Natural exposure: photographing wildlife

Brendan Kelly is a patient man. Sometimes, in the winter, he’s a wet, cold and patient man. He gets up before a salmon-tinted dawn breaks over the shores and marshes of his native Newfoundland. Rises before his photographic prey.

Hauling kilograms of photo gear into the dimly lit landscape, Kelly finds a vantage point he’d already scouted. He hunkers into position, sometimes belly down for hours on the frozen ground or unforgiving ice. All the while he peers through a viewfinder that frames a wilderness packed with potential and primed for a decisive moment.

Kelly is anticipating the arrival of his subject—a duck, a seabird or sudden predator. He knows their rituals, their habitats and schedules. He’s hoping to be rewarded for waiting not where the duck is, but where the duck will be.

Then in an instant, the light, the waft of a wing or the curious tilt of a head are precisely right. Kelly presses the shutter and catches on his camera’s sensor the perfect and vanished moment.

“I’ve found many times when I’m just about to give up and I’m really cold or uncomfortable, when I push myself just a little bit longer to stay there, that’s when I get the shot,” says Kelly.

He’s fortunate to have grown up in Paradise, N.L., surrounded by the varied and rugged terrain of his province. At a young age he fell in love with birds, their ways and their habitats. When he was 11, Kelly saw that habitat shrinking. In response, he and his father built nesting boxes for swallows, boreal owls and other species.

In 2013, his precocious conservation work earned him the Ducks Unlimited Canada Newalta Wetlands Hero Award of Merit. That honour allowed him to spread his nest boxes further afield.

He continues that work today. And, on a novel twist to the old conservation adage, wherever he goes he leaves only nest boxes and takes only pictures—pictures informed by years of knowing the ways of his beloved subjects.

These days Kelly is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in wildlife conservation at the University of Prince Edward Island. A life choice made because of his passion and photography.

“Over the years of noticing these different animals and spending so much time with them you get a really good appreciation for them and a deep understanding of how everything is connected,” he explains.

His hard-fought images are here to see. His own stories are here to read. These are not lucky shots, nor are they ordinary ones. Chance, it is said, favours the prepared mind. And Kelly is an extraordinarily prepared photographer.