The AG Journey: Photographers on the lam
Australia’s wildlife photographers are a special group of people.
Lacking the jaw-dropping “wow’ factor creatures enjoyed by their colleagues on the African continent; it takes a special person to dedicate a lifetime to the pursuit of our shy, subtle but remarkable creatures.
No one ever got rich photographing wildlife in Australia. It’s a waiting game and there aren’t too many clients lining up to cover the cost of keeping photographers in the field for the days and weeks necessary to capture that rarely-observed behaviour. The photographers whose work regularly appears in Australian Geographic share a passion for and dedication to the wildlife they photograph and are often experts in their fields.
Jiri Lochman, an AG contributing photographer from way back, is at home in the bush. Accompanied by his wife, Marie, Jiri spends months at a time journeying off the beaten track to obtain fantastic shots of some of our rarest critters. Esther Beaton has risked life and limb on our behalf shooting our most deadly spiders and Steve Wilson can occasionally be spotted, prostrated across a remote desert dune with lens trained on the tiniest lizard.
We never cease to get excited about dunnarts, bettongs, dragons, moths and bush cockroaches here in the AG office and we are committed to giving pride of place on our pages to images of native wildlife.
We hope that knowledge leads to appreciation and ultimately a desire to protect and conserve. The October 2009 edition of the Australian Geographic journal is teeming with unusual creatures so sit back and enjoy.
And if you do hear of anyone who got rich photographing Aussie wildlife, let me know so I can pass it on…
