Lessons

Lesson Info

Theme: Vanishing Act

and the last one, which actually now has become a book. Over the years, I started collecting photos of animals that were very camouflaged, very much evolved into their habitat. And I did this book, which was vanishing Act. It is one of the most successful bodies work I've done simply because when people look at this, they start to get involved. You know, I've done talks in front of large audiences where you show the most brilliant sunsets, the most amazing landscapes, most interesting cultures. But this body of work people started getting into it because it's almost brings the child out of all of us, because we all want to be the 1st 1 to see the animal becomes a game, because if you find the animal before the person sitting next to you, by very definition, you are a better person than the person next to you. So it becomes a game whether you're nine or 90. People love this kind of work, and it's in fact, a more honest way of how animals are. If you think about animals there either prey...

or predators and ba hooves animal to evolve over thousands of years of evolution to be concealed in their environment, to remain uneaten. Or, if you're predator, to be completely concealed to concern eq up, get your prey animal and therefore survive. And so this is, ah, collection of animals from this body of work. And I say collection because, as I have demonstrated, is very much connecting themes together. So this is a shot of what the ugly shot of a landscape. Well, if you look on the very right side of the frame, there's a vertical giraffe that's align perfectly with a trunk of a tree behind. So many ways I was photographing this body of work was trying to deceive you. I wanted you to kind of look in that arched tree because certainly I'm framing something back there. But in fact, it was that draft on the right side. Ah, I photographed this subject from the micro to the large, and in this case I went all the way to the mountains of Malaysia because there's a leaf Are orchid Mantis? Amanda. This is a predatory bugs that catches and eats insects, but this is a Mantis that's probably not larger than 1/2 inch that Onley lives on orchids growing in the mountains of Malaysia, so very specific little animal, and it's in the center of the frame. This is a shot of a Arctic fox at the top of the frame, and I can see in the monitor that you might not be able to see it to see the large rock in the center of the frame. Just above it is a little Arctic fox, perfectly camouflaged to the very complex background. So one other of the conveniences or the conveyances with which I showed this body of work was trying to hide the animal. You know, whether it was in the upper right or upper left was rarely in the center. I try to focus on every element within the frame so that the I would go to all these false clues. So, in other words, if I only focused on the animal, I would be pointing it out to you. And so my desire was to try to hide it. It became the game between the photographer and the viewer. As much as I could conceal the animal that's right in front of you, the more successful it became. This is a GreyWolf, and it was a used later by absent as a national ad, a two page spread and you can see the wolf now on the right side of frame pronghorn antelope on my mission was to photograph is greater variety of mammals, birds, insects, fish and Fabian's that it could just to show all the variety of animals and how they've evolved. Here's a little predatory weasel and, you know, perfectly framed, not perfectly framed but perfectly situated in his habitat and the pike pine cones that you see our scale and gives you a sense of how small this little weasel is. And, uh, these air to willow ptarmigan, fairly large ground birds again in Churchill, Manitoba. I was up there photographing polar bears and these ptarmigan we're really close. But because the light was very flat, there was no volume to these birds. There was no sun kind of revealing the shape of the birds. And that, of course, then helps conceal their their placement. The added bonus. In this particular images, the very stark dark lines of the branches also confused the I. So that was a perfect example of that, and, ah, same scale or a larger scale There's to Cliff Springer's thes Air Small and Loeb animals that live on rock copies or rock outcrops in both South Africa and East Africa. And they live in these rocks often chase by, um, leopards that also live in the rocks. But they're so adept at climbing vertical cliffs, they often can get away from animals. They're chasing him. One is Balza in the middle of the frame, and one is to the upper right. So, again, um, it may be a little more difficult for you to see him on monitors. Ah, but in a large book, it really worked out quite well. Here's a baby cheetah hiding amongst the dappled light of the scrub of South Africa. This is a Mattis on a truck, and it's very hard for me to see. I can imagine what it must must be like, but it's right in the middle of the frame. It's half, you know, it's it's quite large, but it's so perfectly adapted to the very texture bark on a tree in South Africa. Here's a red fox in red foliage, and you know I'm fairly zooming in on this animal, but because I'm stopping down to have 22. It allows your eye to kind of go all over the frame, and that confuses the I. And that helps me conceal the animal, as in this case of