Tag:wilderness
Some of my most frequent advice is to shoot through a scene. As a younger photographer, I would give up too easily and put the camera down too quickly when my efforts weren’t met with immediate success. “It’s not working,” I would say, when the truth was closer to “I’m not working.” I wasn’t giving the scene the time and effort it almost always needs to be coaxed away from the obvious. Or worse, I’d get what I thought was “the […]
I should have been on a flight to the Yukon on Wednesday. I was meant, by now, to be sitting on a river with bears. I was, instead, lying on an operating table getting an emergency appendectomy. Don’t let anyone tell you the life of a photographer isn’t full of adventure. Oh, the romance of it all! Timing couldn’t have been worse. Or better, really. My appendix could have ruptured while I was in Zimbabwe last week, or while sitting […]
Not 20 minutes after my arrival at Kutali Camp on the Zambezi River in Zambia, a large bull elephant strode through camp, walked up to the lunch table, and sampled—then summarily rejected—the cucumber salad that was due to be my lunch. Two mornings later, I woke to find him outside my tent at 4 am, walking right past the tent door (door? It was a screen with a zipper). Lying in bed, wearing neither a stitch of clothing nor the prosthetic […]
I was about to photograph a beautiful family of cheetah in gorgeous morning light when my camera returned an error message and wouldn’t—no matter what I did—focus. It wouldn’t even fire. By the time I got my lens swapped onto another body, the action was all over, and I was down a camera at the beginning of a month-long trip. Or was I? Back at camp, I discovered the problem: the flange on the camera, the one to which my lenses […]
Wildlife photography should be easy: get a long lens, put the critter in the frame and don’t screw up the exposure. Simple, right? In the 20 years during which I have slid sideways into becoming a wildlife photographer, I have found myself both delighted and frustrated by the challenge of it. Surely if you know how to use a camera, the rest should be a matter of funding the lens and finding the animals. Beautiful creatures make for beautiful photographs, […]
I came home from Zambia with a small handful of images I love. Maybe eight. The jury is still out. But a couple of them I really love. The rest are just meh, a collection of sketch images that don’t make me lean in or quicken my heart. Far from failures, they’re what it takes to get me to the good stuff. Between game drives last week, I found myself telling one of my guests that I was experiencing something […]
Lying in a mud hole, looking up at a white rhino snuffling just inches from my camera, I was having a tough time not giggling or wetting my pants. I might have been a little nervous, but mostly, it was the thrill and the absurdity of it. To be this close to a massive rhinoceros with no remote gear—just me and my camera—was a dream. No guidance counsellor in any high school anywhere would have suggested this as a viable career […]
Among wildlife photographers, it is the long lens that gets all the glory. The bigger the glass, the more serious one is assumed to be about one’s craft. Less a tool than a symbol, sometimes, the bigger telephoto lenses telegraph to the world that we mean business. How I envied those photographers as a younger man, how incredible I imagined their photographs would be. And how disappointed I was when I could finally afford my first big lens, a used […]
The notes below are specific to Kenya but having done safaris in Zimbabwe and South Africa as well, most of these suggestions apply just as well to other places. I’ve been asked over the years, both by my safari clients and others, what and how to pack for a trip like this, so it felt like this might be a good time to explore that for those who are curious. If you and I were sitting down over a glass of wine […]
There’s a curse among photographers, if you believe in such things (curses, that is, not photographers), and it’s this: Sometimes what we do not see can blind us to what is in front of us. Go somewhere with a certain kind of photograph in mind and you might look so hard for that kind of image that you never see what’s actually there. Our expectations can be our biggest blind spots. I went to Zimbabwe and South Africa last month […]