FLY FISHING PHOTOGRAPHY By Tom Sutcliffe

THE ROLE OF THE HIGHLANDS IN MY FLY FISHING PHOTOGRAPHY AND SOME TIPS FOR TAKING BETTER PICTURES

By Tom Sutcliffe

In all the years I’ve been writing about the fishing around Rhodes and Barkly, nothing much has changed except me and the equipment I carry. As far as the “me” part goes, it’s easy. I’ve just got older; old enough to feel less comfortable about the walk out of valleys, to remember a long string of fishing seasons that in their own ways were each somehow unique, even if you could group them roughly into those where it was that dry, or that wet, we couldn’t actually fish and others where the Gods were so kind we couldn’t stop catching big trout. I also realise I have fished enough seasons in the Highlands now to easily end up sounding like an boring old fart talking about the place if I don’t watch myself.

Coming to my equipment, the change is simply this; in Rand terms I carry about ten times more value in cameras and lenses these days than in rods, reels or vests. It was an evolutionary growth though, much like my interest in fly fishing, in that it took root steadily from year to year and as it grew so did the cost of the gear I wanted to own, until I’ve reached a state of equilibrium in both, where there’s a roughly equal heap of stuff I would still like to have but can’t really afford. Like in fly fishing, a 7½-foot, three-piece, 4-weight H L Jennings split bamboo fly rod would be nice and in photography, a 21 mega pixel, full frame, digital SLR camera, neither of which are totally out of my reach but would need a lot of explaining and justification. An odd fact is there’s little difference in the cost of the ‘nice to haves’ in fly fishing and photography. A trip to Alaska for example, or the Seychelles, is right up in the same league as the cost of a prime, image stabilized long lens.

Of the two pursuits I can’t say any one is more consuming, just that they both are, and that luckily fly fishing and photography are as complimentary as peas and pods. Fishing trips have got a little more complicated, of course, in that when I plan a visit up to Rhodes these days it’s as important for me to know how yellow the autumn leaves have turned as what the water levels are doing. And there’s a lot more to pack and most of it is as fragile as any bamboo fly rod. Corrugated dirt roads in a hard sprung truck have taken on a new meaning, as has dust. Cameras and lenses need to be packed so that road shocks are absorbed, and dust is kept out. Then with the speed and resolution of modern digital SLRs, a few big memory cards are not enough these days. You have to take a laptop along to download the day’s shoot. It takes time and discipline. A few years back I’d just tie flies on any evening I had nothing much to do. Now I’m hunched over a lap top and I tie flies only when I run seriously short on patterns.

I suppose I’d have to put a lot of blame for my additional obsession on Rhodes and the Highlands. The fact is that not only is the area a fly-fishing paradise, it’s also a fly-fishing photographers’ dream world. That’s partly because up here you can point a camera anywhere other than straight at your feet and you’ll take a nice picture. What helps are the sensuous gold and red autumn colours the place is so well known for, the spectacular sandstone scenery everywhere, the pretty turquoise tints to the water and the fact that you don’t have to worry if the fish in your pictures will look big enough because mostly, they are and trophies aren’t rare.

The two downsides to taking pictures on streams are weight and water.

Let’s consider weight. It took me a while, but I’ve come to realise that good pictures don’t often happen by chance, just as chalkstream trout aren’t often hooked by chance. Taking good pictures needs careful planning, a reasonable camera and quality lenses. But a reasonable camera hooked up to a quality lens equates to plenty of weight and these days my co-converts and I carrying at least one SLR camera and two or three spare lenses.

Just to add to the on-stream weight problem let’s talk about camera shake, the photographer’s equivalent of drag in fly fishing. It causes pictures to lose needle sharpness, and the slower the shutter speed, the poorer the light the better the chances of shake if the camera is handheld. So a tripod is essential and even light tripods with legs made of carbon fibre are heavy – by fly fishing standards anyway. Tackle manufacturers talk in ounces, camera manufacturer’s talk in pounds.

Where water comes in is that all fly fishing happens in or near it and the sophisticated electronics of digital cameras and lenses are allergic to water. I have heard a few dunked camera stories of that had a happy ending, but you don’t want to believe it’s the rule. Mainly a very wet camera, or lens, is history. So, I have learned to wade with a lot more care and I make a point of keeping risk to a minimum.

