At the end of last year, Will and I visited the north-west coast of Tasmania. The landscape was full of scrubby bushes and grassland, which on first inspection, didn’t seem like a very hospitable environment for wildlife. However, as night drew closer the area was teeming with animals including wallabies, wombats and of course Tasmanian devils – it was the devils that we had come to photograph.

At one time, Tasmanian devils used to live all over mainland Australia until they became extinct there around 3,000 years ago. Since this time, Tasmania has remained the only stronghold for these ferocious little marsupials. Tassie devils are about the size of a small dog, with a stocky build and an incredibly strong bite. In fact, it has the strongest bite for its weight of any living mammal! The unusual name stems from the horrendous screeching sounds that they make at night.

For Tasmanian devils, one of the main causes of population decline is vehicle collisions. Driving at night in Tasmania is a stressful and slow experience – animals constantly hop out in front of your car without warning, startled by the headlights. Unfortunately devils are drawn towards the roads, where they feed on the dead animals that litter the tarmac. As a result, the devils often end up getting hit themselves.

One man who lives in north-west Tasmania is trying to give the devils in his area a helping hand. Geoff King removes dead animals from the road, and drags them into safe locations on his land. Here, the devils can feed safely without the danger of vehicles. This presents an excellent opportunity to photograph these incredible creatures in the wild.

Every evening at around 5pm, we would get our stuff ready for the long night ahead. We would try to get to our hide (basically a fisherman’s shack on the coast) well before sunset so we could get settled in and let our scent dissipate before the devils arrived. The devils are very shy animals and have a keen sense of smell – it’s difficult to get close to them if they catch your scent. To get to our hide, we had to walk 2 km with our full camera bags and a suitcase full of lighting equipment. On a couple of occasions, we arrived at the hide to discover a leech clamped onto our stomachs! Here’s a tip for you if you ever find yourself in this situation – don’t try burning a leech off or using alcohol to loosen its grip. This can cause the leech to regurgitate its stomach contents into your body. It’s much better to let it drop off naturally, or if you must remove it, slide the jaws off with a sharp edge. Be warned though, these pesky parasites can hold on tight!

In order to attract the devils to our hide, we had to do a scent drag, which is basically just pulling a rotting roadkill carcass along the ground leading up to the hide – a pretty grizzly task!

The nights spent in the hide were long and cold, so we stocked up on plenty of instant noodles to keep us going! We also worked out a shift system to keep a lookout for devils. Staring out of the glass window on our own, with the wind blowing outside and the weak light extending only a few meters into the the inky darkness was quite a spooky experience!

Tasmanian Devils are nocturnal, so we were restricted to taking photos after dark. This presented some technical challenges in terms of our lighting set-up. The main challenge that we faced was diffusing the flash light as much as possible to avoid getting harsh shadows. We used a couple of remote speedlites pointing into studio umbrellas, which were triggered with pocket wizards. The strong wind kept toppling the umbrella so we had to have all the lighting equipment in the hide with us, behind a layer glass. As a result, we had to push our lens right up to the glass and shield it from any reflected light.

When the direction of the wind was blowing our scent away from the feeding devils, we tried to venture outside the hide. We would edge along the side of the shack towards the dim puddle of light were the roadkill had been staked out. Above the howling wind, the unmistakable sound of bones crunching could be heard. We would get down on our stomachs and peek around the corner of the shack, careful not to appear above the horizon where we would be silhouetted against the night sky. Usually at this stage we would slowly raise our camera and take a single shot which would then alert the devils to our presence and send them scampering off into the blackness. However, on one occasion, a brave male devil accepted our presence and allowed us to lie just a couple of metres away from him as he fed. It was an incredible, wild experience that we will never forget.

Unfortunately, Tasmanian devils have recently been suffering from a deadly and highly contagious form of cancer – devil facial tumour disease (or DFTD for short). This cancer causes unsightly and painful tumours to form all over the devils’ faces, meaning they can no longer feed. The cancer spreads when the devils bite each other (which happens quite a lot!). The population has suffered a 50% decline since the disease was first recorded in 1996. The future of this amazing and unique animal hangs in the balance as the cancer spreads west. One of the best hopes for Tasmanian Devils, is the creation of disease free populations, which could then be used to repopulate Tasmania in the worst case scenario that all the devils there are wiped out. It would be a tragedy if the Tasmanian Devil went the same way as the thylacine (Tasmanian tiger) which became extinct in 1936. For more information about the efforts to save the Tasmaniaan Devil, visit tassiedevil.com.au.

