In conversation with Ellie Rothnie

Talking to Mike Owen, Head of Marketing at EIZO UK

Regardless of photographic genre photography for so many is a passion, rather than a profession. The saying goes that for those who love what they do will never work a day in their life. Photographers who get to earn a living in their chosen genre have often managed it through a huge amount of skill, an element of luck and a lot of effort. They will have worked in a variety of conditions, and wildlife photographers may well have visited more places than many on their journey. Ellie Rothnie’s journey with EIZO is a long one, which during this last year have included Birmingham’s NEC and our Ascot HQ, neither of which are wildlife hotspots. During her visit to our Ascot HQ Ellie sat down with Mike Owen, our Head of Marketing, to discuss her photographic journey.

Ellie is an award-winning wildlife photographer, photographic tour leader, and Canon Ambassador who has been fortunate enough to follow her passion around the world taking photographs of wildlife. Like many photographers, Ellie started her career because of her passion, leaving behind a successful career to follow her heart and follow her dream. The foundations of that dream started as an 8-year-old with her father’s camera, taking eye-level pictures of hedgehogs in her garden and as they went on family walks around some of the most picturesque parts of the United Kingdom.

Photography is a profession and a passion that requires photographers to trust their equipment and that it will work when needed to capture the moment and work when reviewing the captured moment. Ellie has been a long-time Canon photographer, following in her father’s footsteps, and EIZO owner, having selected the tools within her creative toolbox early on in her professional career, as she explains, “A passion for photography, for most people, probably starts with someone we know from an early age, be it their dad, Mum, an uncle, cousin or a family friend. A lot of people are inspired from a very early age and my dad was my early inspiration. I always had a camera, was always taking photographs of everything, wildlife, landscape, architecture, and friends. But never selfies, because you didn’t do that in those days, it was a very different time. I never appeared in any of these photographs, I was always taking photographs of other people and things.

Wind forward to 2004, I was in Kenya on a safari holiday but obviously had my camera and an old lens with me. There was a Cheetah there called Kike, and she was one of the feline stars of ‘The Big Cat Diary’ at the time, so I knew who this cheetah was.

A lot of people were coming and going so there were a lot of vehicles taking pictures, I stayed in the vehicle with her all day. During that time there was a vehicle parked right next to mine, and there was a professional photographer in that vehicle shooting on Canon, he saw that I got the 300D (the first DSLR under £1,000) and asked if he could take a look. He took off my really old lens, put on one of his prime telephoto lenses. He asked if I wanted to join him to take some pictures. And that’s exactly what we did. We took these beautiful images of Kiki, and it just opened my eyes to looking at the world through a prime lens and also opened my eyes to speaking to a professional. Somebody who did this, as a living, spending months in the Mara and then going to the Arctic.

At the end of the day, he said to me, ‘you’re really different because you’re happy to spend time with one animal and just watch it, watch the behaviours, photograph it, and enjoy it for what it is.’ I got home, looked him up, went on to his website and the photographer was Paul Souders, winner of Wildlife Photographer of the Year with some beautiful work with polar bears, wide angle, submerged in the water.

His perspectives and views were very different at the time, to anybody else that I was interested in. He changed something in my psyche. If Dad had created the initial flame, Paul Souders created the next spark. He was so generous with his time, modest and gentle and lovely to chat with, and it was that encounter that ignited my passion.  I started taking it more seriously, I was starting to buy kit and using the salary from my marketing job to fund a lot of these purchases.”

It is at this point that I start connecting the dots, Ellie and I had never met before meeting for the interview, but our paths have unknowingly intertwined over a number of years. The EOS 300D was the first camera I worked with when I joined Canon, it was a trip to the Maasai Mara that cemented my love of working with photographers, but I wanted this conversation to be more than just an origin story.

You can read more about Ellie in another interview she did with EIZO previously. I wanted to try and understand what makes her the photographer she is and why she does what she does, not only in her own photography but also in her workshops with other photographers. Ellie is an excellent communicator and is incredibly easy and engaging to talk to. You can understand why she had a successful marketing career prior to becoming a photographer.

