Reckon this is my favourite fishing photograph of the year so far

Note the word “fishing” before the word photograph above, because it’s not as if the light is really dramatic or the waves are crashing around in a particularly artistic way. In terms of a pure fishing photograph though, this says just about everything I want to put out there about the sort of fishing so many of us do…………….

You obviously can’t plan for a photo like this, unless I am missing something very obvious and I’ve been doing it wrong all my life. The key to shooting a photo like this is firstly being in the right place at the right time - obviously - but then you need to be mixing your knowledge as an angler about what is happening and what might happen next together with your knowledge as a photographer. You also need to not actually be fishing, which isn’t so easy to do when there are a bunch of hungry bass around and you haven’t got long before you need to get out of there so you don’t get cut off.

From a technical point of view I shot this photo with a Sony A7RV camera body and a Tamron 20-40mm f2.8 lens. Exposure details were 1/800th at f2.8, ISO 100, 40mm end of the lens, polarising filter. I locked the focus point on Leigh and the amazing autofocus abilities of these Sony cameras held to him like glue as he moved around my frame (it’s why I had to eventually give up on the Fuji gear, their autofocus simply wasn’t good enough). I have cropped in a bit on the RAW file and I have also processed the image in Lightroom to really accentuate the deep blue skies and the white water - which in turn helps to bring the angler out from the rocks a bit. Shooting at a large aperture like f2.8 helps with this separation as well, but of course this photo looks a lot better on a great big computer monitor like I have here at home connected to my MacBook Pro.

Leigh here is into a bass, and to land it he chose to literally jump from that large rock on the left where he hooked the fish, down to that much smaller rock below where he is hopefully going to end up! I was shooting some photos because the location and conditions looked good, plus there were a bunch of fish around. When Leigh hooked into this bass I stayed on him with the focus point and moved the camera around as he went to jump off the rock. By pure chance I nailed this photo where he is literally in midair, and to me it says so much about how you might need to go about this lure fishing for bass thing if you are fishing more hectic ground and conditions.

The only thing that niggles me a bit is that I wasn’t framed quite wide enough at the time to show the hooked bass on the lure which is obviously just out of the frame to the bottom. That to me would have potentially made the shot even more impactful, but it’s fishing and I might never see this kind of thing happening in my viewfinder again - which is a big part of why I feel so compelled to take photographs. I like shooting fishing as it does or doesn’t happen, and an angler like Leigh here obviously wants to just carry on fishing regardless of my afflictions! I shoot photographs of fishing for both work and pleasure, indeed I can’t not take photos because it’s such a big part of me as an angler. Hope you like it and many thanks as always for reading.