Photography as Biodiversity Observation

Photography as Biodiversity Observation | Vernon Chalmers Photography

Explore how nature photography can become biodiversity observation through repeated observation, identification, documentation and pattern recognition.

Vernon Chalmers is a Cape Town-based professional Canon photography trainer and photographer with extensive experience in nature, birds in flight, landscape and environmental photography. His photographic practice combines practical camera technique with sustained observation of recurring field locations in the Western Cape.

Through Vernon Chalmers Photography, he documents photographic subjects, locations and observations while developing practical approaches to photographic learning, visual analysis and image interpretation. His biodiversity photography work is based primarily on first-hand field observation and an evolving personal photographic archive.

Core Scientific & Observational Roles

• Virtual Vouchers: Digital photos capture physical characteristics and behaviors, serving as permanent records that avoid the degradation effects of physical specimen preservation.
• Spatial-Temporal Data: Time-lapse, macro, and aerial drone imagery provide quantitative metrics to track long-term ecological changes and population dynamics.
• Automated Inventories: Camera traps accelerated by AI and machine learning efficiently monitor wildlife behaviour and individual animal identification.

Citizen Science & Public Impact

• Participatory Monitoring: Global bioblitz events and programs like the City Nature Challenge aggregate millions of observations via platforms like iNaturalist to map species distributions.
• Emotional vs. Cognitive Engagement: Studies show that photographing wildlife significantly increases emotional attachment to nature and environmental concern, though direct observation must be paired with education to maximize factual learning. 

Emerging Risks and Ethics

• Location Leaks: Geotagging precise coordinates of rare or endangered species can unintentionally expose them to poachers.
• Behavioral Disturbance: Unethical close-up photography can stress wildlife or distort natural behaviours, requiring strict adherence to non-intrusive observation guidelines.

From Photography to Biodiversity Observation

Biodiversity is often encountered through individual things: a bird in flight, a flowering plant, a wetland, a mountain landscape or a photograph of an animal. Photography naturally encourages this way of seeing. We find a subject, frame it, focus on it and make an image.

But there is another way of looking at the natural environment.

A photograph can be more than a record of a subject. Through repeated observation, photography can become a way of recognising the relationships between species, habitats, seasons, environmental conditions and human activity.

For a photographer working repeatedly in the same places, this distinction becomes increasingly important.

 Cape Town as Contemporary Tourism Attraction

From Tourism Attraction to Living Environment

A recent Cape Argus report highlighted growing concern about the relationship between tourism expansion and biodiversity protection in the Western Cape. The article notes that more than 2.4 million visitors travelled to Cape Town in 2024, while natural systems are experiencing pressure from factors including habitat loss, water scarcity and climate change. It argues that tourism businesses need to place biodiversity protection closer to the centre of their operations rather than treating sustainability as an optional consideration.

There is an important observation within this argument.

The natural environment is simultaneously an attraction and an ecosystem.

Visitors may arrive because of the landscape, coastline, mountains, wetlands, forests, flowers or birds. Yet the things that attract visitors are not simply scenery. They are components of living systems.

For a photographer, this creates an interesting responsibility—not necessarily the responsibility to become a conservation campaigner, but the responsibility to look more carefully.

The Biodiversity of Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden

A photograph of a bird tells us that a bird was there.

Repeated photography may begin to tell us something about the place in which that bird exists.

That is where photography begins to move towards biodiversity observation.

The Biodiversity of Milnerton Lagoon | Woodbridge Island

Seeing the Individual

My own photography has often started with the individual subject.

A bird appears.

A raptor crosses the sky.

A heron stands beside the water.

A flowering plant catches the light.

A gull moves across the coastline.

The immediate photographic task is familiar: identify the subject, establish the composition, select an appropriate shutter speed and aperture, acquire focus and make the photograph.

This is the practical side of photography.

But repeated visits change the nature of observation.

