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MALE SPEAKER: Hi, everybody.
Welcome.
It's my great pleasure to introduce Andy Biggs.
Andy's actually going to do a lot of the
introduction himself.
He's going to talk a little bit about his work
and how he got here.
But there's a couple of highlights that I do
want to point out.
So Andy was the winner of the 2008 BBC Wildlife Photographer
of the Year in the category of Wild Places--
is that right?
ANDY BIGGS: Yeah.
MALE SPEAKER: Yeah, and it's a killer image.
So that's one of the accolades that he's got.
Andy is a Silicon Valley veteran.
I don't know if he left or if the Valley spit him out, but
I'm sure he'll tell you the story of that.
But Andy is one of the premier, one of the best
African wildlife photographers that I've ever met.
And it's really awesome to have him here and speak to us.
So take it away.
[APPLAUSE]
ANDY BIGGS: OK, everybody hear me OK?
All right.
So I'm Andy.
And I'm an African wildlife photographer.
And this is now my fourth career.
I'm 43 years old.
And yes, I'm a Silicon Valley veteran.
We left in 2002.
But when I got out of college in 1991, I was an accountant.
And I thought that I was great at that.
I might have been decent at it, but I hated it.
I hated it.
So I moved into the consulting world doing financial software
systems for a long time and ended up in Silicon Valley,
working for Rational Software.
And in 2000, somebody said, hey, you want to go out with
me to go take some photographs?
We're going to head over to the ocean over
by Pescadero Beach.
And you have a camera?
And I thought, no, I don't.
So I guess I should buy one.
So I headed up to Keeble & Shuchat,
and I bought a camera.
And that's been a journey now that's lasted really for the
better part of what, 13 years now?
So eventually, after working my tail off in Silicon Valley,
I decided that it was time to end my time here.
Because mainly we wanted to start a family.
And it was a very difficult environment to start a
business, a safari business, out here with a high cost of
living and try to make it all work and start a family.
So we moved back to where we're from, which is Houston.
And we put everything in storage.
And we took off for Tanzania.
And we went away for a month and a half.
We had no plan after a week of planning once we got there.
So we said, we're going to go climb Kilimanjaro for a week.
And somewhere on Kilimanjaro, we'd figure out what we're
going to do the next week.
And then at the end of that week, we'd figure out what's
going to happen the next week, which is very unlike my
behavior, my personality.
Because I used to be a planner.
I was a project manager.
And so I used to plan everything to the nuts.
And so somewhere on Kilimanjaro, I
realized that this is--
I needed to put a business plan together to actually turn
this into a business.
And now 11 years later, I'm doing it full time.
I've been doing it full time for many years now.
But it's been a blast.
So what I wanted to do today is talk about transitioning
from Silicon Valley--
what I call Silicon Valley to the Serengeti--
and then talk about photography, maybe just look
at some photographic examples, look at them, talk about them,
the approach to photography, how I think creative
photography should be the driving force behind people's
photographs, not what does this button do, and how do I
make it work?
The creative side should always drive the craft, not
the craft driving the creative.
So I want to get into that a little bit.
Aravind mentioned this a minute ago.
This is the winning image from 2008's BBC Wildlife
Photographer of the Year.
It's a photograph of the Namibian Skeleton Coast, which
is a country just above South Africa on the
western coast of Africa.
And we were taking a bush plane flight one day all the
way up the coast towards the border of Angola.
And normally, the coastal fog sits over the water, and you
can't see it.
And this day, there was no fog on the water.
It was all over the sand dunes.
And these sand dunes are basically 1,200
to 1,500 feet tall.
So they're really, really large dunes.
And to give it a little bit of perspective, there's actually
a seal colony down here on the bottom part of the screen.
Give a little bit of perspective.
So when it comes to photography, I think the
starting point of photography should be coming up with a
list of adjectives, as opposed to, I've got a camera, and
this is what I think I want to see.
And I'm just going to capture everything in front of me.
I like to start with a list of adjectives, like hopeful,
remote, timeless, regal, uplifting, happy--
as opposed to aggressive, sad.
There's a lot of different approaches to wildlife
photography, and we're going to see those in a minute.
And I don't like to take that approach that most other
people take.
I'm looking for more big, wide open scenes,
things that tell a story.
Because photographers--
we are visual storytellers.
And visual storytelling is difficult.
Because we have the assumption that there are no words with
any photograph.
Sometimes there are.
If you're lucky, it's in a magazine with a wonderful gold
border around the front.
But most of the time, we don't.
Most the time, photographers are trying to illustrate a
story with one photograph, not a series of
photographs with no words.
So here we've got a photograph of a giraffe underneath an
acacia tree in the Serengeti National Park.
Just trying to get a sense of place, what's going on.
We have all grown up knowing what giraffes look like.
We've seen them in books.
We've seen them in children's books.
And we know that they've got spots.
We know they've got horns.
But we don't have to fill the frame with it because our
memory fills in those gaps.
All we have to do is show a shape.
And we're going to talk about shapes a little bit with black
and white photography a little bit later.
But I thought kind of start off the discussion talking
about the whole adjective approach--
find out what you're interested in and how to
photograph that.
Because you're going to be editing your photographs
before you even click the shutter.
How you compose and how you tell a story is all starting
with that, your requirements.
And the requirements are, for me, hopeful, timeless, remote.
I don't like to have anything that looks like it's been
man-made in my scenes.
I don't want a road or a path.
