This year’s wildlife competition winner? It could be ewe!

Countryfile’s Matt Baker – head judge in our fabulous contest – never goes anywhere without his camera. So who better to share his tips for taking the perfect picture...

‘Wildlife won’t hang about posing for the camera’

Matt Baker’s schedule is hectic. What with presenting BBC1’s Count r yfi le each Sunday as well as four editions of The One Show each week, not to mention commentating on gymnastics events around the world, he must struggle to squeeze in a spare minute for supper.

Yet despite being bombarded with requests every day of the week, he says he couldn’t resist the chance of being head judge in Weekend’s Wildlife Photography Challenge – particularly since, in the rare moments he does have time off, he’s a keen photographer himself.

‘I’m never without my little Sony camera. It’s nothing fancy but it means I can point and shoot without an elaborate setting-up with different lenses and so on,’ he says. ‘And isn’t that the point with wildlife? It doesn’t hang about posing for the camera.

‘The competit ion is giving people a reason to go out and explore their surr o u nd i ngs . I know from personal experience that when you star t looking, you notice so much. And I love the fact that it’s encouraging people to focus not on their own world but on the natural world around them.

‘It’s about capturing something beautiful and putting it into a picture so others can enjoy it too. For me, it’s also about trying to get an animal’s character across rather than just photographing it. I try to infiltrate a creature’s world so you’ll feel you’re almost in conversation with it when you look at my photographs.’

Matt lives in the Chiltern Hills with his physiotherapist wife, Nicola, and their two children, Luke, ten, and Molly, eight. But before he moved there, he’d spend hours in pursuit of a particular shot in a hide on the 20 acres of ancient woodland attached to his parents’ farm near Durham. ‘The joy of photography, as often as not, isn’t in taking the shot but being in the location waiting patiently for that one special moment. It’s a question of being at one with nature. I love all that.’

He learnt a lot from his father, Mike, a very good photographer, says Matt. ‘The one thing he taught me, above all others, was to break down the frame into three equal, horizontal strips. That way, you can concentrate on the composition of a shot and the story you’re telling.

‘In this digital age, of course, you can take a much bigger shot than you need and crop it afterwards, selecting the most effective bits. And you don’t need to get too close to your subject which can result in you missing other elements in the frame.’

Matt is also fond of taking photographs of landscapes that appeal to him. ‘ I then like to go home and paint from one of my own photographs – and in all types of media: oils, watercolours, acrylics.’ And he always prints out those photographs he likes the best, whether of wildlife or landscapes.

‘My advice would be not to keep everything stored on a computer or phone. You’ll get so much pleasure from seeing the printed version rather than scrolling down a screen. If you’re proud of your photos, put them in an album or scrapbook.’

Matt is a countryman and very much the product of his upbringing on the farm. ‘I don’t really think I’d realised how special my childhood had been and how it had shaped the person I’d become until I came down to London to start work on Blue Peter.’

A chance appearance in a school performance of Grease ( he was a lastminute replacement as a T-Bird) at Durham Sixth Form Cent r e revealed a talent for acting and he applied to drama college, ending up at Edinburgh’s Queen Margaret University. During his second year, his now-wife’s aunt heard that Blue Peter was looking for a new presenter and persuaded Matt to give them a call. ‘I got the name of the editor off the programme credits, rang directory enquiries for the BBC’s number and got through to his secretary.’

When it became clear that Matt was never going to be put through to talk to the editor directly, he asked what he should do. ‘She told me I needed to send in a showreel but that it was too late. I told her I’d have one with her by the next morning. I got off the phone, Dad got the video camera out and we went round the farm with him filming me picking up little lambs and so on. Then I put a big jumper on and read a children’s story in front of the fire, videoed my telephone number and sent it in.

‘ The next day, they rang me up and said they wanted me to come down to London. I’d never been to the capital before. Dad and I got on the train, walked into the studio and I couldn’t believe my eyes, seeing how it all worked behind the scenes. I’ve never forgotten how I felt going in there. You never lose the feeling.’

