"The Right Place"

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Ants interacting with aphis on a branch
PHOTO: © Daniel De Granville, 2006

My wife Tietta found this text on a book that she read some time ago, when accomplishing her Masters’ degree. She found that it had “a lot to do with nature photography”, read it aloud to me and I decided to share it with Fotograma Bits’ readers.

Indeed, its author Edward O. Wilson (one of the world’s most outstanding living naturalists) was able to express a lot of what I feel when out in the field photographing. He talks about persistence, patience, attention, concentration, creativeness and even a bit of luck – virtually everything that I consider necessary when “hunting” for a good nature photography. I hope you enjoy your reading!


"The Right Place"

The naturalist is a civilized hunter. He goes alone into a field or woodland and closes his mind to everything but that time and place, so that life around him presses in on all the senses and small details grow in significance. He begins the scanning search for which cognition was engineered. His mind becomes unfocused, it focuses on everything, no longer directed toward any ordinary task or social pleasantry. He measures the antic darting of midges in a conical mating swarm, the slant of sunlight by which they are best seen, the precise molding of mosses and lichens on the tree trunk on which they spasmodically alight. His eye travels up the trunk to the first branch and out to a spray of twigs and leaves and back, searching for some irregularity of shape or movement of a few millimeters that might betray an animal in hiding. He listens for any sound that breaks the lengthy spells of silence. From time to time he translates his running impressions of the smell of soil and vegetation into rational thought: the ancient olfactory brain speaks to the modern cortex. The hunter-in-naturalist knows that he does not know what is going to happen. He is required, as Ortega y Gasset expressed it, to prepare an attention of a different and superior kind, “an attention that does not consist in riveting itself to the presumed but consists precisely in not presuming anything and avoiding inattentiveness”.

Edward O. Wilson, in “Biophilia, The human bond with other species” (p. 103).

A gecko’s paw
PHOTO: © Daniel De Granville, 2006
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Hit the Road, Jack!

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PHOTO © Daniel De Granville, 2006

This week I will be out in the Pantanal guiding a group of Dutch ecotourists – therefore, FotogramaBits will get no updates for awhile...

PHOTO © Daniel De Granville, 2006

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy some of the pictures that I took today at the must-see Buraco das Araras, one of the largest sinkholes in the Americas, which is about 37 miles away from my home.


See you soon!

PHOTO © Daniel De Granville, 2006

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Macgyvering Photo Gear

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Wide angle shot of aquatic birds in the Pantanal of Brazil
PHOTO © Daniel De Granville, 2004

Before you ask, the title of this article comes from the 1980’s TV character MacGyver, who was very inventive and could fix a space shuttle’s engine using a rubber band and a broken toothpick. The Brazilian word which could better describe the act of macgyvering things is “gambiarra”. By what I have searched and asked, there is no real or official equivalent of “gambiarra” in English – maybe “improvising” could be it, but the concept behind that specific term goes beyond this.

All of the above is just an introduction to today’s subject: photo equipment is extremely expensive and sometimes very hard to find in Brazil, as well as in other countries. If you want some specific device you must import it, which means an extra 70% (at least) in taxes. In other words, a photographer buying any equipment in Brazil will pay about twice the average US street price.

Considering the average income down here, usually the only viable solution for us is the famous DIY (do-it-yourself) approach – in other words, being creative. I have been doing a lot of this for nature recording equipment, one of my hobbies during my spare time, and now I am planning to work on a new remote shooting device to capture images similar to the one which illustrates this article (and is the cover for this month’s issue of Brazil’s main publication about birds).

Recording bird songs with a $2 "parabolic reflector"
PHOTO © Tietta Pivatto, 2005

During my assignments with the National Geographic as a field assistant (posts about this coming soon!), every now and then we created things with what we had in the middle of nowhere, so in those moments my macgyvering (or “gambiarra, if you prefer) skills were extremely helpful! I guess this is very much what nature photography is about.

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Death on the Road

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Female Black Howler (Alouatta caraya) with its young
near the Transpantaneira Road
PHOTO © Daniel De Granville, 2003

This week, more precisely on October 4th, we celebrate the World Animal Day, which – not by chance – overlaps the day of St. Francis of Assisi, considered as the Patron of Animals.


For a long time I’ve been thinking about setting up an itinerant exhibition on this date, with photos and information, aimed to bring up drivers’ awareness about the problem of wildlife kills in our roads – specially those which cross more preserved natural environments, such as the Pantanal. Since 1999 I have systematically collected photo records of animal road kills, and unfortunately it has not been a difficult task to find the subjects I must photograph.

While the exhibition doesn’t come true, this subject gradually brought up the media’s interest, and in August 2005 I was invited by the National Geographic to publish an article about the theme on their website, simultaneously with the Pantanal story that came out in the same edition.

