Wild at heart: From Bedfordshire to Brazil with Olympus gear

Pro wildlife shooter Greg Coyne on dream shoots, disasters, and switching from the Nikon D5 to the Olympus OM-D E-M1X

Professional photographers don’t always start shooting their specialist subjects from the moment they pick up a camera – and they don’t always take to their future specialisms like fish to water.

“I started wildlife photography rather late in life, and decided that I had spent enough years shooting on Auto and should really start to use the cameras I had properly,” says Bedfordshire-based wildlife pro

Greg Coyne. “My gear was mainly point-andclick gear, so I acquired a Nikon D7100 and a 70-300mm VR telephoto lens and decided to practise on garden birds. The results were disastrous – it was so disheartening!”

Greg tracked down Danny Green, having seen one of his images in a newspaper, and emailed him for some advice. Danny replied and, after an hour on the phone, Greg booked onto a workshop with Danny’s partner Mark Sisson and captured his first ‘wow’ images of birds of prey.

Fast-forward to 2019 and Greg conducts workshops of his own, passing on his award-winning knowledge to others eager to master the art of wildlife photography. His career has seen him photograph animals all over the world, with his passion for big cats taking him to Africa, India and South America to capture lions, leopards, tigers and cheetahs. His richest trip, however, was to the Pantanal region of Brazil, where he had over 40 jaguar encounters – including one very special one...

“I was incredibly lucky to spend nearly two hours with a jaguar we found while cruising down a small tributary of the River Cuiabá. It was sleeping when we came across it, under the shade of an old tree. You could hear the deep breathing from the cat and we watched it sleep, dream, wake, drink, stretch, and gaze across at us in our small boat. It was a privilege to share that time with such a magnificent animal.”

It was this trip to Brazil that convinced Greg to switch from his trusted Nikon D5 to the Olympus OM-D system. “I was considering moving over from Nikon, who I had been with since before my hair turned grey, to Olympus and its Micro Four Thirds system. So I was loaned an Olympus setup, and I took both systems with me to the

“I decided that I had spent enough years shooting on Auto”