If you happen to pass Rachelle Richard Mack while she’s lying in a field, waist deep in a lake, or wandering through the woods at all hours of the night, don’t be alarmed. She’s just trying to capture the perfect shot.
“I love changing my perspective and trying to take pictures that you wouldn’t normally see,” says Mack.
While it’s true there’s no limit to where the call of the birds, path of sunlight, or splash of a frog will take the nature and wildlife photographer, most of the time Mack can be found with the flora and fauna of Lake Scugog where she lives.
Mack moved to Viewlake, just west of Janetville on the boundary of Kawartha Lakes and Durham Region, almost 25 years ago. Having been raised on a hobby farm in Port Elgin, she was already accustomed to life in the country, but living on the water was all new for her.
That’s hard to imagine now that Mack spends nearly every day of the summer paddling in her kayak with her Nikon Z6 mirrorless camera in hand.
Earlier this year, Mack shared some of these photos of life on the lake at her very first solo show, called “Shore Life on Lake Scugog,” held at the Kawartha Art Gallery in Lindsay.
“I’m out there taking pictures every single day,” Mack says. “It helps me reconnect with nature and I feel like it gives me purpose to take photos.”
Just as now she can’t even go to the store without taking her camera, Mack grew up taking photos of anything she could on the hobby farm. That passion encouraged her to major in media arts in university, before briefly working in production and then in schools as a media specialist for 13 years.
Shortly before moving to Viewlake, Mack was in the “right place at the right time” and found herself as a high school teacher for the next 20 years of her career.
When Mack retired just before the pandemic, she was the departmental head of technology at Clarington Central Secondary School in Bowmanville, where she taught graphic design, yearbook, video production, and even introduced a photography program.
It was while teaching these high school students that she really began honing her photography skills and became increasingly inspired by the property she lives on.
“Growing up in Port Elgin, we had amazing sunsets on Lake Huron and now, living on (Lake Scugog), I face west so it’s another amazing sunset,” Mack says. “I think that’s partly how I kept up with photography. I just always had to take a picture of the sky because it’s so gorgeous.”
Over time, she incorporated different plants and animals into her sunset photos, and though she had explored travel, architecture, and event photography, she discovered that nature was where she is “happiest” and wanted to make it the focus of her art.
Today, her work often features the animals that she has befriended while living on the lake, from chipmunks to frogs and birds. One of them, Sid the Heron, has become quite as a regular feature on kawarthaNOW’s social media channels.
“He’s quite popular,” says Mack. “My son swears (Sid) loves me because I can get within the nose of a kayak length to him now, especially near the end of the season, when he’s really used to me.”
That’s high praise, given that Mack named the Blue Heron (which, despite his name, she has been unable to identify as male or female) after punk-rock musician Sid Vicious because of its temperamental and territorial behaviour when it comes to other herons on the lake.
After photographing Sid the Heron for years, Mack is now able to get within a close enough distance to capture shots without disturbing the bird.
“You have to be respectful of their space and distance,” she says. “I don’t want to mess up their hunting or anything that’s going on, so you have to be respectful. You have to be ethical, no matter what you’re doing.”
A key proponent to respecting the animals while still capturing those award-winning shots is to remain patient, no matter what that entails. One time, Mack waited for more than an hour in the rain, camera in place with protective covering, waiting for a snail to pop its antennae out.
“You can’t be afraid to do things — I’m not afraid to get down there with them,” she says, adding that on her bucket list is to take photos of a bear, a moose, and an owl out in the wild.
“Get low, change your perspective and the way you look at things. You don’t know what’s going to happen when you do.”
Patience and perspective are two of the “four Ps” which Mack thinks about when she’s trying to capture her photos, alongside practice and planning.
“You really have to spend some time learning it because so many people are just standing and taking a picture,” says Mack. “That makes the difference. I don’t take a picture — I make a picture.”
Planning her photos and their composition is often what gets Mack amazing captures. But occasionally, she gets lucky with the unexpected, like the chipmunk that ran by with a peanut in its mouth while Mack was photographing blades of grass — one of her favourite photos.
“I try to control most things I can, but then sometimes it’s the unexpected stuff that is pretty cool and gets you some neat results,” says Mack.
Reverting to her role as a teacher, Mack has started offering four-week photography workshops to beginners in the community. There, she teaches them how to use their camera, and what it means to change the ISO, shutter speed, and aperture of their device.
But, of course, the difference between just taking a photo and making a photo has nothing to do with the camera functions.
“The worst thing anyone could ever say to me is ‘That’s a great picture — you must have a really good camera’,” she says. “It’s not about the equipment. You have to know how to use your stuff, but it really doesn’t make matter if it doesn’t work for your composition.”
A key element of composition, according to Mack, is one of the four Ps: perspective.
“One of the things I teach in my classes is to think about how would a three-year-old look at the world,” she explains. “They look underneath things. They look upside down. They tilt their heads. They’re looking at the world differently, and we tend to not let ourselves do that as adults.”
Clearly, her advice is not something to take for granted, since her work has been admired by a large audience, featured and winning contests for publications including Our Canada, Nature Canada, and Reader’s Digest.
Most recently, Mack was awarded the second-place prize in Cottage Life magazine’s 2023 photography contest for capturing a grasshopper who looks like he’s smiling.
Though she says that this year was a “strong year” for a lot of her photos, she is already eager for next year, when she will be showcasing at the SPARK Photo Festival in Peterborough.
Mack has teamed up with fellow Kawarthas-based photographers Linda Kassil, Maris Lubbock, and Cindy Bartoli to form a group called Serenity Seekers. Their exhibit, “For the Love of Nature,” will be showing for all of April at Peterborough’s Cork and Bean.
Until then, Mack can likely be found in the most unlikely of places, aiming to get those perfect shots.
To see Mack’s latest photos, follow her on Instagram at @rachelle_richard_photography.