There are many things that connect marketing and photography, but one key area is the emotional connection. The adage of an image says a thousand words, is so true, because a photo gives you so much information and that helps build a broader narrative. In marketing you are looking to make an emotional connection with your audience to garner a response, in photography you are trying to find an emotional connection with your subject, which is why marketing and photography have always gone hand in hand. I ask Ellie what she thinks keeps motivating her and driving her forward in her photographic career?

Ellie responds, “I put it down to one word, and that’s passion and it never goes. I love just going to see the same species time and time again. I’m asked if I find it boring to go and photograph Gannets [Large white seabirds] again, in the same location? And the answer is no, never! You’ll always see something different, be that weather, light or behaviours. You can guarantee you’ll come away with different images, but also observation is the best way of learning about an animal and building your field craft on how to approach that animal and photograph it. And I think you do build an emotional connection, and you try your best to portray this through your photography.

I always prefer it when you know about the animal, we want them to be relaxed in our company and when it’s relaxed, it’s showing its normal behaviour. It might be preening, cleaning its fur, sleeping, or even playing. Animals don’t show those behaviours if they’re uncomfortable with you being there or if you’re within their comfort zone, they’ll just move or fly away.

So, you learn that through just being with them, over a long period of time and you do develop that emotional connection. When you’re looking at your image files, you’ve immediately got an emotional connection with that image, and in many cases it’s the build up to that image that lays the foundations for the connection. It might be really difficult to get that image and you’re so happy that you did. So, you have an emotional connection with the subject, the image itself and how it worked out.

The reason for building that connection is ultimately to tell a story. And in many cases, getting an image can take years of returning to the same location, watching the same species. So, it’s sad to think in the age that we’re in now, an image is probably given a couple of seconds and that’s it. Sometimes you have to remove yourself, when you’re assessing your own work to look at it in terms of how somebody else is going see it. And you have to lose that emotional connection when you’re looking at your own work and assessing it.”

Many photographers struggle with image selection, because of the emotional connection with an image which is the reason photographers will often collaborate with editors because the focus is then on the narrative or the collection rather than anyone individual image or an emotional connection to a specific subject. Having had the honour to be able to witness a number of photographic competition judging sessions, I have often seen a set of images being let down by bad selection, either too many of the same image or an image that does not help the narrative, which is often a favourite of the photographer,  but the photographer has too much of a personal connection with a specific image. It is a fine line that photographer and editor have to tread.

The balancing act is not only around the selection of images, but also around the amount of editing that takes place. There are many reasons why post-production editing may take place on an image, but this can easily spill over into image manipulation, which in the simplest sense, is when you are trying to change the narrative of original image. This could be excessive cropping or in the worst case, the addition or removal of an element via tools like Photoshop. In some circumstances digital manipulation is totally acceptable, especially if you are shooting for commercial purposes, but if you are shooting to enter competitions like Wildlife Photographer of the Year, then digital manipulation could get your image disqualified, so I asked Ellie as a photographer and trainer what her thought processes are to capturing and editing images in her workflow?

Ellie tells me, “In terms of how I approach editing, my approach generally is to get as much right as I can in camera. When I’m teaching people photography and techniques, I’m really hitting this home, get everything off ‘auto.’ Think about what you’re doing, what you want, most importantly working with the light, as well as where you want to place yourself in relation to the animal. Think about what type of image you want, and the camera is your way of realising your idea. You’re dialling in settings, and you might be doing multiple exposures or slow motion panning to convey the sense of movement. Doing as much as you can in camera is very much my approach.

In terms of post-processing, I’m shooting in RAW, and I like to just get that image back to how I remember it. I don’t push it, and I’ve got a very natural approach to my processing and it’s very subtle. If I tell people that my processing of an image took me 10 minutes maximum, they think maybe there’s some magic in there. People think I’ve got different filters or [Photoshop] actions or something that I’m using to do my processing. It will be maximum 10 minutes. I can guarantee that, especially when you’re doing high key work, that is so easy to process. You’ve just got to learn how to do it, and also, learn how to take those high key images in camera in the first place. I understand that you need the right environmental conditions in the first place to do this, and the right type of light.