For more pictures from our trip, take a look at our Australia galleries.

Preparation for the trip commenced several weeks earlier, as I attempted to devise an effective and safe way of getting wide-angle, close-up shots of these notoriously dangerous creatures. I would not have time to set-up camera traps, and I didn’t have enough room to take BeetleCam, so I came up with something a little more basic!

I mounted my camera on top of two wheels (generously donated by my computer chair) and then attached this to a monopod so that I could push the rig up to the dragons. I figured this would give me a 2 meter head-start if one of them decided I looked like lunch! I named my new contraption “KomodoCam”!

Reaching Komodo Island was an epic undertaking… I had to fly to Singapore, then Bali, then the island of Flores, before taking a boat to Komodo Island and Rinca Island. Komodo dragons only live on a few isolated islands in this part of Indonesia.

It is hard to describe the excitement and trepidation I felt as the foreboding volcanic peaks of Komodo Island loomed up in front of me. The island was shrouded in ominous dark clouds and even the sea seemed to have turned black. It really felt like a land lost in time.

My first sighting of a Komodo dragon came shortly after venturing off the boat. I was taken aback by the size of the beast! Komodo dragons can grow up to 3 metres in length and can weigh well over 70kg! This individual was lying in the shade. Being cold-blooded, the dragons are caught in a constant thermal juggling act; in the mornings they must find sunlight in order to warm up, but later in the day they must retreat to the shade before their bodies heat up too much.

Despite their size, the dragons are surprisingly well camouflaged… in fact, they often rely on their camouflage to ambush prey such as wild pigs (below left), deer (below right) and water buffalo. When suitable prey approaches, the dragon will suddenly charge, sometimes at speeds in excess of 20km per hour, and lunge at the throat or underside of the animal. For larger prey such as buffalo, the dragon will deliver a bite that is not aimed to kill immediately. Instead, the saliva of the dragon is like a petri dish of virulent bacteria which rapidly infects the animal, resulting in a protracted and painful death.

Like a snake, the Komodo dragon uses its long, forked tongue to taste the air. Its keen sense of smell allows it to detect a dead or dying animal up to 9km away.

Towards the end of the second day of my trip, an opportunity to use KomodoCam at last presented itself; I came across a large dragon in a flat, open clearing in the forest. I nervously set up the rig and pushed it towards the dragon. The dragon treated the camera with curiosity and obligingly flicked its tongue in and out to investigate the unfamiliar object. To my relief, the beast decided that there was nothing edible and I was spared seeing a Komodo dragon eat my Canon 1Ds mkIII!

In the evening of our last day, thousands of raucous flying foxes emerged from the mangrove swamps and flew overhead, towards the interior of the island. They resembled pterodactyls which seemed like a fitting end to my time in this prehistoric land.

For more pictures of Komodo Dragons (including ones taken by KomodoCam), please look at our Komodo & Rinca gallery. To receive notification when we post pictures from future wildlife photography projects, please sign up to our free newsletter, you can either subscribe by email or via RSS.

Free Desktop Background!

To thank you for your support, we have decided to make one of our favourite Komodo dragon images (taken by KomodoCam) available as a FREE high-resolution desktop background! To get your new wallpaper now, all you have to do is join our Facebook community by “liking” our page and then click here to access the image download link. Enjoy!

On this project I will be collaborating with fellow wildlife photographer, Rebecca Jackrel. During a scouting expedition to Ethiopia, Rebecca took the beautiful photographs that I am using in this post.

The aim of the Ethiopian Wolf Project is to educate and inspire people to take action on behalf of this highly endangered animal. To achieve this, we will spend several weeks in Ethiopia photographing the wolves and documenting the threats to their survival. On our return, we will use our images and experiences to produce lectures, articles, gallery exhibits and more in order to raise awareness and support for the conservation of these wonderful animals.

We need your help to make our vision a reality!

