Wildlife photographer

Photography is the natural companion for the professional zoologist and amature naturalist alike.  Photography for me is the perfect melding of accurate note keeping and an artistic expression.  The equipment I use is all Canon EOS digital. I have a 5D body and my three primary lenses are a 17-40 mm f4 L series zoom, a 100 mm f2.8 macro and a 300mm f4 L series IS lens. I also occasionally use a 1.4x teleconverter and carry a cheap little 50mm f1.8 plastic lens for dirty work. In reserve and for specific jobs I have a 400mm f5.6 L series lens, an MP-E65 macro lens, 480ex flashes and a macro twin flash. I don’t carry my slik tripod nearly as much as I should and it all gets zipped up in a Lowe Pro Dry Zone 200. It all adds up to a real pain to lug around but I can’t consider a trip without it.

I’ve put this info up in response to a few emails but it really doesn’t matter what you shoot with unless you aim to be published in high-end magazines (and even then there is more latitude than you’d think, excuse the pun). It’s capturing the image that matters, and for that you need to be where the action is, not at home polishing your lenses.  It’s a sympathy with nature and your chosen subject that yields the results not the size of your lens collection.

I use Canon because that was the original camera body I had, bought for me by my Mum as a going away to University present. It was a Canon EOS 1000F. I snapped away furiously with it and it took me at least three years to properly grasp the basics. 

The real joy of wildlife photography is the situations it guides you too. I’ve had sandpipers sit on my head as I drifted towards them neck-deep in a river in Dominica, humming birds have attacked their reflection, the list is long, and few resulted in an amazing image, but the experience was more than compensation. Just this afternoon I found myself pinned in a tangle of vines amongst tree ferns covered in mud with a proud Fiordland crested penguin preening himself at his burrow entrance whilst others called around us and kaka, bell bird and tui dropped by to investigate my presence. The photographic outputs are mediocre at best but the experience was real and superb.