5 weeks getting up at 5 a.m. every morning to shoot; 6 hours in the 4X4 in dust and heat and then another shoot in the evening. Later in the evening sorting images before going to bed and getting up to start all over again. But we’re back, we’ve got the images and lots has happened.
I’ll come back later on the motivations and making of the images, today I’m just giving some context and a few images to whet your appetite.
The context: producing images for 3 NGOs:
Honeyguide, Kopelion , Mwambao
These three NGOs help indigenous communities to become the protagonists in the protection of the environment and wildlife.
More than large organisations that would dictate to local populations what they need, these organizations strive to make communities autonomous and united in the defense of their environment.
To do this, they must find motivation and reward in protecting wildlife, and that is where aid comes in.
Help can be access to microcredit. This is the case of Mwambao in Zanzibar which provides fishermen with the opportunity to launch small businesses to diversify their activity (overfishing is a big problem, and ecosystems have difficulty regenerating). But they also replant the mangrove, create coral regeneration zones...
For Kopelion, I went to schools to illustrate the help that villages receive when they "keep" a lion on their territory: meals for the schoolchildren, benches with the image of the lion for the classrooms, oxen purchased for the reproduction...
Sometimes, as with Honeyguide, it is in-depth work with WMAs (wildlife management areas), semi-protected areas where cattle, humans and wildlife coexist. The forest, immense, threatened, a big challenge for the coming decades.
I had to illustrate how this cohabitation works: cattle, Massai, rangers, wild life...
To bring everyone together on the same image, we spent hours locating where the herds of cattle were, praying that they would head towards the giraffes or zebras that were nearby.
Not easy...especially when the light "falls" very quickly, in 15 minutes we go from perfect light to night.
Finally, we found that the best client was the zebra, not too shy, a little curious, used to living quite close to humans and cattle, they gracefully allowed themselves to be photographed.
5 weeks to search for iconic images, illustrating areas of pastoral life/wildlife or wildlife/civilization conflicts. The forest, the fishermen, education, pastoral life,...
But above all, playing with light, discovering these remote territories, meeting all the people who work in the shadows to move projects forward, and that was just absolutely brilliant!!!
Equipment used :
Canon R5
Canon L series lenses: (all aperture 2.8) 15-35, 24-70, 70-200 + multiply 1.4
Drone: Mavic 2 pro