a Columbia blacktail deer in the very complex for us, that is just to the west of Seattle on the Olympic Peninsula. This was underwater. I literally learned how to scuba dive for this book because so many of the great cryptic camouflage animals lie beneath the sea. And there's a sand dab or a flounder right that comprises 2/ of this frame right in the center of this image. And the only way I could find it is to swim really low to the surface of the, uh or below the surface and scare up thes flounders. And they would just get up, glide and land. And I would just stare at wherever they landed because the minute they landed, they just simply disappeared. This is a close up of a small snake that lives in the sand dunes of Namibia. It's a little viper is a poisonous snake, but very small. But these animals are just everywhere, and, you know, if you're hiking wherever you live on this planet, you're probably out in the woods or in a scrub area or a desert. Probably 2/3 of the animals that you walked right by you never even notice they're there. But you just don't notice. This is 20 feet down on a coral reef in New Britain Island, part of New Guinea. It's a scorpion fish, very, very crypt of cryptic, very beautiful. They evolved to look like the corals that live under the ocean. Also a poisonous animal, very large mouth. They sit there quietly, an official pass by, and they just opened this giant mouth suck in the water and therefore the fish, and they've got their dinner. They're not aggressive towards humans, nor would you want toe inadvertently lean against one of the spines of these fish. This is an animal that was largely unknown 15 years ago. It's a tiny tiny seahorse in almost the center of the frame, just to the left of center, and it's no more than 1/4 of an inch large and lives on these giant sea fans 60 feet deep. You see it with clear eyes and focus and light. Can you imagine when it's subdued light down there. It was just a miraculous that they were ever discovered. And now they've found three or four different species of these tiny, tiny seahorses. Of course, in the book vanishing actors very clear explanations of where the animals are, but also the whole ecology of the animals. So I love to do books but also inform and educate. Well, I'm doing that. This is a very large seahorse that lives in the cool waters off Kangaroo Island on the very southern end of Australia. This seahorses about 11 inches and just floats around in the kelp forests below the surface and in this next shot is a little tree frog that lives in the Amazon basin, and it's just sitting there quietly amongst the decaying leaves but the beautiful colors as it leaves decay. They create this beautiful palette of color and design, of which this little frog is quietly sitting there on unseen. Here's a lion in the grass. You know these animals are lying, waiting for the wildebeest migration in East Africa to come their way, and in this shot, the guide found the animal and kept on saying, Do you see it? And I go where? He said, I'm not telling you. You look at kept looking and looking, and I pride myself for having fairly good eyesight for finding animals. I could not find this cat. And if you look at this image to the base of the large tree in the centre, on the right side, there's a leopard looking straight at me. But it was so perfectly camouflaged. I had the longest time to find it. Thorny devils on the floor of the desert in central Australia, they look awful. They look like they would be the most poisonous animals on earth, and yet they're totally innocuous. They just are completely harmless. You can literally pick one up, put him in the palm of your hand, and the warmth of your hand will make him closer. I and fall sound asleep is like humans are not part of their system, and if you pick him off your hand, wake him up, put him down at the base of your feet. They'll start hunting insects right, without even acknowledging acknowledging your presence. It's like we don't even belong in their world. They want to be bothered. Amazingly cute little lizards this is a spotted owl of the Northwest Forest, lives in the mountains around Seattle, and it's a beautiful, dark eyed bird and its symbol of the old growth. For us, there's a poison snake in Morocco in the scrub for us of, um, the Atlas Mountains. This is a great gray owl, the largest owl in north America. Ah, sitting on a branch right in front of a truck and again you're you're seeing it fairly large in the frame. You can imagine how easy it'd be to miss seeing this animal if you're walking through a forest and the very fact that they sit on a branch right next to the trunk of the tree, they're very aware of their vertical plumage, not enabling them to blend in with the tree. It's all about thousands tense tens of thousands of years of natural evolution to where they become part of the environment. And I think the last photo is of Arctic fox just sitting in very flat light. You can see how easy if he closed, his eyes virtually disappears. So that was a great book toe work on fun book. Ah, and all the books, all the projects I have worked on over the last years have had that element of fun and discovery is why I travel all the time. I'm is enthusiastic Photograph in the Coombe in the last few days, as I was the first time I traveled overseas, which was on an Everest expedition in Tibet in 1984. So that's my talk. Let's give our, uh yeah.