So that’s basically how I’m approaching my processing, I’m not adding anything. There’s a slight tweak of levels, a tiny little bit of saturation or even spot saturation, picking out a certain colour tone, adding a little bit of saturation, a little bit of contrast, maybe a tiny bit of brightness, but on a scale of zero to 100, these are all less than 10. Finally, when I’m exporting that file and resizing it for the purpose that I’m going to use it for, that’s the point where I’ll sharpen it, and it might need some noise reduction.”

Ellie is very much of the minimalist school of thought when it comes to her post-production and with a get-it-right in camera mentality, you can never go far wrong.

There is a huge difference between capturing an image, like Ellie does, and creating an image. You can create an image in a multitude of different ways whether it is taking various elements and putting them together in Photoshop to create an image with a narrative that may not reflect the natural environment. You can also set up an image, with trained or stuffed animals, or you can use one of the many generative AI platforms, to create an image, but this is not wildlife photography. I ask Ellie whether she has had any question about whether the work that she produces is genuine, she responds, “I’ve never been asked that question personally. You’re obviously aware of these examples, but I don’t see this in the world that I’m moving in.

I can see people are doing things in post processing, I do see images that are put together. There might be an element taken yesterday in a picture as if that was what the photographer saw.

I think there should be honesty if it is a composite, but I don’t necessarily see that level of honesty. In terms of how I approach my photography I’m not doing anything like that, it’s in camera and the important message is get it right in camera, because then you’ve had complete transparency.

There’s a lot of power in Photoshop and with AI now you can change the backgrounds, the skies and you can even add things if you want to. I set myself objectives where I want to develop myself. And using Photoshop and AI for image manipulation is not one of them.

When you work in the industry, you’re a lot more analytical looking at certain images and thinking oh, how did that happen or how did they take that?”

The level of honesty that Ellie brings to her work is the benchmark by which all photographers in her field should hold themselves to, but as we know for some people the lure to try and ‘get away’ with something or find a short cut is overwhelming, they do not want to put in the hard work or the financial or personal investment that Ellie has made. That honesty brings with it a huge amount of credibility within professional circles.

Regardless of credibility and hard work you still need to have a huge amount of ability. You can have all the best equipment, but if you don’t have ability and you are not able to see an image develop in front of you and know when to capture it, your images will not be at the consistent level required to be a professional photographer. Many photographers will look at the work of others when deciding on which location or subject to shoot and many will use this as an inspiration for their own work. Others want to try and get their own version of a shot, while the odd few will want to replicate a shot they have seen. These decisions can be taken either consciously or sub-consciously but depending on your point of view there will always be a discussion around the difference between inspiration and copying.

Over the years of working with professional photographers, I have always said there are two extremes of photographers, those who understand the technical processes of photography in the finest detail and will produce a technically perfect photo while at the other extreme you have photographers who do not understand the technical aspect of photography, but can visualise an image and have the ability to capture the essence of the subject. Then you can create a quadrant, by mapping whether someone has natural innate skill or whether the skill is learnt, the classic nature vs nurture argument, but this provides a subjective way to define photography, without there being a good or bad definition. Alongside that when you are looking at a photographer’s work there is the element of originality vs inspiration vs copying. At the end of the day, photography is a technical art, it requires an amount of knowledge and skill, and an element of luck, alongside a vision to see how the picture might unfold and how best to capture it.

Just as there is a difference between inspiration and copying, there is a difference between learnt skills vs natural talent. Some photographers have learnt the skill of how to take images, and some have a very natural talent for taking images, so is a good photographer down to nature or nurture?

I outlined my thought process to Ellie and asked about her thoughts on this and her standpoint on originality vs inspiration vs copying, knowing there is no right or wrong answer, but I wanted to try and understand a little more about where this desire for an emotional connection comes from.

Ellie quickly responds, “It is a good question really, it’s a hard one to be analytical about, isn’t it? Other than I’m quite an experimenter with my wildlife photography. For example, because I’ve worked for many years with Gannets, all the shots I’d seen coming from the island I visit were beautiful but all pretty similar. I was in a position, and I was experimenting a lot with shooting through things. I shot through a rock, now I know it’s a rock, but I used it in my foreground. It was covered in guano, and I brightened that image with exposure compensation. It was creating quite an airy light feel, it didn’t look like a guano covered rock. I believe in trying different things, experimenting. I’ve even shot through somebody’s woolly hat on a trip, and nobody knew it was a woolly hat.