Because sometimes we are on roads in the
middle of the Serengeti.
So when I left Silicon Valley in 2002, I had to transition
into this world of being a full-time photographer.
So that requires income.
And income for me comes from running photographic safaris,
not so much being a photographer,
licensing the images.
That does happen.
But it's really leading photographic safaris, teaching
photography out in the bush, and showing people how to have
an appreciation for what they're seeing and then how to
capture them.
And here we've got two young lionesses on the ground that
we get this eye contact with.
And I look for photographs that have some sort of
connection to the viewer, that somehow draws the viewer in.
And a lot of times, the eyes are the things that are doing
that for us.
Here's another kind of scenic image.
Here is a bull elephant, a male bull elephant in the
Okavango Delta in Botswana.
Looking for some clouds, a little bit of background, a
reflection, but something that kind of places the animal in
its environment, that kind of tells us the bigger picture,
as opposed to filling the frame.
Not to say that I don't do that.
I do that as well.
But I try to vary the looks of the photographs so that people
don't get what I would call visual fatigue, the
same-looking photograph every time.
And the way that photographers should and can do that is by
shooting vertical, horizontal, zooming in, zooming out, going
in for detailed shots, going in for big landscape shots.
Here's one of my safari groups.
You can tell this was a winter day.
This is in July in Botswana.
And we all have our jackets on.
And coming from Texas in July, it's awesome.
Because it's 105 degrees where I am in July.
And I can get on a plane, and it's 45.
It's fantastic.
Again, back to this visual storytelling idea--
when shooting in black and white, which is very different
from color, one has to really pay attention to shapes.
Because when you remove the color information from a
photograph, you're basically left with nothing but shapes
and textures.
And there's a language with color that's all removed.
So whenever we talk about contrast in photographs, we
usually talk about--
we're thinking of black to white, something
with a lot of contrast.
But in the color world, we have hue contrasts, so the
difference between reds and blues, or
maybe blues and yellows.
But we take that away, and we have to have more to stand on.
And so what I do is I'm always looking for clean backgrounds,
clean elements that are easy for the human eye to figure
out what's going on.
And here we sat here, watching this lioness on a rock.
She was asleep for a few hours.
And we just wanted her to wake up and yawn.
It's all we wanted her to do, right?
So sometimes sitting around in a Land Rover for hours is an
opportunity to read a book, tell jokes,
take a nap, do whatever.
But patience pays off.
Patience pays off.
And in the safari world, driving around in a vehicle
thinking that something's going to happen right when you
pull up to it is very misguided.
It's very misguided, because it never ever
happens that way.
You don't drive around and you're like, oh,
wow, look at that.
There's a lion about to kill something.
No, you have to watch things transpire.
And you have to pay attention to what's going on around you.
Now, this is the opposite of what I talked about a minute
ago, which is kind of the big scene, the big overall
sweeping vista.
This is a photograph of a mother elephant walking across
the road in front of us, protecting
the rest of her family.
She just stops, looks, makes her ears look larger.
And certain mammals are easier to photograph than others.
Elephants, I think, are the easiest.
And the reason why they're the easiest is that they give a
lot of non-verbal cues.
Because how they socialize with their other family units,
proximity, their tail movement, how they move their
head gives you an idea of what their mood is.
And ultimately, that's what I'm trying to convey.
So we're back to the whole list of adjectives, right?
If you come up with that list of adjectives, you're going to
be looking for very specific behavior in an animal to try
to photograph that moment.
And sometimes, storytelling is kind of bending the truth.
Back to simple elements.
This is a photograph in South Africa a few years ago.
We just waited for a lioness to climb up into a tree,
because she saw a herd of Cape buffalo.
She wanted to get a better vantage point, figure out how
to approach them.
So she jumped up in the tree, looked around.
And I was hoping to get a shot where her tail was actually
still in the frame.
Because a lot of times, photographers, we will get so
excited and zoom in and go straight for
the eyes, the head.
And we'll totally forget about the tail and the legs and
everything else.
So you have to have a lot of breathing room in these
photographs.
So we've mentioned a few images.
And we'll return to those in a minute.
But I wanted to talk about the life of a safari photographer.
When I started this business, I was thinking, oh, I'm going
to take a bunch of photographs.
It's going to be great.
I'm going to lead some safaris.
I'll take some photographs.
And that's going to be it.
Well, the reality is that I'm a marketing guy.
I've got to build a brand, who I am, communicate that out to
the market.
I've got to sell safaris.
I've got to put them together.
It helps to have a cost accounting background.
So I know how all the international rates work with
the monetary and how to hedge.
And I have to be able to run a trip.
I have to be a leader.
I have to be a guide.
I have to be able to say, this is a giraffe.
Here's what it's doing.
Here's why it's doing it.
Here's how to photograph it.
I have to be a photographer.
I have to be a teacher.
I have to teach photography.
Andy, what's an f-stop?
What's shutter speed, ISO?
What's all that going on?
I don't understand how to do that.
And I have to be an accountant when I get back home, because
I still have to pay vendors.
I still have to keep the business going.
And so I have to wear a lot of different hats.
But I'm an outsource model kind of guy.
So I outsource to these different companies in Africa
for the camps.
I outsource to these guys as agents.
And I have myself in the office.
I used to have an assistant, who used to do a lot of fun
printing for me.
But he moved up to New York.
And I haven't seen him in a while.
But for the most part, I'm an outsourced business.
It's really great because I have the freedom to not really
worry about a lot of things.