The main inspiration for my work came from the research carried out between 1996 and 1997 by Brazilian biologist Wagner Fisher, where he registered the death of 1,400 animals in one year of studies along the Federal Road 262, that crosses the South Pantanal. Among the victims are 88 species – many of which endangered – including caimans, capybara, foxes, anteaters, armadillos, several birds (such as hawks and seriemas) and even jaguars.

This subject is food for thought during your next road trip, since animals might not be the only victims of such accidents.

A young Black Howler Monkey (Alouatta caraya) run over
at Transpantaneira Road

This photo was finalist in a Brazilian Nature Photo contest last July

PHOTO © Daniel De Granville, 2003
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About the Joys and Distresses of a Nature Photographer

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Harpy Eagle (Harpia harpyja) lands on its nest under rain at
Serra da Bodoquena National Park, Bonito, Brazil
PHOTO: © Daniel De Granville, 2006

Biology became part of my professional life prior to photography, but my connections with nature come from much longer ago, since I was a kid and didn’t even have to think about a career. I still remember my mom’s reaction on the day she went into my bedroom and found the walls covered with hairy caterpillars, which I had brought home in a shoebox and wanted to “care for ‘till they turned into butterflies”.

Due to this strong bond with wildlife since my childhood, associating these two activities – photography plus biology – and making a profession out of them has been, more than a planned objective, a natural tendency. To know animals both in theory and with hands on, and to like them a lot, is crucial to get the images that I’m looking for.

But despite all of the glamour associated with nature photography, it is not an easy career. One day you find yourself waking up extremely early in places such as the Pantanal, having to walk in the dark through swamps full of caimans and surrounded by clouds of mosquitoes, before the rising of a sun that will soon make temperatures go over 100 oF. Next week you might be freezing your ears and fingers on the edge of a cliff, at the top of some mountain in the Bavarian Alps, waiting for the best light. Not only you suffer, but also does the photo gear, which is extremely expensive and delicate. A minor failure and all of your work may be lost… This keeps me constantly tense when I’m out in the field, until the photos are finally saved into my computer, printed on paper or delivered to the client.

The photos which illustrate this text, for example, took a total of over 40 hours of “stand by” under adverse and risky conditions, in exchange for a few good shooting moments – maybe no more than 5 minutes…

At the same time, however, it is an incredibly gratifying life. Each time that I spend hours observing scenes that very few people in our planet will ever have a chance of seeing, such as a rare species of hawk bringing prey to feed its young at the first morning light, I feel privileged and realized.

Ornate Hawk Eagle (Spizaetus ornatus) takes care of its young in the nest – Maracaju Mountain Range, Brazil
Photo: © Daniel De Granville, 2006

People will frequently ask me if I’m not afraid of spending hours or days alone in remote areas full of animals and other “perils of nature”. Maybe I really should be more careful about certain risks, but whenever I’m photographing in a natural area I feel totally integrated with everything that surrounds me. Moreover, I must concentrate a lot in order to do my job, and here such worries which could disturb me simply don’t fit in.

To me, the most important of all in this job, besides persistence, patience, concern with minimum details and a restless personality, is to adopt an ethical attitude towards natural environments. Firstly, I never accept to cause an excessive disturbance in a certain place just to get the image that I want. Second, I always feel obliged to reward nature for every good thing that it has provided me with until today.

Showing my photos is one of the means that I have to reach this objective. If people become thrilled upon seeing these images and raise their awareness and admiration about nature, I consider that my mission is accomplished.

One hand, five fingers, fifity mosquitoes! (On assignment in the Pantanal)
PHOTO: © Daniel De Granville, 2006

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Finally Online!

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Scouting for Jaguars while on assignment in the Pantanal of Brazil...
(Photo: © M. Juelsgaard, 2006)

Hello to all,

Some time ago I felt the need of making my website more dynamic. The first initiative in this direction was taken at the end of 2005, when I upgraded the site contents and layout – but it still seemed not enough.

By mid June this year, after returning from my sponsored period in Germany, I came up with the Portuguese version of this blog, which now gets an English edition – at last!

My intention is to keep an “up close and personal” contact with visitors and friends, telling behind the scenes stories and talking about other less formal subjects (but never losing focus on photography and environment). And, of course, always showing recent images that I have been making while on the field, be it on a regular outdoor ride or on a serious assignment.

Some of the posts will be the same for both versions and others will be exclusive, depending on the subject. I plan to gradually translate the former contents from the original Portuguese edition into English too.

Be welcome and thanks for visiting!

... and the result of this very lucky day!
(Photo: © Daniel De Granville, 2006)

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