far too many photos while you are there. Most will be rubbish, but one or two might end up being just what you need.

Your garden counts. Foxhole came from a photo I took out of our kitchen window. It had snowed, and one of the local foxes turned up in morning light, which almost never happens because Sheffield’s urban foxes keep to dusk and dawn. I shot it through glass, which is never ideal and gives you reflections to fight, though a long lens does cut a lot of that out.

Overcast days are a gift. Bright midday sun flattens iridescence, which is a problem when half of what makes a kingfisher or a starling worth painting is the way the colour shifts as the bird turns. Soft grey light keeps that shimmer and gives you the shape underneath it. We have a lot of soft grey light in Sheffield, so this works out well.

The photograph does not have to be good, it just has to be a good reference. The Foxhole reference is not one I would put on the wall: shot through glass, reflections in it, not especially sharp. It did not matter, because I was using it to remember something I had seen rather than copying it.

What changes when the photograph is yours

The story is the main thing, and the emotional connection. But I also find that I paint with more nerve. I moved that kingfisher off a rope and onto a branch without hesitating, because I was there and I could remember what the light was doing and what the water looked like behind her. When I work from someone else’s photograph I am more careful and more literal, because the photograph is all I have. When it is mine, the photograph is just there as a reminder of what I saw.

You also remember things the photograph does not hold: how cold it was, what the bird did next, whether it saw you, how badly you needed to pee!

Have a go yourself

If you want to try this, the Sheffield end of the Peak District is a good shout. Porter Valley and the river Sheaf are both home to kingfishers, and there are streams around Longshaw Estate and Padley Gorge worth walking slowly. Early morning is the best time to catch them at their most active. Take a flask and an audiobook.

I put many of my own photographs on dans.blog if you want to see what the raw material looks like before it becomes a painting. You are also very welcome to use them as reference for your own work, as I have said before. Just tell me if you do, so I can enjoy seeing what you create from them.

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That kingfisher from Ueno Park never made it into the shop. The original was a gift for my mum, so it is not for sale and never will be.

But I have made a print-ready file of it, at full quality, and it is yours free when you join my email list. You will also be the first to hear when a new painting goes up, before I announce it anywhere else, and you’ll get 10% off your first purchase too!

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