Working on the show proved to be a formative experience. ‘I was fortunate enough to travel all over the world and see the most incredible things and meet the most remarkable people. As a result of that and all that’s followed, I really feel I know what makes me happy. I also know where I feel happiest – and that’s in the countryside. I like to govern my life by nature’s rhythm and the different seasons. Doing The One Show is very full on with a lot of energy flying around. It’s why, when we come off-air, I like to leave all that behind and head back to a natural tempo where I feel completely at ease.’

It wasn’t long after he started on Blue Peter that Matt moved out to pastures green in the Chilterns and

bought a flock of sheep. ‘I think I’ve only ever lived six months of my life without a flock of sheep,’ he says.

Filming Countryfile, which regularly pulls in eight million viewers, puts him more in his natural element. ‘It’s my dream job in many ways because it’s such a good fit with everything that makes me tick. And that’s been even more the case since it moved from being a morning programme full of rural news to a Sunday evening lifestyle show.

‘To be honest, I’m always amazed when people say they’re “surprised” that Countryfile is such a big hit. I always knew people would like it. It reflects a world I grew up in and choose to live in now so why would other people not like it, too? And I was particularly keen that we ran items which would engage the interest of lots of younger viewers and especially those who weren’t from a rural background. ‘ My other aim was trying to bridge that gap between consumers and producers, making people understand the whole process of how food reaches their table. Putting something in a pan to cook it isn’t the starting point – that’s just the end of the chain.’ Matt’s life might have turned out rather differently. A junior gymnas- tics champion, he had to give up the sport when he was diagnosed with anaemia aged 14. ‘It was the intensity of the training that was the issue. I trained six days a week to maintain that level. The advice at that age was to cut back training so my body could cope, but that meant I wouldn’t have b e en a s successful so I packed it in. It was really all or nothing for me.’

But rather than casting him down, it acted as a spur for what to do next. It wouldn’t be everyone’s choice but Matt opted for learning how to train sheepdogs. And pole-vaulting.

‘We went to Gateshead Stadium to watch Steve Cram running but, for me, the most theatrical, exciting, entertaining thing happening that day was the pole-vaulting. I remember looking at it and thinking, “I

wonder how that feels?” So I made it my business to find out.’

How was he able to pole-vault but not carry on with gymnastics? ‘With pole-vaulting, I trained just once a week. It was more of a fun challenge than an Olympic dream.’ Now he regularly adds commentating on gymnastics to his other TV roles. He’ll be presenting the highlights from the Gymnastics World Cup in Birmingham later this month.

Has he always been Action Man? ‘Well, I do like to push my body to see what I can achieve.’ This is the reason he accepted the invitation to appear on Strictly Come Dancing in 2010, where he finished runner- up to Kara Tointon. ‘She was fabulous, wasn’t she? I’d watch from the wings, full of admiration.’

Matt is a man who likes a challenge. He was the prime mover behind The Rickshaw Challenge, an annual ingredient of the BBC’s Children In Need. A team of riders, who have been funded by Children In Need projects, pedal a rickshaw in shifts along a pre-planned route of almost 500 miles to raise money for the charity. Last year’s Challenge, the seventh, swelled the amount raised so far to more than £21 million. And Matt takes part in every one, riding his bicycle alongside the rickshaw to support the team. You need to be pretty fit to accomplish that, but then Matt makes a point of going for a run for 20 minutes or so most evenings. ‘Apart from anything else, it’s a good way of clearing your head.’ In judging this year’s photography contest, Matt is joined by Dragons’ Den’s Deborah Meaden, who campaigns for maltreated horses in the Third World, biologist, film-maker and Springwatch presenter Gillian Burke, wildlife photographers Simon Stafford and Sally Fear, and editor of Nikon Owner magazine, Gray Levett.

‘I’ve only gone six months without a flock of sheep’

Matt in his element with Oxford Down sheep and (inset) a barn owl