And I just kind of remotely manage other vendors.
In 2008, I licensed a bunch of
photographs to Banana Republic.
And as a wildlife photographer, it's a very
unusual environment to be in.
So essentially, Banana Republic being in
the clothing world--
I would call them still in the fashion world, even though
it's not high fashion--
a wildlife photographer existing in a fashion world is
like oil and vinegar.
We have two totally different languages.
And when their ad agency called me and said, hey, we'd
love to use your photographs as the cornerstone of our
urban safari campaign.
What do you think?
I thought, yeah, it sounds great.
But I have no idea what you want.
So let's figure this out together.
So what they ultimately did was they used a bunch of
images in their stores, all their 750 stores.
They put them in their marketing brochures, on their
website, billboards--
you name it, in anything they wanted to.
And they licensed these images for sole use for four months.
Nobody else could use them for any other purposes.
And it was a lot of fun.
It was a lot of fun because I learned a lot about how that
world works.
And being a former project manager, showing up and doing
contract negotiation was a lot of fun.
Because now I was in the driver's seat working with an
ad agency of creative people negotiating contracts.
So that was a lot of fun.
So what they did is they basically put them in all
stores, every little nook and cranny where
they could find it.
And I don't know if anybody remembers in that year a lot
of women handbags, giraffe-print purses?
That was the campaign that we did together.
I think the most fun part of that negotiation is when they
came back and said, Andy, we could really use a few more
images for our stores.
We're kind of stretching these images a lot.
People are going to walk into different sales areas within
the stores, and they're going to see the same photographs.
Could we do more?
I said, yeah, sure.
Just you know what this many took.
Take that.
You can figure out the cost pretty quickly.
And they said, well, we kind of ran out of money.
And I said, oh, well, being a former budgeting guy, I can
figure this out.
So if you ran out of money, let's go find somebody else's
budget that has money.
And they said, OK, well, give us an idea.
And I said, you know what?
Let's throw a party.
Let's throw a party where I can get some PR
value out of this.
So they threw a big party.
And what they did is they basically announced to all
their Visa cardholders for Banana Republic, if you've
made a purchase--
I think it was at least $600 in the last 12 months, and you
live within 100 miles of San Francisco--
we're going to send you an invitation.
And we're going to have a private party.
We're going to serve alcohol.
We're going to have a DJ.
We're going to put it in our store.
And we had something like 900 people come through the doors
in 120 minutes.
And it was a lot of fun because it just kind of
created a lot of PR for me.
And I got some additional value out of that.
And then they said, OK, well, can we use those images now?
I said, well, let's keep working on this a little more.
And I said, you know what you should do?
You should design, print, distribute, oh, maybe 100,000
About Andy cards and put them behind the checkout counter of
every store.
If you like these photographs, maybe you could buy one, too.
So we drove additional sales.
We hit another different budget within the organization
that allowed us to--
I could basically earn more income indirectly from them
without them really having to spend much money.
So there are all these really creative things that
photographers can do that are not necessarily someone
cutting you a check.
In this world right now, there's so many people that
contact photographers that say, oh, we'd love to use your
photographs.
We have no budget.
And I have a really nice response to that.
It's usually something to the effect of, thank you for your
consideration.
I appreciate that.
Boil it down, that doesn't pay the bills.
I'd love to donate to your organization.
But I do that through a different process, so sorry.
And then in 2008, it was another big part of the year,
I started a camera bag company.
Has anybody heard of Gura Gear before?
So I started that in 2008.
And I was really tired of carrying around heavy, heavy,
heavy camera bags.
You can imagine, as a wildlife photographer, I was carrying
big lenses with me.
The problem is that most international airlines are
limited to 10, 12 kilos for carryons, so like 22, 24,
maybe 25 pounds at the most.
And if you're carrying a 500 or 600 millimeter lens, that's
8 to 12 pounds.
That's 50% of your weight allocation right there.
And most bags that can carry that lens
weigh 7 to 12 pounds.
So suddenly, you're on safari with no camera,
a bag, and a lens.
That doesn't work.
So I removed all the weight.
And here's a little product promo shot I took in Kenya a
couple years ago.
So how does a wildlife photographer shoot?
Here in the States, most wildlife photography is done
handheld, on a tripod.
You walk out into a field, and you take photographs.
Well, in Africa, much of it is done with a Land Cruiser or a
Land Rover.
And we basically drive out on safari.
We usually do two game drives in a day.
And we just go see what we can see.
But we always have some sort of game plan.
And the game plan is we're going to track the second we
leave camp.
We're going to track big paws.
We're looking for leopards.
We're looking for lions.
What are they doing?
Where are they going?
And in the morning, that's my morning paper.
That's the first thing that I read in the morning.
We're trying to figure out what's going on, what happened
in the night, where did everything go.
And we track.
And in this photograph, we've got a tracker sitting on the
hood of the vehicle who's helping us figure out where
everything's going.
And at some point, he may get out of the vehicle, take a
rifle, and walk off for half an hour or an hour.
And we'll go pick him up some other area.
And he'll be self sufficient.
He's just trying to track what's going on.
This is another vehicle configuration without a
canopy, when it's cooler outside.
And you can see we've got bean bags that we set up to support
our lenses.
And it's really fairly easy.
You don't have to do much work.
The guides and the trackers do all the work for you-- yes?
He was asking, is there are some sort of
clamp to the rail?
There is a clamp with a stem and a bean bag
sitting right there.
