"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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