We are relying on community donations to raise the funds necessary to undertake our expedition. For example, we will need help covering the costs of permits and enlisting the services of local guides, trackers and horses. On our return, remaining funds will be used to produce the lecture, gallery and print materials.

In return for your support, we are offering some fantastic rewards! For example, pledge $100 or more any you will receive a signed, limited edition print, a hand-written postcard mailed from Ethiopia and more!

For details of all the rewards on offer and how you can make a donation, please visit our Kickstarter page.

Follow the Project

There are a number of ways that you can follow our progress of this project:

• First of all, please subscribe to the free project newsletter (or the RSS feed).
• Please join our Ethiopian Wolf Project Facebook page.
• Follow @EWproject on Twitter.

For much more information about the Ethiopian wolf and our project, please visit our new Ethiopian Wolf Project website.

Our trip took place in September, when the wildebeest were beginning to travel south into the Serengeti again. We have put together a simple migration map showing the route and approximate timings of the wildebeest’s 3,000km round trip.

Whenever we cover something that has already been well documented by other photographers, we try to come up with an original way to portray it. The result is the short film below which we hope conveys to you the magnitude and drama of this incredible migration.

This film is a combination of telephoto video clips and wide-angle time-lapse sequences that speed up the motion by around 25 times. Before this, we have never seen a time-lapse of a wildebeest river crossing – perhaps this is the first time it has been done. Among other things, the clips show the wildebeest being pulled downstream by the current and swarming up the far banks of the river.

Of course we also took plenty of photographs of the wildebeest river crossings (there are more than 70 in our wildebeest galleries). Below we have included a few of our favourites.

When the wildebeest reach the banks of the Mara River, they gather in vast herds as they summon up the courage to make the crossing. Eventually, it takes one brave individual to venture into the water and then all the other animals rush to follow. We often spent many frustrating hours waiting for a dithering herd to start crossing!

A couple of the crossings we witnessed had upwards of 10,000 individuals swim across the river in just half an hour. It is hard to describe the mayhem and noise that accompanies one of these epic crossings.

The crossing is very perilous, with wildebeest frequently drowning, breaking legs after jumping down cliffs or falling victim to the river’s well-fed crocodiles.

In order to capture the scale of one of the crossings, we took over 30 overlapping images which we then stitched together to create a 300 megapixel panorama. If you click on the preview below you can explore a high-resolution version of this panorama (it has been shrunk to around 50% of the original size but is still over 16 thousand pixels wide!).

The influx of animals into the region provides a valuable opportunity for predators and scavengers. We saw cheetahs, lions, hyenas and vultures all feasting on wildebeest kills.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the great migration has been one of the most incredible spectacles we’ve ever had the privilege of witnessing. On occasion we found it hard to hold our cameras steady as the adrenaline was making us shake so much!

For more of our wildebeest photographs, please checkout our Wildebeest Migration page. You may also want to read about the rare pink hippo that we photographed during the same trip.

During the southern hemisphere summer, rockhopper penguins come ashore all over the Falkland Islands to breed. The penguins gather in large raucous colonies and form a well-worn track down to the sea.

We primarily visited Saunders Island to photograph the majestic Black-Browed Albatross that nest along its cliffs. However, this colony of rockhopper penguins proved just as photogenic! Along the main penguin highway down to the sea was a freshwater spring that flowed over an overhang and created a small waterfall. This was an irresistible attraction for the penguins and throughout the day it was busy with squawking, squabbling, splashing birds!

The fresh water allows them to wash the salt from their feathers and remove the grime of the colony. The penguins were wonderful to watch, as they appeared to be enjoying themselves a great deal!

The penguins were splashing so much that keeping our gear dry was a never-ending battle… in the end we had to cover the camera with a hat and lift it briefly to take each shot. We also used several off-camera remote flashes to illuminate the penguins and the underside of the overhang.

You can find out more about the penguins of the Falkland Islands in this blog post. You can also read more about our trip and the other creatures we photographed in our Falklands Islands post.

We have recently returned from a fantastic trip to Australia and will be posting our images here soon. If you would like to be notified when this happens, please subscribe to our free email newsletter / rss feed.