I bring those on safari with me for all my customers.
And anybody who likes to go off-roading in the States has
no clue until you get into one of these big bad boys.
These are great because they've got big, huge
inflatable tires.
And this is in the Okavango Delta, where the water is
often over the top of the tires.
So we're having to drive through through the water to
get to another area.
It's pretty common.
I kind of giggle a little bit when I see vehicles with the
snorkels on them here in the States.
I'm thinking, when was the last time you forded a river?
Probably not yet.
Yeah, and then sometimes, we just use a bean bag.
Sometimes we handhold our lenses.
The neat thing about most of the safaris that I run is that
you don't have to have huge lenses to get great
photographs.
Remember, it's all about visual storytelling.
Visual storytelling doesn't mean you have to zoom in on
everything.
And at the end of the presentation, I want to talk
to you about one idea of how to visually tell a story in 10
photographs--
just some ideas on that.
And here we've got a lioness lying on a vehicle.
We were all laughing, thinking, oh, that guy can't
leave any time soon.
And then right when we were chuckling, we saw
his hand stick out.
[LAUGHING]
ANDY BIGGS: OK, it's perfect timing, isn't it?
Yeah, they were stuck there for quite a while.
You may see a lot of wildlife images of something like this,
where you've got an animal filling the frame.
And you maybe don't understand what's really going on.
Because you're not--
the photographer's only selecting a
small area of the scene.
What's really going on is something like this.
So here's a vehicle behind on the other side that we sat
there and waited for him to walk towards us.
Normally, we won't get that close to the wildlife.
We let them get closer to us.
And we're just waiting for him to walk off.
Here's Laurie.
So this is a typical vehicle in Kenya.
A little bit different, where you can stand up, as well.
I think I've got an image of that in a minute.
You can just put your bean bag down there and take a
photograph.
And if you make me angry, I'm going to make you pull the
vehicle out of the mud.
This is just a photo op.
We were laughing and giggling.
I told one of my travelers, hey, get out there
and pull the chain.
But not all photography is done from a Land Rover.
We're often flying around in helicopters.
And helicopters are very, very, very efficient ways of
getting a unique angle to wildlife.
The challenge with that is you don't want to fly too close.
Because the closer you get with a really loud turbine
engine, the more they get scared or angry, and they'll
go away from you.
You don't want that.
And so what we do is we have these helicopters in Botswana.
And we will take the doors off.
And every now and then somebody will ask me a
question like, Andy, what about the air conditioning?
No problem on that one, you've got--
anyway.
So we put two photographers on the left and one on the right.
And we basically fly figure eights around our subject.
And here you can see a little bit closer in
with a fisheye lens.
We put our gear on the floor.
We put it on the side.
And we're always in contact with the pilot, saying, hey,
check that out over here.
Let's go check that out.
And what I'm always looking for is something that is
clear, away from the vegetation.
Remember that most animals are looking to either drink, eat,
sleep, fight, fornicate.
And you have to think about that, which means most of the
time, they're going to be in the shade.
They're going to be next to a tree, not out in the middle of
a field, unless they're a grazer.
So here we've got some giraffes walking off.
Here we've got some elephants in some shallow water.
Again, it's not about zooming in and filling the frame with
your subject.
This is actually from a helicopter shooting way out at
a low angle, just a gentle sloping angle.
And here's one from a couple months ago in November, in the
Delta, the Okavango Delta, where we've got a small family
herd of four elephants--
mother in the front, nice separation between all the
individuals.
And remember, we've been talking about shape.
And shape is really important for the photographer.
Whenever you've got shape, it's separated from
foreground, background.
That's good, because it helps us home in on what the subject
is all about.
If you've got a really, really complicated background, it's
hard for the viewer to understand what's going on.
They have to work that much harder.
And whenever you've got a color difference between your
subject and the background, that's good.
That's separation.
Whenever you've got a light difference--
black to white, a hue difference--
those are tools that we use to help create those shapes or
separate the shapes.
Whenever someone says, hey, Andy, what are the tents like
in Tanzania or camping out in the Serengeti, I just have to
show one photograph and say, this is not a tent that you
had in Boy Scouts.
This is a proper tent.
You've got plumbing, even though it's temporary.
So we'll set these up.
We call these Hemingway-style camps.
But it's not roughing it.
So whenever I leave home and go out to the Serengeti or
Botswana or wherever I go, we're always well taken care
of so we can focus on photography.
And sometimes we stay in really super
swanky places like this.
Electricity--
either using solar for the camp, and sometimes they use
backup diesel generators.
And then we'll usually eat outdoors at night.
So I never have to worry about accommodations, food,
anything like that.
Yes?
Yeah, so the question is, how much editing
is done in the field?
For me, it's very different from my travelers, my guests,
my customers.
I'd say most of my customers download once a day, look at
their photographs, not edit them.
Look at them.
Learn from them.
And then put what they've learned in action the next
game drive or the next day.
I have something over 200 gigs of compact flash cards--
I don't know, something like that.
And I will probably download every three to five days.
Because I'm really busy.
My day is back from a game drive, everybody heads to
their tents, to their rooms.
And I'm basically making sure that lunch is going to be on
time, what's going on, getting a presentation ready for the
night, the evening time--
what are we going to do in the afternoon game drive--
maybe working with somebody one on one with their laptop.
So I don't get a chance to download very often.
So I just live off the grid for a long time.
And then hopefully I'll back up at some point.
