we’re out there on the flat somewhere with a guide and we saw something—I don’t remember what it was—but it was a moment and you had to be ready to go. When we saw this moment, I jumped over the side of the boat and I went out, and I photographed it because I had one camera and one lens. As I came back to the boat, Lefty had missed the shot. He was still trying to figure out what lens and what camera body to put together. And that set off the light bulb in my mind: “Less is more.” BC: You can only take two prime lenses on the fishing trip of a lifetime—Alaska, Christmas Island, Russia, wherever— what are the two lenses? VA: I would say those would be probably a 24 wide-angle and an 85 mm portrait lens. BC: I heard you say once that fly fishing as a young person allowed you to escape from a family life that was, at times, tumultuous. How important in your life is the concept of nature as an escape? VA: When I was probably 15, my mother and father got divorced. They were arguing a lot, and it was three or four years of my life that were not much fun. And so, I would just escape; I would just go out into nature. I’d be usually fishing in a farm pond or walking in the woods. And so photography
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FlyFisher Winter 2022
was, and is, an escape for me too. BC: Underwater housing: What do you think? Overdone and gimmicky or essential to any serious fly fishing photographer’s arsenal? VA: The former. I will admit, it’s very seductive. Same thing with drones, it’s a perspective that you don’t normally see. And as soon as something like that becomes popular, everybody’s doing it. But I have fallen back on the ‘less is more’ mantra. I’m just going to concentrate on what I do best. BC: What species of fish, or what style of fly fishing, is the most difficult to photograph in a way that achieves your vision? VA: I would just say fishing from a boat is the toughest one because you’re locked in and you don’t have very good alternative perspectives. BC: What’s a mistake in your career that you had to make before you started to learn to correct it? VA: Because I’m not super outgoing, my failure was to not call up editors more frequently and talk with them. If I were starting all over again, I guess I would push myself. I used to think that if I take good enough pictures, they’re going to come to me; but that’s not really true, you’ve got to present yourself.