The most conspicuous geckos in Madagascar are the luminous-green Day Geckos. As their name suggests, these geckos are diurnal. Different species range in size from around 7cm up to 30cm. We dedicated a whole day to photographing them in the area around Amber Mountain National Park.

We particularly enjoyed focusing in on their beautiful abstract back patterns…

We found the day geckos were quite skittish and therefore a challenge to photograph. However, Madagascar has another group of geckos where just managing to spot one is challenging enough! Can you see the leaf-tailed gecko in the photograph below?

Well done if you spotted the gecko camouflaged against the tree trunk! If you didn’t, click here to reveal it. Leaf-tailed geckos are true masters of camouflage! They can change their colour to blend in perfectly with the tree they are on. They also have frills to break up their outline. We were never able to spot them in the gloomy rainforest, but our guide had an extraordinary ability to spot them from up to 10m away… apparently, the trick is to look out for the telltale shape of their eyes.

The leaf-tailed geckos shown above are all Uroplatus Sikorae. There are several other species of leaf-tailed gecko that have different strategies for blending in. The Satanic Leaf-tailed Gecko (Uroplatus Phantasticus), for example, resembles dried leaves. We found this one while it was out hunting at night…

Aren’t leaf-tailed geckos just the most amazing animals?!

Unfortunately many of Madagascar’s unique geckos are under threat from habitat loss and over-collection for the pet trade.

Please visit our Gecko gallery for more pictures of these remarkable creatures.

With this in mind, we were driven to embark upon an ambitious project to photograph African wildlife from a new perspective, one that would involve getting close to potentially dangerous animals and photographing them with a wide-angle lens. Traditionally, this has been achieved using camera traps – stationary cameras triggered when an animal breaks an invisible infra-red beem. The problem with this method is that it requires a great deal of time, patience and luck. We therefore decided to invent something a little more proactive! And so BeetleCam was conceived; a DSLR camera mounted on top of a four-wheel drive remote control buggy.

We booked a trip to Tanzania and set about designing, building and testing BeetleCam. The first step was to get up to speed on the necessary robotics and electronics that would be required to build such a vehicle from scratch. Having conducted some research, we sourced components from around the world. Construction then began in earnest with sawing, soldering, sewing and super gluing taking place around the clock in Will’s garage.

BeetleCam’s primary challenge would be getting over the uneven African terrain with a heavy payload of camera, lens and flashes. We therefore ordered the most powerful motors we could find and large off-road tires. BeetleCam had to be able to operate for long periods without being charged, so we stuffed the vehicle with the biggest batteries we could squeeze in.

We constructed a split ETTL off-camera flash cord that would allow the camera to control the output of two flashes depending on the light conditions (this would be important for filling in the shadows cast by the bright African sun).

After much deliberation, we figured out how to get the camera (our trusty Canon EOS 400D) to interface with the same controller used to drive the buggy. The finishing touches were to camouflage BeetleCam and seal the camera gear and internal mechanisms to protect them from the dusty African environment.

The prototype was finished with a month to spare but proved to be catastrophically unstable! An emergency redesign was undertaken to lower the centre of gravity and, a few days before our departure, BeetleCam was ready for to be let loose in the wild!

Our destinations in Tanzania were Ruaha and Katavi National Parks, both in the South West of the country. They are quiet parks with plenty of wildlife – perfect for trialling BeetleCam.

We thought that Elephants would be an easy subject for BeetleCam’s first outing. We were wrong… we quickly learned that Elephants are wary of unfamiliar objects and due to their highly sensitive hearing, they are almost impossible to sneak up on! Over the course of the trip, we learnt that the best way to photograph an elephant was to position the camera well in front of it and then let the animal approach in its own time. With this technique we enjoyed great success and managed to get some incredible photos of these colossal creatures.

After obtaining our first photographs of Elephants we were buoyed with optimism and decided to make our second subjects Lions. In hindsight this was a foolish idea; BeetleCam was promptly mauled, and carried off into the bush. A long recovery mission ensued and we were extremely lucky to retrieve an intact memory card from the mangled Canon 400D body. On downloading the images, we were delighted to find that BeetleCam had performed its duty admirably, and we got a great series of images from the encounter.