Sometimes, we'll have these really cool adventures like
going to Mahale Mountains, which is on the western part
of Tanzania, which is on Lake Tanganyika on the western side
is Democratic Republic of Congo.
And this is on the Tanzania side.
It's the second largest, by volume, freshwater lake in the
world nobody has ever heard of.
But it's amazing.
And to go there, it takes six hours of bush plane flights,
and having to go up and down on a dhow, a boat.
You can see the boat on the bottom part of this frame--
into this mountain area looking for wild chimpanzees.
Chimpanzees are very, very difficult to track.
Because you have to have a lot of trackers.
And they move often.
So the trackers leave at 6 o'clock in the morning.
They go up into the forest.
And they start radioing in where they've seen them last,
where they bed down, where are they heading,
where are they eating.
And then hopefully when you arrive two, three, four hours
later, and you've been hiking, they haven't
gone away too far.
But sometimes they do.
So it might involve 6, 8, 10 hours of trekking in the day
just to find your subjects.
And then the area they say, once you get to them, you can
only photograph them for 60 minutes.
And then you must leave.
So it's very restrictive.
And these are very wild animals, very difficult
photography.
For those who are into photography and all the techie
nerdy stuff, basically, this is with a 70 to 200 lens on a
D700 shooting at probably ISO 3200, wide open.
It's a dark canopy.
It's a very, very, very difficult place to photograph.
But it's also one of the most rewarding.
This was in South Africa few years ago.
We were watching a lioness take out an impala in the mud.
And she obviously had mud all over her.
This is the extreme part, the northern part of Namibia,
along the Angola border.
It's the Himba tribe.
And even though I photograph wildlife primarily, I love to
photograph cultures all throughout Africa.
And these are fascinating people, some of the last
semi-nomadic people in Africa.
And what's great about them photographically is they still
dress traditionally.
And they cover themselves with an ochre that's been mixed
with a butter fat.
And they coat their bodies and also burn and smoke some
Commiphora for basically their smell.
They smell really nice.
And it's really fascinating to shoot them.
So on this day, we decided, hey, let's go to the local
village, basically hut, and let's see if they'll let us
take their photographs.
And we went there.
And they said, oh, yeah, we'd love to do that.
And we said, OK, would you mind walking
out on the sand dunes?
And they started laughing.
They're like, we do that anyway.
Why would you pay us to do that?
And they said, wait, pay.
Oh, yeah, so can you bring us back-- we'll do it tomorrow--
but can you bring us some tobacco,
some sugar, some maize.
So we went off and bought some of that and brought it back.
And they just thought it was the most hysterical thing to
walk out on the dunes, which they do every day anyway.
And it was a fun time.
It was a fun time.
Here's a Maasai in Tanzania a few years ago.
I find cultural photography a little more difficult for me.
I'm used to photographing animals, where it's a little
less of an intimate relationship, even though I
observe and watch.
People photography is something that I have to force
myself to do and try harder and harder.
And I find it hard because it's the separation of
background and separation of subject that
always intrigues me.
So here we've got a greeting dance that they're greeting us
when we came into the village.
And they're all encircling us.
We talked about action, where we talked about this
adjective-driven approach to photography.
And it doesn't mean that I always stay
within those bounds.
Here we've got action at a water hole.
And I'll shoot it.
I may not show it a lot.
So there's a difference between shooting,
editing, and showing.
So I have to communicate on my blog, on Google+, on all these
different places, what I'm doing, who I am, what my
photography looks like.
Because I'm trying to reach people to go
on safari with me.
And I have to think about what they want from their safari
versus just what I want.
So I have to separate my portfolios, the one that I
like to print and sell versus what I want to communicate for
people to get them interested in coming with me.
And a lot of men, specifically, are interested
like, I want to kill.
I want to kill.
I'm like, OK.
So I have to communicate that side of the business.
And then usually once somebody sees it, they're like, yeah,
let's not do that again.
It's really funny.
Once you see it and you realize, it's maybe not what
you hoped for.
But it usually involves a lot of sitting, a lot waiting, a
lot of patience.
And this actually happened on the safari with Aravind a few
years ago, two years ago in the Serengeti--
we just sat by a water hole.
Again, action--
there's a little bit of implied activity going on here
that's not maybe true.
Here we've got a hippo in the late afternoon, yawning.
But it looks aggressive.
It looks like he's being very, very aggressive.
This also isn't a really large adult.
It's more of a teenager or a young adult.
But you see all the water splash going on.
I'm showing the aggressive side of photography or of
African wildlife.
Here we've got an elephant.
We pulled around a corner, and she decides she
didn't want us there.
And she just basically opened up her eyes and took off.
We startled her.
It wasn't intentional.
But it was a photographic moment.
I love to slow down the shutter speed.
Now, slowing down the shutter speed gives this implied
movement, implied action, power--
the adjective-driven approach, right--
this power.
And if you can slow your shutter speed down to
something like a 60th, a 30th, a 10th, maybe even far down as
something like a fifth of a second, it really shows a
different side of photography.
It can be very creative.
It's very difficult, very frustrating to shoot this way.
Because you may shoot 200 or 300 photographs
and get zero keepers.
But pixels are cheap, ie, free.
And you can just delete them.
It's OK.
But it takes a lot of patience to shoot
slower shutter speeds.
Because you have to pan through the shot.
You have to have the same autofocus point on the same
spot of the subject all the way through.
And you have to learn which shutter speeds are appropriate
for which animals and how fast they are.