Someone who’d just bought himself a fairly fancy digital SLR asked me over the phone the other evening what tips I could give him for his trip to Rhodes. He was intending in future, he said, to make a really good photographic record of the fly fishing trips he does and he’d invested a fair amount of money. I said his request was impossible to answer over the phone, but an email could work. Here’s what I sent him:

Don’t be typically male. Read the instruction manual from cover to cover with the camera in your hand. Then read it again until you know every button and every dial by heart.
Get a good book on digital photography and if a fellow called Scott Kelby wrote it, so much the better.
A digital image in your camera is only step one. You have to download that image to a computer, delete the rubbish, then back up the day’s pictures onto a CD or a portable hard drive. If you are on a laptop don’t try editing your pictures in a farmhouse somewhere. Wait until you get home and edit them on your desk top computer. Use the software that came with the camera or buy yourself purpose designed image editing software. My recommendations flowing from this was that (a) he first gets his computer screen colour calibrated (to accurately represent colours) and (b) if he wanted a benchmark editing suite then to get Photoshop CS4 or Photoshop Elements 7, depending on bank balance. Again, having got it, read the instructions. Here a Scott Kelby book is as good as a Bible and most bookstores stock them!
Always shoot RAW images (it’s a format that doesn’t allow the camera to do any in-camera editing, so you lose no detail). I shoot RAW and JPEG images together, but don’t ask me why. The RAW images are always superior.
Look to shoot at least a few pictures from unusual angles, say with the camera right at the water surface, or close to a waterfall, to add unusual effects. Be imaginative. The real bonus of the digital age is that you can afford to experiment because it costs nothing. With film you thought twice.
If you are not using a tripod, make sure your shutter speed is high to avoid camera shake. The general rule is the minimum shutter speed you can use is the reciprocal of the focal length of the lens. So, using a 100 mm lens, set a shutter speed no less than 1 hundredth of a second. With long lenses (100 mm and over) shooting during the day I set the camera to shutter speed priority and leave the camera on 1/500^th of a second. To get higher shutter speeds you may have to push up the ISO setting, but I’ll explain that later.
Get a good, soft waterproof bag to protect your camera when wading across deep rivers.
Learn about light. The best pictures are taken in early morning or evening light. The harsh light at the middle of a sunny day tends to wash the colour out of pictures, even if you are using the best equipment in the world.
Be careful about the clothing your subject is wearing. He must be dressed like a fly fisher; not in shorts, sandals, T-shirt and no fly vest. All your short of is a guy with a propeller mounted on top of his cap ! A touch of bright colour helps and very pale-coloured or white shirts or pants will tend to throw the camera’s white balance judgment out the window when you are doing close ups. The result is those areas of your picture will be under-exposed and that’s very difficult if not impossible to correct in the computer.
When you photograph fish keep them near the water not miles out of it and make sure the fish has the sun coming from behind it or from an angle. If you don’t follow this simple precaution the fish will look ‘blown out’, even white, as if you had been photographing a mirror reflecting sunlight straight at the camera.
What the ISO setting on your camera denotes is how sensitive the image sensor is to the amount of light there is. The higher the ISO, the more sensitive the image sensor thereby opening the possibility to take pictures in low-light. In general terms, the resolution of an image is better at lower ISO settings; say 100 or 200, and the higher the ISO goes the more ‘noise’ comes into the image, a perceptible graininess in the picture. But as cameras have advanced so has their ISO performance, meaning you can now get as good an image on ISO 400, 800, even 1600 depending on the camera. The important tip is to experiment with your ISO settings. If you are shooting hand held in very poor light bump the ISO up to 400, 800 even 1600 and check the quality of your images. For sporting or action scenes, like an angler casting, leave the ISO faster, say on 400.
The perfect landscape is the dream of most photographers fly fishing photographers included. How do you get it? Not by luck. To shoot perfect landscapes here are a couple of rules:

Use late afternoon or early morning light, or the brilliant light that comes a few moments before and after a thunderstorm, or the light of a sunset or the momentary ‘burst’ of treacle-coloured light just as the sun goes down.
A tripod is non-negotiable.
Set the ISO on 100 or the lowest setting the camera has.
To allow for better depth of field, choose an aperture of around f11 to f16.
Focus one third into the landscape, not at the camera’s infinity setting.
Set the mirror lock to ‘up’.
Use a cable release to trigger the shutter, or if you don’t have one, the camera’s self-timer set to fire after 2 or 10 seconds. Both these last two points are designed to eliminate any possibility of camera movement.

Tom Sutcliife’s renowned mural on the wall in the Thankshjalot pub at Walkerbouts