From the course: Wildlife Photography: Nature Preserve

Exploring first impressions of a preserve

From the course: Wildlife Photography: Nature Preserve

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Exploring first impressions of a preserve

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(waves crashing) - I arrived last night here in Point Arena, California where the B Bryan Preserve is. I'm here to photograph the wildlife here. I've got a lot of experience photographing in Congo, Antarctica, in the Mediterranean. I did a whole movie on horses in Iceland so I've got a lot of experience with different kinds of animals ranging from gorillas and sea turtles to blue whales even. So I've got that experience but a lot of people that want to start out in wildlife photography don't have the opportunity to go to those places but all across the country there are preserves like this one that have hundreds of acres sometimes with endangered species and they're allowed to go out there and do tours and take photographs. So it's a good place to sort of stretch those muscles if you're wanting to go out on a safari or maybe you just want to take some wildlife pictures. I haven't actually met the owners yet. I got in pretty late last night. Just looking around the space, it's pretty incredible. You've got big giraffes and zebras. They specialize in hoofed animals here that are endangered. I think they have five different animals. I'm not quite sure what level of access I'm going to have; if I'm going to be in the Land Rover all day or if I'm actually going to be able to get my boots dirty and walk around in the dirt with these guys. The first thing that I'm noticing though that's different from the kind of photography I've done is there's lots of fences, which for obvious safety reasons are here, but most of the photography I've done with mountain gorillas in the Congo, there's no fences. You get to get as close as you want and the safety concerns are on you and not the owner of the preserve. So that might be one thing we're going to be working with. I've also got some different equipment that I don't usually work with when I'm just doing normal stories. I've got some larger lenses. So I'm going to go meet up with Frank, the owner, and find out where we're going to go from here.

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