Based on the article “Money Shot” by Niki Christopher in the latest Gray’s Sporting Journal

I will never forget when I turned the corner on my porn addiction, fish porn that is. It had to have been the hundredth image of the butt of a fly rod, selective focus, looking down the line, reel gloriously gleaming like a chrome spinner. Ugggh. Pick up your latest favorite magazine, latest on the newsstand, and there will be at least one of these images in an ad, gallery or story.

The bigger issue of course is that the ability to afford cameras, lenses, flashes and camera housings, has far outpaced their owner’s ability to use them creatively, and sometimes even competently. Forget that they are uneducated. Forget that they haven’t “paid any dues.” Forget all that. It’s simple math; in the past, every time I punched that shutter button, I heard a cha-ching and one dollar just disappeared into the film’s emulsion. Now, that little shutter sound doesn’t advance film, and it doesn’t cost a dime. Photographers chimp* and delete, putting only their acceptable images forward for a merciful edit.

Mistakes have no cost. A very successful friend of mine recently sold a Nikon D3. It had more than 183-thousand “actuations”, what we used to call exposures counted on the firmware. That translates into 183-thousand dollars saved against the cost of a top shelf camera, lenses and accessories. No brainer.

But I again digress. The ability to record, edit, enhance and transmit images to publications makes for a more economical world for magazines as well. I would like to meet the working fishing photographer who is making more per job or per usage than they were say two years ago. Add electronic magazines to the mix, and we have a downward death spiral. No one has ever answered my many posts and questions on pay (which should have set standards and is not some kind of a privacy issue) for “This is Fly”, or “Catch”. I would love to be corrected on this, but no one has yet come forward.

The idea of a staff photographer, who carries the look of a magazine into its own creative direction is as extinct as the dinosaur. Why? Staff costs money. There’s plenty of middle ground for a magazine to be the “Rolling Stone” of fly fishing – falling somewhere between the gratuitously irreverent Drake Magazine and consumer rags like Fly Rod & Reel or American Angler. Feel free to think.

A concrete example of how pay at paying magazines works, is a recent shoot for Poets & Writers Magazine. They called, defined the project and told me what the budget would be. I was good with that, delivered, billed and was paid. Then, I got a call once the magazine hit the stands, and they wanted usage for their web site, and said to bill them 100. for usage. Done, and done.

Beyond the obvious financial problems the business in general and fly fishing in particular presents, there is the sad sameness to the category that is fish porn. It does no good to define fish porn here as we all know it when we see it. And what is creative today becomes the fodder of fish pornographers tomorrow. It really is less the fault of the photographers than the editors who are, after all, the gatekeepers for the images they publish. If the editors would start to raise their creative expectations, maybe the photographers would follow. That could never happen though. Why?

Porn sells, and good porn really sells. It’s like Niki Christopher said in the article “Money Shot” (Gray’s Sporting Journal, April 2010), magazines sell some distant location over the water ten miles from our house. Exotic locales and more exotic fish are as magnetic to fly fishermen as any other type of porn is to any other consumer. The balance of selling and showing, for the vast majority of fly magazines, has been sacrificed and will be difficult to resurrect.

On The Water

I often wonder why the Blue River does not get more coverage in online and with fly lines, but it has ups and downs just like anywhere else. It may be the general conditioning necessary just to get to the top of the CNR area, or any other laundry list of small deficiencies sometimes knotted to the Blue. The most extensive coverage I did of the Blue back in 2008 may have lead to a bit of extra traffic there, as there were much greater visible signs of wear than anytime since then. Except for the hike, it really is a user friendly place to the point I call it a water park. One of the reasons I waited to revisit the Blue River is so this report can perhaps fade into the late season woodwork, and quickly be overcome by what is shaping up to be the spring of all springs.

The falls had more water running over than last year, and it was a bit cloudy from recent rains. Still, the whole place is highly navigable to the point that waist high waders can be more than enough. Hiking in is much easier if you stow stuff in a day pack and just backpack that in to the area. It’s far enough in that if you are thinking about walking out for lunch at the car, it could be a day breaker. Bring the kitchen sink, plan on a full day, and bail when your body says bail. It only took a minute to realize I left my main box of streamers behind, so starting the day with woollys would depend on scrounging a few from the guys. Thank goodness there were enough to share.

I worked the depths of the upper pools and realized the added water was keeping the buggers shallower than in past, but without my box I was going to have to work a bit harder. The guys moved over to another fall on the same level, and we spent the first hour with the whole area to ourselves. A couple of more guys showed up, one sliding into the water on the same level as us (no matter plenty of room), and another further down the southwest run. And we fished on into the noon hour with nothing showing for our efforts. I switched over to double droppers, weighted a bit and indicator. Still nothing. I silently wondered if it would be just another bloodless Sunday.

The cloud cover firmed up to a consistent grey day, the water seemed to start clearing a bit and a north breeze came down the line dropping early afternoon temperatures another five degrees, nothing like last year’s report; 17 degrees not including wind chill and frozen guides. Back to the woolly buggers and longer drifts to the back of the pools, slower drifts and longer strips, and finally on with the first fish of the day. It was a nice 18 inch rainbow, surfaced, took drag and used the current wisely to give my TFO four weight the first fish it had ever felt. I hoped the short rod would give me a better chance than the TFO two weight at landing these slabs in a fairer way, and it performed just as I had hoped – a fair negotiation to net, and released.

I was really beginning to miss some of those crawfish colored woollys I had tied, in different variations. They would have been the bomb … maybe. After lunch, we explored a bit more and ended up back where we started. The fish were few today, and far in between, so we decided to drop down and hit some of the lower pools. Finally, using the same kind of woolly dredging “technique” we were able to get into a few more very nice rainbows.

An all day affair was topped by a drive through at the Dairy Queen at Tishomingo. Tishomingo is one of those towns you will want to drive through slow, if not to stare at the unusual business fronts, then to at least check out the strange murals. Both of the teenage girls working at the DQ drive through, a window in a wall, had somewhere else they wanted to be on this late Sunday afternoon – church maybe. They missed a burger, not me, and after waiting fifteen minutes at the window, they only took about five more to extend a hand with a burger – not a Hunger Buster, not a Belt Buster – just a burger. Earlier, when talking to the teens, we asked if they had Belt Busters and they looked at us like we were from another dimension. Explaining would have been futile.

It was a weary but quick ride home, and the fish rested, and they swam in their prairie ocean pools not knowing tomorrow was kill day.

 

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