Like something walking, you'd really slow down their shutter
speed versus something that's running.
I also love this kind of interaction between species.
I'm not necessarily a bird photographer.
But I won't shy away from being an opportunistic
photographer, taking shots when I can get them.
So here, we've got a Cape buffalo, which most people
think of as a very dangerous, aggressive--
they can be--
animal, with a bird.
It almost has this kind of yin and yang approach to it.
This is called an oxpecker.
And it's a symbiotic relationship, where the
oxpecker is basically cleaning the animal of ticks.
And the animal wants it there.
But not the only animal that likes it there.
Here's an oxpecker on a white rhino.
So I love these kind of relationships between animals,
if you can get them.
And it's often difficult.
Because there aren't that many that interact.
Usually, it's predatory--
animals trying to kill something else.
Or maybe paying attention to those small little details
that make you laugh.
Here we've got two brothers that are just pulling on each
other's ear.
I mean, mom was over there eating.
And the other mom was eating.
And they just were playing around and horsing around.
And it was about just finding those little small moments,
those little small details that kind of make you laugh.
Lighting and wildlife photography and nature
photography is very important.
There are so many different types of lighting.
We wanted to use the language of angles of light.
Where is the light in relation to your subject?
We also have the language of soft, harsh, warm, cold.
And you have to think about environments and situations
when they're going to a certain light is going to
bring you something that's different.
So always play to the positives.
Here we've got a hot air balloon--
I'm in a balloon myself--
a hot air balloon.
But we also have what looks like fog on the ground.
Well, whenever you put light behind anything in the air
like rain, sleet, snow, water, vapor, dust, fog, it
illuminates.
It shows up.
And so if you throw light behind there, it transforms
the photograph.
This is actually not fog.
This is actually the dust from the vehicles that were chasing
the hot air balloons to make sure that when we landed,
there was somebody to grab the ropes.
But it's still about visual storytelling, right?
The angle of light is really important.
And if anybody has watched the BBC's "Planet Earth," you'll
notice this in probably 75% of their shots.
Basically, they're doing what I call 3/4 lighting, which
means that the light is behind the subject, but not direct
enough to cause a lens flare on the lens.
This helps define the shape.
Because there's an adage in photography that light
illuminates and shadows define.
And a shadow is necessary to have a line or an edge.
So where are you going to put the shadow and the edge?
Well, I like it on the edge of the animal.
Makes sense, right?
So here we've got this nice soft glow on the left-hand
side, or the edge, like a rim light.
But there's still enough light to illuminate her face.
And we have these great processing tools now, when we
develop our photographs, where we can pull out things from
the shadows, where in the film world, this was
hard to pull off.
You could do it.
You just had to nail your exposure within
a third of a stop.
We talked about harsh light a second ago.
Play to the positives.
If it's a harsh light, just blow out the sky.
There are a lot of photographers out there that
are shooting portraits and weddings that are doing this.
And they're setting the trend.
And wildlife photographers like myself are just taking it
and running with it and doing the same thing.
So here, we've got a back-lit leopard in a tree.
And it's created a nice rim light around her paws.
You can see the bottom of her body.
And you don't really worry about the sky because there's
nothing interesting in the sky.
Same kind of concept here.
Actually, in the original file, there's quite a bit of
lens flare.
I'm OK with it.
When I started this in 2002, I used to be so picky about
everything that was inside that frame.
And I wanted everything to be perfect.
And now I'm just, pfft.
11 years later, I just will shoot it.
And if it looks cool--
as long as it's conveying a sense of space, that people
have some sort of emotional reaction to the photograph,
then it's a successful image, even if it has a lot of
technical faults.
If you guys read magazines like "National Geographic,"
you'll probably notice that there are a lot of images with
significant technical faults.
But it doesn't matter.
Because it's about visual storytelling and conveying
what needs to be said.
And so what if something is a little bit blurry?
It just doesn't matter as long as the overall image works.
Again, here's another back-lit image.
Here's a leopard in a tree.
Here's a good example.
Here's kind of the standard sun over my shoulder, looking
at the leopard.
She looks up.
That's great.
There's really nothing going on.
It's direct.
It's flat because there's no shadow.
So why not drive onto the other side and get a
photograph on that side, which looks a lot more dramatic?
I would prefer not to have the tree growing
right through her head.
But basically, sometimes you have to take
what you can take.
But it's a different look.
You're able to get more of that contrast, more of the
color, a lot more drama, because you're
getting those shadows.
Speaking of shadows, silhouettes, another approach
to photography, as long as you've got the
shape worked out.
Silhouettes are all about shape.
This is such a common scenario, which drives most
photographers crazy--
complicated subject, complicated background,
complicated light, complicated everything.
It's hard to figure out what's going on other than it looks
like you've got a lying leopard up in a tree.
This is not processed.
This is straight out of the camera.
But it illustrates a typical scenario, where you're like,
oh, that's cool.
But it's really, really hard to pull off.
Here we've got a big branch right in front of her body, a
lot of lines.
I mean, nature is inherently messy.
And it's our jobs as photographers to clean it up.
And I think of that cleaning up as usually removal.
We're using our lenses to include or exclude things.
So I think photography is all about excluding things as
opposed to including things.
Like a painter includes things--
blank canvas, add stuff.
We take things out.
But this is what I'd rather have.
I'd rather have that.
So now we have an easier-to-figure-out subject,
because we've got the light on her.
We've got an easier set of tree branches that are not all
in the way.
