What most people see is the moment the photograph is taken. What they rarely see is the wildlife photography workflow that begins afterwards. Once the cameras were packed away and the excitement of the wallaby walkthrough had faded, the real work started. Hundreds of photographs and video clips waited on memory cards, ready to be reviewed, compared, edited and reduced to the small number of captures that would ultimately continue the journey from pouch to platform.

That sounds impressive until you sit down and start looking through what is actually on them.

By the time we arrived home, the excitement of the walkthrough was still fresh. The wallabies, the joey, the unexpected moments we thought we had captured. On the camera screen everything had looked promising.

The computer told a different story.

Wildlife photography has a habit of humbling you.

A photograph that looks sharp on the back of a camera can fall apart the moment it fills a monitor. Focus can be slightly off. An eye can be soft. An ear can be cropped. A branch can appear from nowhere. A perfect pose can be ruined by a distracting background.

Then there are the duplicates.

Wildlife photographers rarely take a single photograph and move on. We shoot bursts. Small movements can completely change an image. One frame might contain the perfect expression. The next might contain a blink. The next might have a sharper eye.

So the sorting begins.

Hundreds of photographs become dozens.

Dozens become fewer still.

Every image is compared against the others. Tiny details suddenly matter. Sharpness. Composition. Backgrounds. Behaviour. Commercial value. Storytelling value.

Wildlife Photography Workflow processes can literally take hours.

Sometimes days.

People often imagine wildlife photography ends when the camera is packed away.

In reality, that is usually when the work starts.

By the time the review process was finished, all of those photographs, all of those moments, all of those clicks of the shutter had been reduced to just 17 images.

Seventeen photographs.

Seventeen images that survived the editing process.

Seventeen images that would continue the journey from pouch to platform.

And we had not even started reviewing the videos yet.

The photographs were good.

Some were very good.

But deep down, we already suspected the videos might contain something even more special.

Unlike a photograph, a video captures the moments between the moments.

The slight movement of a joey hidden within its mother’s pouch. A tiny nose appearing briefly amongst the pink folds before disappearing again. Small movements and behaviours that happened so quickly they were easy to miss while standing in the enclosure.

The camera had recorded details that were almost impossible to appreciate with the naked eye at the time.

Only later, on a larger screen, would we discover exactly what had been captured.

The photographs had survived the edit.

The videos still held their secrets.

And somewhere amongst those clips, we hoped, were the moments that would make the entire trip worthwhile.

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