My Remote Camera Set-up

This is a quick one but I’ve had some questions about the way I photograph bears and rhinos so close without frightening the animals or jeopardizing my own safety, so I’m posting this as a place to direct people interested in this.

If you look at the picture above you can see two cameras, one is mine and the other belongs to my friend Jon. The camera sits on a motorized tripod head. On top of the camera itself is a CamRanger2 remote with two little antennae, connected to the camera with USB cords, and to my iPhone or iPad with its own wifi signal. Both the remote-control tripod head and the remote trigger are made and sold by CamRanger here.

Once set up and connected to the iPhone or iPad I can see my composition, change my focus points, camera settings like shutter, aperture, ISO, EV compensation etc. And with the motorized tripod head I can pan and tilt. The only thing I can’t do really is level the tripod or zoom the lens.

With this set-up a camera can be placed well ahead of an approaching bear, usually around a corner so our presence doesn’t disturb them, and then we’re back into the boat and back into the middle of the river, about 100 feet or 35 meters away.

The CamRanger2 is a bit fussy to get set-up initially, but when I ran into problems the folks who support it were very responsive and got me turned right side up. Overall it’s the best solution I’ve found for remote stuff where I want to see what’s going on through the lens, and want full control. Now that I’ve used it a while it has my confidence.

The tripod is a Really Right Stuff Versa Ground Pod, and while almost any tripod would work I like this one for the very compact size and it’s still super stable, which is important when you’re trusting a grizzly bear not to knock your camera into the water. So far I’ve had no issues, even though the occasional bear decides to give herself a bit of a scratch on the camera. Am I worried about losing the gear in the water? Not really. So far I’ve had no incidents.

Hope this helps. Happy to answer questions if you’ve got them.