The same location begins to become familiar. Certain species appear repeatedly. Others appear only occasionally. Some birds occupy particular areas. Flight paths become recognisable. The relationship between light, weather, water and animal behaviour becomes more apparent.

The photographer begins to accumulate observations.

The individual photograph remains important, but it becomes part of something larger.

The Paddocks Wetland, Milnerton: Urban Biodiversity

From Photographing Wildlife to Documenting Biodiversity

There is a subtle but important distinction between photographing wildlife and documenting biodiversity.

Wildlife photography can be centred on the successful capture of an individual animal.

Biodiversity observation asks a broader question:

What is happening in this environment?

That question changes the photographer's attention.

Instead of seeing only the bird, I may begin to notice the water body in which it is feeding.

Instead of seeing only the raptor, I may notice its recurring flight path.

Instead of photographing only a flower, I may become interested in the surrounding vegetation, season, pollinators and changing environmental conditions.

Instead of regarding a wetland simply as a photographic location, I begin to recognise it as a living community.

The photograph consequently becomes one piece of evidence within a larger observational process.

This is particularly relevant to place-based photography.

Western Cape State of Conservation Report 2025

The Importance of Returning

There is considerable value in returning to the same photographic locations.

A first visit is largely exploratory.

A second visit begins to create familiarity.

Repeated visits create a developing visual memory.

At Woodbridge Island and Table Bay Nature Reserve, for example, the environment becomes increasingly recognisable through accumulated photographic experience. Birds that were initially simply "subjects" become part of a mental map of the area.

The same applies to Intaka Island and Kirstenbosch.

The more often a photographer observes a location, the more likely it becomes that changes, repetitions and relationships will be noticed.

This is where pattern recognition enters photography.

The photographer is no longer simply asking:

What can I photograph here today?

The question gradually becomes:

What am I noticing about this place that I did not notice before?

That is a very different photographic practice.

The History of Biodiversity Management in Cape Town

Observation Before Interpretation

There is another important discipline involved.

Observation should come before interpretation.

A photographer sees a particular bird repeatedly using an area.

That is an observation.

The photographer may subsequently investigate why the bird is there, what it feeds on, whether its presence is seasonal, what habitat it requires and whether similar observations have been recorded elsewhere.

Those are subsequent stages.

This distinction matters because photography can encourage assumptions. A single photograph provides a limited moment in time. It does not automatically explain the ecological circumstances surrounding that moment.

Repeated observation provides a stronger foundation.

Identification provides another layer.

Research provides another.

Documentation provides another.

Interpretation should emerge from the accumulation of these layers rather than being imposed upon a single image.

The Biodiversity of Intaka Island, Cape Town

A Photographic Observation Cycle

This suggests a useful framework for VCP Nature Photography:

OBSERVE → PHOTOGRAPH → IDENTIFY → INVESTIGATE → DOCUMENT → ARCHIVE → INTERPRET

The sequence is deliberately familiar.

It reflects the observational methodology that has also emerged through the Maritime Observation System (MOS).

The subject may change—from vessel to bird, habitat or plant—but the underlying intellectual process remains remarkably similar.

First, observe.

Then create a photographic record.

Identify what has been observed.

Investigate it.

Document the findings.

Archive the photographs and associated information.

Finally, interpret what the accumulated observations may reveal.

The important point is that interpretation comes late in the process.

The camera therefore becomes not simply a device for making images, but an instrument within an observational system.

Photography Creates a Visual Record

One of the less obvious benefits of repeated nature photography is the creation of a personal visual archive.

A single photograph may have limited significance beyond its immediate subject.

A collection of photographs made over months or years can become something else.

It can reveal recurrence.

It can reveal absence.

It can reveal seasonal differences.

It can reveal changing photographic conditions.

It can reveal which species repeatedly attract attention and which were initially overlooked.

And sometimes it can reveal something unexpected.

This is one reason I increasingly value older photographs.

An archival photograph does not necessarily become less useful because it is old. It can acquire a new meaning when viewed alongside more recent observations.

