Suzi Eszterhas: Wildlife Photographer

Yes­ter­day, I was lucky to lis­ten to Suzi Eszter­has talk about her expe­ri­ences and how she got into pho­tog­ra­phy. Some of the things she men­tioned were pretty eye-opening. The ded­i­ca­tion of pho­tog­ra­phers is some­thing a lot of us are aware of and are in awe of (have you not seen the ‘Planet Earth’ series?!). Still Pho­tog­ra­phy is no different.

Suzi spe­cial­izes in wildlife pho­tog­ra­phy and she works on sto­ries, not pic­tures. That is, she fol­lows a fam­ily, watches them grow up, watches them learn to hunt, migrate — every­thing! She spends many months, some­times years on a story! Briefly sum­ma­riz­ing some of the things that stuck in my head (and of course, there are so many par­al­lels to design or rather, prin­ci­ples which are applic­a­ble to design)

• Under­stand your subject(user). Bears yawn when they are stressed while lions yawn when they are happy. A cru­cial dif­fer­ence to know.
• Observe their daily rou­tine until you see pat­terns and can predict.
• Do not abuse their trust. Once you lose their trust, it is a lot harder to win it back than it was to win it in the first place.
• Even pros make mis­takes. A lot of them. But the expe­ri­ence and learn­ing from mis­takes helps them get over it fast.
• She uses 1 in 1000 pho­tos (i.e. it is an out­stand­ing photo) and also remarked any pro who said oth­er­wise was lying.
• She was very unaf­fected and mod­est. Asked how she man­aged to cap­ture some amaz­ing pic­tures, she attrib­uted a lot to luck, under­play­ing the amount of time she waited for that one shot. While on photo we see the “moment”, which is the per­fect shot, there’s hours and hours of wait­ing, of posi­tion­ing, of being aware and ready. And all her expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge from under­stand­ing her sub­jects play into this.

Amaz­ing pho­tos and talk. I highly rec­om­mend check­ing her site out.

Update: One of the not-for-profit orga­ni­za­tions Suzi vets is called Wildlife Direct. The prob­lems of poach­ing, wildlife endan­ger­ment, loss of bio­log­i­cal diver­sity is unchecked due to lack of fund­ing. And there are a lot of grass-roots level orga­ni­za­tions which make many small pocket areas safe. And wildlife direct ensures that your money gets to them, with­out tak­ing a cut.

Another thing she men­tioned and I am inter­pret­ing — if you want to leave a small foot­print when you visit Africa, visit one of the expen­sive resorts. They are expen­sive for a rea­son. In East Africa, a resort might accom­mo­date 200 beds. In these resorts, there might be 30. So, it will be more expen­sive. But you are not gonna tor­ture ani­mals by hound­ing them in these places, as you might in over-crowded locales. She rec­om­mends Botswana coz they do a lot of things right.