That's what we're looking for-- not this, but that.
And it just takes patience and spending time and waiting.
Usually a leopard hangs out in a tree until it wants to hunt,
which is usually at night, which means you find them in
the afternoon, they're probably going to be there
later in the afternoon.
So we drive around and do some other things, return back to
the same tree.
And maybe a photograph isn't always about color.
When do you use color versus when do you
use black and white?
We talked about shape, right?
Well, color works, but maybe shape works, too,
for black and white.
I'm not sure which one's better here.
They're different.
But I encourage you to take photographs that maybe didn't
have good color, consider it as a black and white.
I like to have very contrasty photographs where there's a
deep black and a bright white in every scene that helps get
an overall sense of--
drama, I think, gets added from that.
And then I love intimacy in wildlife photography.
And that's usually happening between two of the same
species, like a mother and a cub.
Here we've got a mother and a baby here.
Or maybe we've got a mother and a cub.
I really prefer that, because that helps me support those
adjectives we've talked about earlier--
hopeful, regal, uplifting.
That's what I'm really trying to shoot for because
photography--
people who buy images are rarely buying images of
aggressive subjects.
I think when we think African wildlife photography, what's
the first animal people think about?
Usually a lion or an elephant.
Well, a lion--
most the time people, I think, want that yawn, that real big
aggressive roar.
The reality is getting that into an economic model doesn't
really translate very much.
I don't know many companies or people who want to buy a
print, put it on the wall of a roaring lion.
So this helps me sell images.
Because I'm in the business of staying in business, right?
So licensing photographs--
this is kind of what really sells in the marketplace.
OK, let's end this discussion in a few secs, and I'll take
some questions.
But let's end on some storytelling ideas.
Years ago, when I got into this business, two
professional nature photographers
told me over a margarita.
They said, Andy, you need to figure out whether your
storytelling style is one photograph that sits on
somebody's wall or your wall, above the fireplace
or above the couch.
Or are you looking for the series of photographs?
Are you more of an editorial photographer?
Are you looking to take 5, 10, 15, 20, 50, 100, 130
photographs--
130 is typically the number of photographs used in a coffee
table book.
How does it come out of you?
It's natural.
And I'm like, I'm a single shot guy.
I mean, I know that.
And that helps me go down one path and not
try the other one.
But every now and then, sometimes I run a safari where
someone hires me, like a CEO who wants to bring other
executives, or maybe it's a patriarch of a family.
And they said, Andy, we've hired you to run this safari,
teach us some photographs.
But would you also mind documenting our safari for us?
We would love to have photographs of the family.
Now, I'm not a portrait photographer.
I don't pretend to be.
But I like a challenge.
So I'll do those things.
But storytelling--
I thought, let me throw some images together to kind of
illustrate a day in the life of a safari.
Maybe it's seven photographs.
Maybe it's nine.
Maybe it's 10.
But usually when you start telling stories like this on a
web page, and you're showing them to family, they're bored
by the fourth photograph.
Because they're seeing the same image-- oh,
look, another elephant.
Great, right?
Because they weren't there.
They want to see people that they know and love in the
photograph.
So here we've got leaving first thing in the morning,
driving around, slow shutter speed.
Here we've got our tracker up on the front of the vehicle.
Here's our guide smiling at us through the rear-view mirror.
Oh, look, a detail shot.
Here's a photograph of one of us with a big lens.
We go on hikes sometimes., and we shoot from the
ground, just walking.
OK, there's our subject.
We're shooting giraffes off in the distance.
Oh, look, we stopped for a tea and coffee break.
So going in for those detail shots.
Everything about storytelling is about glue.
How does one photograph get glued to the next one?
And how do they all glue together?
Oh, look, smiling, happy faces.
That's a good thing from a marketing standpoint.
Oh, look, we've got some wildlife shots, great.
And then end of the day, we're going to do some tracking.
We've got some leopard tracks going up and down a road.
We had no idea which way they're going.
Let's go down one direction first and
see what we can find.
Sunset shot, we're done.
So just a quick way of thinking about storytelling is
really trying to glue images together that all
somehow make sense.
But if they were to stand on their own, they're not the
photographs you're going to put up on your wall as a big,
huge 40 by 60 print.
I mean, maybe this one would be OK.
But maybe not that one.
They're just different purposes.
I know a lot of people these days who are building Blurb
books and things like that.
Well, that's a totally different style of editing and
including photographs than doing something like these
images earlier, like that.
This is that kind of I want it to stand on its own.
But shooting in a series is very, very, very different.
And then stopping the action--
love stopping the action.
Sitting at a water hole, just shooting, shooting, shooting.
Zebras, as they come down to the water, is exciting because
eventually they get spooked.
And about every 10, 15 minutes it resets again, and they come
down to drink.
So four times an hour, you're getting good photographic
opportunities.
And for me, in the way I think of things, four times in an
hour to shoot something rich is awesome.
Because sometimes you might drive around for two or three
hours not finding what fits your adjective list.
Well, thank you, guys.
Let's do some questions.
How much time do we have for questions?
5, 10 minutes-- yeah, cool.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: I was wondering since wildlife photography is
such a kind of an on-the-fly kind of thing where you really
have to capture things in the moment, are you consistently
using shutter priority and autofocus?
Or how often do you go just full manual?
ANDY BIGGS: That's a really great question.
I'm all over the board, depending on the scenario.
So if I'm hypersensitive to shutter speed, which is
usually when I want to slow the shutter speed down, I'll
switch to shutter-speed priority.