The archive becomes a form of accumulated experience.

Biodiversity and the Photographer's Field of View

There is also a philosophical dimension to this.

A camera has a frame.

Biodiversity does not.

The frame necessarily excludes most of the environment.

A bird may occupy the centre of an image while the ecological relationships surrounding it remain outside the photograph.

This is one of the limitations—and opportunities—of photography.

The photographer can deliberately expand the field of observation.

Make the close-up.

Then make the wider photograph.

Observe the habitat.

Observe the surrounding species.

Observe the environmental conditions.

Return at another time.

Compare.

The resulting photographic practice becomes less about obtaining the photograph and more about developing an increasingly complete understanding of the photographic environment.

Tourism, Photography and Natural Heritage

This has particular relevance in the Western Cape.

The Cape Argus article argues that the natural assets attracting visitors cannot be separated from the responsibility to protect them. It also reports calls for tourism businesses to move beyond acknowledging sustainability and towards practical interventions involving conservation, habitat protection, resource use and community participation.

Photography occupies an interesting position within this relationship.

Photographers are also visitors.

We travel to places because they contain something we want to see.

But photography can encourage a different form of visitation: returning, observing and learning.

The objective is not simply to consume the landscape photographically.

It is to become increasingly attentive to it.

That distinction matters.

A place can be photographed thousands of times without necessarily being understood.

Conversely, a relatively modest collection of photographs made through sustained observation can become a meaningful record of a particular environment.

The Photographer as Observer

I do not see the photographer as automatically becoming a scientist or conservationist.

Those are different disciplines with different methodologies.

But photography can occupy a useful space between casual observation and formal scientific investigation.

The photographer is often already looking.

The opportunity is to look more deliberately.

To identify.

To question.

To return.

To compare.

To preserve the evidence.

And, importantly, to recognise the limits of what a photograph can actually demonstrate.

This makes biodiversity photography an exercise in attention.

The camera is simply one of the tools through which that attention becomes visible.

Cape Town's Living Biodiversity Corridor

Seeing More Than the Photograph

The deeper value of biodiversity photography may therefore lie beyond the finished image.

The photograph is the visible result.

The observation behind it is less visible.

So is the developing knowledge of place.

A photographer who repeatedly encounters the same environment can gradually develop a form of visual literacy: an ability to notice small changes, recurring patterns, unusual behaviour and relationships between species and habitat.

This does not require every photograph to become a scientific record.

It requires only a willingness to look beyond the isolated subject.

A bird is not only a bird.

A wetland is not only a landscape.

A flower is not only a macro subject.

A coastline is not only a composition.

Each exists within a larger living system.

Raising Environmental Awareness Through Photography

A Biodiversity Dimension for Nature Photography

This is the direction I would like to take with biodiversity coverage within Vernon Chalmers Photography.

Not simply:

Here is a photograph of a species.

But:

Here is what repeated observation of this species, its habitat and its environment has taught me about this place.

That distinction changes the role of the photographic archive.

The archive becomes more than a collection of successful images.

It becomes a record of encounters.

It becomes a record of attention.

And, over time, it can become a record of change.

The Western Cape tourism debate provides an important contemporary context for this thinking. As tourism continues to depend upon the region's natural heritage, the value of that heritage extends far beyond its attractiveness as a destination. The article's central message is that protecting biodiversity needs to become integrated into the way tourism operates.

From a photographic perspective, I would add another dimension:

Before we can meaningfully document what is changing, we have to learn how to observe what is there.

Photography provides an unusually powerful way of doing that.

It slows the eye.

It creates a record.

It encourages return visits.

It rewards curiosity.

And, when combined with identification, investigation, archiving and reflection, it can transform an individual photograph into part of a much larger process of understanding.

That is perhaps where biodiversity photography becomes most interesting.

Not simply seeing more subjects—but seeing more of the system in which those subjects exist.