SERENGET I | WI LDLI FE
IMAGES Remote cameras could be triggered by the animals themselves
We operated with a lot of remote cameras. When you’re dealing with hyenas, they carry them off
mounted onto one of the stabilised camera systems. “The quality is amazing. We can track animals wherever they go and keep a stabilised image.” The stabiliser, a Shotover F1, is perhaps most at home on the underside of a helicopter, and has been used to photograph subjects as diverse as MotoGP and skateboarding. “The whole thing had to be incredibly robust as well,” Downer says. “We had to be able to shoot the moment anything happened. It had to be on all day. There was never a moment it was turned off. The stabilisation systems were working when we were travelling over rough terrain. It was hard on the equipment, but we had to be ready to film the unique events that happened.” But it paid off, and the tricky task of capturing rare animal behaviour enjoyed a much-improved success rate. “In the past,” Downer enthuses, “particularly in the film days, you’d only capture 10% what you saw. On this, we wanted – as soon as we’d
Perhaps predictably, wildlife can be hard on equipment. “We had quite a few cameras trashed,” Downer admits. “We operated with a lot of remote cameras that could be left all day – they were being triggered by the animals themselves, and that was a quite important part of the look. When you’re dealing with hyenas, they love them and they’d carry them off.” At that point, recovering the camera became an exercise in recovering the recording media. “We put trackers on them, and you realise that they’ve taken it to a muddy, urine-soaked pool. And you have to find it, and it tends to be… well, we lost quite a few cameras,” he recalls. CLASSIC CANON Given the range of situations involved, it’s perhaps not surprising that Downer describes using “a huge array of lenses”. For him, one of the most important was the Canon CN20x50, which could be
SEPTEMBER 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 47
Powered by FlippingBook