I would say most of the time, I'd be in aperture priority
mode because that's what's most important for me.
In recent years with specifically Nikon cameras,
they do a really good job with auto ISO.
So I'll shoot in manual mode, I'll set my shutter speed, my
f-stop, and I'll let it choose the ISO for me.
Unfortunately, Canon hasn't figured that out very well
yet, the exposure compensation.
But I'm kind of all over the board is the answer.
But I'd say 75% of the time, I'm probably in aperture
priority mode.
AUDIENCE: Cool.
And autofocus?
ANDY BIGGS: Actually, I'm always in
continuous autofocus mode.
And for anybody who has an SLR with a rear autofocus
capability, usually on Canons, it says AF On--
and actually Nikons are the same--
AF On on the back, I prefer to use the rear autofocus button,
not the shutter speed autofocus button.
Because I can leave it in continuous or AI Servo mode
and take my thumb off to stop focusing whenever I want to.
So I don't have to switch modes.
And the reason why I use the rear autofocus button is that
I look at it from a process standpoint.
I'm a process guy.
Back basically when Leica invented the first 35
millimeter camera, we had an aperture
selection on the lens.
We had a shutter speed on the camera.
And whatever the film speed was, that's what it was.
And then in the '50s, they developed
meters in the cameras.
And they said, well, where are we going to put the
functionality for the meter?
Oh, let's put it on the shutter button.
OK, so now we've got two functions in one button.
In the late '80s, when autofocus came out, hey, let's
have autofocus.
Where are we going to put the functionality?
Hey, let's put it on the shutter button.
So now we've got three functions, one button.
So autofocus, metering, and take the shot.
And that just fries my brain thinking about that.
From a UI standpoint, it just doesn't work.
So I prefer to shoot with autofocus on the thumb,
because it's independent of my forefinger.
Hope that helps.
AUDIENCE: Can you say a few words about the different
countries in which you operate?
And the character of each country?
ANDY BIGGS: Yeah, yeah.
So the differences between the countries.
So let me--
I'll make a broad statement first and say that I go to
areas where there's a lot of wildlife.
And wildlife exists where there are not a lot of humans.
So typically more remote locations--
Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, South Africa, Namibia.
Rwanda's in there, even though that's a very densely
populated country.
And the Virunga Mountains are basically an island amongst a
sea of people, where the mountain gorillas are.
I only travel to areas that are what I
consider to be safe.
Because I'm a father and a husband as well.
I want to come home.
So it's very important to me.
So usually, we get to places that are remote.
We fly into a major city and we fly out the next day.
And we get out in the middle of nowhere.
Most of my safaris are split between--
I'd say Kenya, Tanzania, and Botswana, which are very, very
easy places to get to, politically stable.
I know Kenya had some issues a couple years ago.
But really, on the whole, these are very, very, very
stable places.
In other words, I'm not running trips to West Africa,
Nigeria any time soon.
So East Africa is a broad brush.
East Africa is more wide open savannah, where you have more
grazing herding animals, wildebeest and zebras.
You get the wildebeest migration, 2 million
wildebeests, 450,000 zebras--
really, really big.
Southern Africa tends to be smaller
congregation of animals--
same species, just smaller congregations and more
intimate experiences.
Because East Africa typically works off of a national park
method, where you pay fees to be in the park, as well as
other people.
And you'll see them.
Southern Africa--
South Africa, Botswana--
tend to work off of a game reserve, private game reserve,
concession kind of a model where a given camp has
exclusive access to an area.
And you'll see very few, if any, vehicles within a day.
Fees are a lot higher in Southern
Africa than East Africa.
I would say it's a fair statement to say that most of
my safari travelers will start off with a
Tanzania or Kenya safari.
They'll get interested and say, this is a lot of fun.
And they'll end up doing a Botswana safari later, because
it's a little bit more of a commitment
in time to get there.
Financially, as well, it's more expensive.
But the species are virtually the same everywhere that I go.
So the question is, how did I start the safari business and
put together the first safari?
I'm a networker.
My personality is really driven around talking to
people and engaging with people.
And I knew Michael Reichmann, who owned Luminous Landscape
website, which is a nature photography, a
very popular site.
I emailed him and said, hey, let's put a safari together.
He said, that sounds great.
So that helped me build up a name in the industry with
somebody that was well known.
And then it kind of went from there.
I was very fortunate in that I was able to follow the same
trajectory that digital photography took at the same
time that baby boomers were starting to retire or cutting
back on their work commitment.
So international travel was made easier
10 or 15 years ago.
It's just gotten easier and easier and
easier every decade.
But really, I'd say the late '90s started getting really
easy to a lot of these places that I go.
Digital photography was on the rise.
I bought my first pair of digital SLRs in 2002, the
original D30 Canon.
Paid three grand each for them--
three autofocus points, awesome.
And I was seeing my customers doing the same thing.
People were getting reinvigorated by digital
photography.
Oh, I shot film but I stop shooting in the '80s.
Something like that was usually the story.
Most of my travelers are either empty nesters slash
baby boomers, or high tech, one kid or no kids, younger
30s, late 20s into the 30s, early 40s, kind of that
demographic, and just a high interest in digital
photography that didn't exist before.
It's all about networking.
So I really appreciate you guys coming out today.
I wanted to be very mindful of just one hour so that you can
get back to your normal daily life here.
So thanks, guys, for having me out here.
[APPLAUSE]