I have been utterly consumed with trying to make fishing look as good as possible via the medium of photography for many years now, and from time to time I have been asked to do a sort of fishing photography talk for a bunch of people at a fishing show or something similar - and I absolutely love doing it. Covid has obviously put a stop to so many things which we accepted as part of our normal lives, but I really, really like communicating about fishing - obviously! - and photography. In many respects they are one and the same to me because of my obsessions, but I have been thinking about how I might communicate a bit more about photography and see if anybody out there is remotely interested……………
So I hit upon the idea of creating a simple YouTube video which consists of still photographs only - no video work at all - plus a voiceover from me. I wanted to base it on the photo above which you have seen here before but which from a photography point of view is easily one of my favourite bass fishing photos I have ever been lucky enough to shoot. I guess that because I am an angler and also a photographer, I know completely how much luck there was that literally every single thing came together at exactly the right time to enable me to shoot this photo. I know because I have tried, but you can never, ever repeat a photo which relies on so many factors (luckily) coming together. The photo below of the eye of a bass is another of my favourite bass fishing photographs, but I have never seen everything come together like it did that afternoon to be able to repeat the shot.
So yes, in many respects the photography of fishing is a bit mad because there is so little you can actually control. For the purposes of this video I went back to the day I shot the photo - 30th December 2016 - and I grabbed a bunch of other photos I also shot which in a natural way lead into the one main shot which I am so pleased with. There are some kind people leaving some really nice comments on the video so it’s a big thanks from me, but at the end of the day this isn’t a fishing video as such and it could well find no real audience at all. I hope it does though because I have got so many ideas about how to do more YouTube work based around photographing fishing. You all have a good weekend, please stay safe and well and I hope that you are also getting big blue wintery skies like we have currently got around here at the moment. Not much good for having another crack at a January bass, but I’ll take blue skies in winter over not seeing the sun for days on end just fine………..