Why I Became One of Nature Canada’s 150 Women of Influence, and What It Has to Do With Your Camera
There is a moment that happens on almost every workshop I lead.
We are somewhere wild. Georgian Bay, maybe. Or Superior at first light. A woman lifts her camera, pauses, and goes completely still. Not because she has forgotten her settings. Because she has seen something. A shaft of light through the trees. A great blue heron holding its impossible stillness at the water's edge. Frost on a cedar bough that will be gone in twenty minutes.
She is not snapping. She is seeing.
That moment, that shift from casual observer to genuine witness, is what photography does that nothing else quite replicates. And it is what I believe, with more conviction every year I do this work, is one of the most important things a woman can do for herself and for the natural world she loves.
It is also exactly why I said yes to becoming one of Nature Canada’s 150 Women of Influence for the Women for Nature initiative.
Cobi Sharpe
Spark Adventure Photography Workshops founder and CEO.
What Women for Nature Actually Is
Nature Canada was founded in 1939 to honour Mabel Frances Whittemore, an educator and nature lover whose central mission in life was to share her passion for nature with others. That origin matters. This organization was built on the belief that one woman's love for the natural world, shared deliberately and generously, can move people to protect it.
Women for Nature carries that belief forward. It brings together 150 professional women from across Canada who use their platforms, their networks, and their leadership to accelerate positive impact on the natural world. The initiative exists because Nature Canada understands something that often gets lost in conservation conversations: connection comes before action. People protect what they love. And they love what they have truly seen.
As Senator Janis Johnson said when the initiative launched: "Imagine what 150 Women Strong can accomplish for Nature."
I think about that often.
Because I watch it happen in small ways every single time a woman lifts her camera in the field.
Why Photography and Conservation Are the Same Conversation
Here is what I said when the Nature Canada partnership was announced, and I mean every word of it:
"Spark's core philosophy of mindful presence and moving from snapping to seeing establishes the deep, personal connection essential for conservation. By teaching women to use photography as a powerful tool to tell authentic stories of the natural world, we directly inspire the greater sense of interconnectedness required to protect nature and her fragility for future generations."
That is not a polished press release quote. That is what I have watched happen, repeatedly, in the field with women who came to a workshop thinking they were learning aperture and left understanding something much larger about their relationship to the places they photograph.
When you slow down to truly see a landscape, when you study the light, wait for it, compose within i, you are no longer passing through that place. You are in relationship with it. You notice what is there. You notice, eventually, what is missing. You start to care in a way that goes bone-deep, the way that only direct experience can produce.
That caring is the foundation of conservation. Not statistics. Not policy briefs. Not guilt. A woman standing at the edge of a wetland at golden hour, watching the light move across the tree-line, understanding for the first time what it would mean to lose this, that is where advocacy begins.
Your camera is not separate from this story.
It is the instrument that slows you down enough to truly enter it.
The Connection I Keep Watching Women Make
I have two children. I am constantly working to instil in them a sense of awe and wonder over small things, a moth on a window screen, ice forming at the edge of a puddle, the specific green of a forest after rain. Not because I am trying to raise environmentalists, though I would not complain. Because I know that children who are taught to notice the natural world grow into adults who cannot imagine living without it.
The women who come to Spark workshops are, in many ways, relearning that same noticing.
They arrive having lived years, sometimes decades, in a pace of life that does not leave room for pausing at the side of a trail to watch a dragonfly. They have been moving fast. Doing a great deal for everyone else. Carrying things. And somewhere in the middle of all that doing, the natural world went from something they were in relationship with to something they drove past.
Photography gives them a reason — a legitimate, camera-in-hand reason — to stop. To look. To stay long enough that the heron decides they are not a threat and goes back to fishing.
That is not a small thing.
That is the beginning of everything.
Why Nature Photography Specifically — And Why It Matters That We Name It
The Canadian Women's Photography Collective that I am building is not a general photography community. It is specifically for women who photograph the natural world, landscape, wildlife, macro, flora, birds, seasons, the thousand small wonders that a forest or a shoreline or a frozen marsh contains.
That specificity is meaningful.
There are photography communities for women that welcome everyone, cover every genre, and do good work. But there is not yet a dedicated home for Canadian women who feel the particular pull of nature photography, who would rather spend a Saturday morning in a wetland than anywhere else on earth, who have a folder on their computer full of lichen photographs that their families find baffling, who understand that sometimes you need to stop the car because the light through those particular trees will not happen again.
Those women deserve their own space. A community that shares their language, their patience, their values. A place where no one thinks it is excessive to wait forty-five minutes for a cloud to move.
Nature Canada's Women for Nature initiative recognized something I have known for years: that women who are in deep relationship with the natural world are uniquely positioned to speak for it. Not because we are more emotional or more connected to the earth by some romantic notion of femininity. Because we pay attention. Because we show up. Because when we fall in love with a place through our cameras, we do not forget it.
Canadian Women’s Photography Collective
We’re working on something BIG.
What This Ambassadorship Means in Practice
As a Women for Nature ambassador, my role is to use Spark's workshops, adventures, and growing community to connect more Canadian women to the natural world — and in doing so, to the conservation of it.
That means teaching women to move from snapping to seeing. It means creating the kind of immersive, unhurried experience in wild places that produces genuine relationship, not just content. It means building a community where Canadian women who love nature and carry cameras can find their people, share their images, and deepen their practice together.
It means taking seriously the idea that your photography is not just a creative outlet. It is a form of witnessing. And witnesses, when they are paying attention, become advocates.
Nature Canada was built on one woman's desire to share her love of nature with others. Women for Nature exists because that impulse, multiplied by 150 women with reach, with platforms, with communities, can move something.
I am proud to be one of those 150. And I am building Spark to be the place where that movement lives for women who photograph the natural world in Canada.
This Is Bigger Than a Workshop
If you have been carrying your camera into the forest on your own, wondering why it matters, wondering if anyone else feels what you feel when the light does something extraordinary to an ordinary Tuesday morning, I want you to know that it matters enormously.
The natural world needs people who have truly seen it. Not glanced at it through a car window or scrolled past it on Instagram. Seen it. Sat with it. Waited for it. Photographed it at the exact moment it revealed something that made you catch your heart ache.
That is what you are doing when you pick up your camera and walk into the woods. You are becoming a witness. And Canada needs more of those right now.
When you are ready to find the community that understands why, I would love for you to be part of what we are building.
Stay connected and be the first to hear about the Canadian Women's Photography Collective when it launches.