Remarkably, although the 400D sustained irreparable damage, the rest of BeetleCam proved very resilient and, with a few pieces of string and bits wood, we were able to patch it up. We replaced the 400D with our only other available camera, a Canon EOS 1D MK III. This increased the stakes massively and obviously meant that lions were off the menu for the rest of the trip! Over the next few days we nervously drove our beloved 1D MK III in front of various unpredictable beasts and prayed it would come back intact!

To our surprise it was Africa’s second most dangerous animal that proved to be the most cooperative subject, the African Buffalo. Adult males that are too old to compete for females collect together and form bachelor herds. Despite their reputation for being bad tempered and aggressive, these old brutes were totally unconcerned by the small robot. Some of the buffalo even showed mild curiosity and would amble up slowly to investigate.

Upon returning to the UK, we were thrilled with the photographs that we had managed to take during our two-weeks spent in the field. We have already started work on BeetleCam Mark II and plan to return to Africa this summer to take more photographs. To receive news about BeetleCam’s future escapades, and to be the first to see the resulting photographs, please subscribe to our free email newsletter (or subscribe to our RSS feed).

For clips of BeetleCam in action checkout our teaser video and for more images taken with BeetleCam, please view the BeetleCam tag.

To be notified when we post the results of this project, please subscribe to our free email newsletter (or subscribe to our RSS feed).

Update: The results of this project have now been posted. Read The Adventures of BeetleCam for more.

On our recent trip to the Falkland Islands, we tried to document the sea birds that nest along the rugged coastline. We aimed to capture a variety of images, using focal lengths ranging from 14mm to 600mm, that showed the birds’ behaviour and habitat.

Two species of shag (birds similar to cormorants) nest on the Falklands; Imperial and Rock shags. We wanted to photograph both species and show the differences in their nesting habits. The only problem was that the rock shags nest on vertical cliff faces that are almost completely inaccessible! This meant that we had to get creative!

One afternoon, we noticed a pair of Rock shags that were nesting underneath an overhang, 50 metres above the crashing surf. As soon as we saw the birds, we knew that it would make a beautiful image if we could photograph them with the sunrise behind. We spent the evening devising a method that would enable us to get the camera into the right position.

We came up with the “puppet technique”; a makeshift device involving a tripod and lots of string that gave us full control of the camera’s position in terms of angle and height. One of us could take the photos with a wireless remote trigger and provide instructions for the puppet master. We obviously had to maneuver the camera very slowly and carefully so as not to disturb the birds. It worked like a charm, and we were able to get a set of images that would have otherwise have been impossible to achieve.

Another technique that we regularly employ is the “tripod lift”. We use this when we want to get an aerial perspective. In this case, we were trying to photograph a colony of Imperial shags from above, showing the amazing pattern of nests that arises as a result of each bird needing to be outside of the pecking range of its neighbours! We attached the camera to a fully extended tripod and lifted it as high as possible above our heads. This took a lot of strength, and it needed two of us to hold the tripod and trigger the remote shutter-release.

In order to complete our set we also wanted to photograph the shags’ breeding behaviour. At this time of year, the birds were still constructing their nests and were regularly bringing back clumps of kelp to build up their towers. We positioned ourselves in their flight path and were able to get frame-filling images of them using the 600mm lens. This required a fair bit of practice and used up an embarrassing amount of storage!

You can see more photographs of us in the field on our Facebook Fan Page.

To take these shots, we spent a whole night, from 10pm to 5am patrolling the banks of the Rio Negro in search of suitable caiman. We decided to split up, each of us taking a camera and tripod in order to double our chances of getting some decent shots. Being alone with the caiman on the dark river bank was a spooky experience!

Whenever we spotted a caiman in a good position, we moved painfully slowly to avoid disturbing it. In order to photograph the caiman as a part of their environment, we tried to get close enough so that we could use a wide-angle lens. The long exposures typically took upwards of 5 minutes. During this time, we had fish nibbling on our feet and mosquitoes sucking our blood. We couldn’t stop them for fear of disturbing the caiman! At one point we noticed a caiman chomping on a freshly caught piranha – the last thing you want to see when you are wading in the river with bare legs and feet!

When the Sun’s glow started to light up the sky in the East, we squelched back to our lodge for some breakfast and a flagon of coffee… needless to say, we were totally shattered for the rest of the day!