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My favourite lens is probably the 35mm wide-angle. There haven’t been many wildlife photographers in the past who have said that

Nikon ambassador David, from Glasgow, Scotland, mixes fine art with wildlife

David began his photo career in the 1980s as a sport photographer.

He recently returned to photography full-time, focusing his camera on endangered wildlife, after a spell working in finance in the City of London.

David donates the proceeds of his fine art print sales to the conservation charity Tusk, whose patron, the Duke of Cambridge, wrote the foreword to his new book, WildEncounters.

Wednesday morning, and David Yarrow is in an airport departure lounge waiting to board a flight for the next leg of his WildEncounters exhibition tour to the major cities of Europe. After that he will head to the US for more showings from coast to coast. Hopefully his flight will be delayed so we can chat for a little longer! Sorry David…

Where are you off to today?

I’m off to Amsterdam as I’ve got a big show opening there in two days’ time. I have shows coming up in the next month in Amsterdam, Paris, Zurich, Milan and Stockholm, and then more in December in New York, Los Angeles and Palm Beach. So I’m cramming a lot in! There were 1600 people at the opening at Somerset House in London last week. Some galleries in Australia have expressed an interest too, which my colleague will explore some time in January.

How long has WildEncounters been in the making?

There are some pictures that pre-date the idea for the book by a couple of years. I knew I was going to publish a [wildlife photography] book, but I didn’t really know how the book would pan out. When I changed publisher in January, we thought about all of the other books that had been done and how mine could be different. The idea of doing it in terms of longitude from north to south in the world really came together three months later. My last few photography trips for the book were in May and June of 2016. So, in all, it’s three years’ work.

Why did you change publishers to Rizzoli of New York?

Rizzoli’s a fine art, high fashion, luxury book company. I wanted to work with them because the tonal rendition in the book needed to be strong, and I knew that Rizzoli could deliver this.

WildEncounters covers all seven continents. Were there any particular locations or experiences that stood out from the rest?

Well, I tend to go to places that I am very comfortable with. I go to East Africa and Alaska a lot, but I’m so familiar with those places that I’m less likely to be surprised by them, and less able to come back from trips feeling they were special experiences. That said, some of the best experiences I’ve had were in Amboseli in Kenya, and at the top of the world in the north of Alaska, working with polar bears. That’s a fairly special place. Some of the trips to places like Greenland have been special to me, too. But I took the picture that changed my career, Mankind [above], in South Sudan. It’s in the book, and it’s a million-dollar picture. It has a biblical enormity and can be looked at for a long time.

When did you take that?

I took that on the 28th December 2014, in a town called Yirol.

Have you given up the day job yet?

You mean my old life working in the City? That was part-time anyway. I gave all that up five days after I took Mankind. I knew how valuable that picture would be, so I didn’t want people thinking that I was a part-time photographer, because [not being seen as a professional] might have impinged on the value of it.

Which interest came first: wildlife or photography?

Photography. I was a photographer anyway. I shot the football World Cup final in 1986 when I was 20. I didn’t really care about the number of lions or elephants in the world back then, but I enjoyed David Attenborough’s programmes and how he’d go the extra mile to get special content.

Were you working for an agency or a newspaper when you worked as a sport photographer?

I did the World Cup final for TheTimes. I did the Olympics for Allsport, which is now part of Getty, so I worked with a lot of the Getty guys. It was an exciting agency to work for. I travelled the world and covered over 200 international football matches, as well as the World Cup, the Olympics and the Masters.

How did your experience as a sport photographer help you with your wildlife photography?

Well, for most sport photographers the holy grail is of course image sharpness, and I will reject any picture that Ihave taken where the eye of the animal isn’t pin-sharp. I was a working sport photographer before cameras

My favourite lens is probably the 35mm wide-angle. There haven’t been many wildlife photographers in the past who have said that

had autofocus, so I had to use followfocus, which was damned hard to nail. Sport photography is great training for other disciplines, as you learn precision, plus you get to understand the importance of knowing your subject and the need for stamina. But the cameras are so good now, and with 100 people or more photographing a football match, how can one person get a unique image?

That’s why I threw it in back then to pursue a career in finance. But my passion was always photography, and I guess I always knew I would come back to it. I toyed with landscape photography, but landscapes are there for everyone and I didn’t think I could make a career out of that. Then I became obsessed with sharks, and in 2010 I travelled to South Africa. After about ten unsuccessful trips, I finally got a great shot [above] that had a profound impact on me. It was unique to me, and that immediately made it different to a sport image. That was a key moment for me.

Have you always shot with Nikon cameras?

Ah, no. I shot in 2003 and 2008 with Hasselblad. But it wasn’t too hard to go from the Hasselblad to the D810. The D810 is the much more robust camera body.

Which were your first Nikons?

I think it was the Nikkormat and the FM2.

What gear do you typically use?

The opportunity I saw in wildlife photography was that it had all become very boring. If you’re going to photograph a beautiful woman, you photograph her from two feet away with a wide-angle lens, or from three feet away with a standard lens. But people were photographing beautiful lions with a 600mm lens, which dulls things down. It compresses and it flattens your subject, and you lose that sense of intimacy and emotion. I wanted to bring a feeling of proximity to wildlife photography. As Robert Capa said: “If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” My favourite lens is probably the 35mm wide-angle. There haven’t been many wildlife photographers in the past who have said that.

So what then would be your ‘desert island lens’?

I think probably the Nikon 58mm f/1.4. Mankind was shot on the 58mm.

You use a custom-made protective steel box as an essential part of your kit for remote photography

with wide-angle lenses. How effective has it been?

It works better with some animals than with others. You don’t have a lot of time to set things up quickly. The danger of doing it is that you lose time, but with polar bears it’s essential. With lions it’s kind of essential, because if they see something that’s got wires on it, they’ll eat it and destroy it. I’ve had quite a lot of cameras eaten by lions and polar bears before, but the box is effective at protecting my gear. For the intimate shots I get, the camera needs to be close to the subject, but I don’t. Over the years I have refined the process and got better at it.

Can you describe how you have refined the process?

I use every trick in the book to play on two of the animals’ senses. I’m playing on their vision and on their sense of smell, so I’ll often scent the box with aftershave, with fish, or with whatever I think will attract that animal towards the box for the photograph. So which animal does aftershave work best for? Just lions.

Really? Is it a particular brand?

Yep, but I can’t tell everyone that! [It’s already been widely published that David uses Old Spice!]

Where do you derive your photographic inspiration from?

From a lot of my peers. I subscribe to the Ansel Adams quote that: “You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all of the pictures you have seen.” I’m very unapologetic about the fact that I absorb other people’s pictures, to see what they’ve got right and to see what they’ve got wrong. I mean, it does give you ideas.

Can you give me an example?

I took quite a big picture recently, away from wildlife, of Dortmund’s football ground. The only person who has taken a famous picture of Dortmund’s football ground is Andreas Gursky, but he did it from the other end of the stadium. and while he’s abig name, I just felt that that was the wrong perspective of it. So, when I took the shot I was informed and influenced very much by his image.

But a lot of my other ideas come from just trawling on the internet and finding things that I feel – and I don’t know whether I see things differently – haven’t been shot that well. That goes right back to my experience in sport photography. If you’re on Centre Court photographing Djokovic playing Murray, it’s very difficult to take a picture that nobody else has got.

You say your book captures “The splendour and very soul of what remains wild and free in our world”, but the WWF says that more than half of the world’s wildlife has been lost in the past 40 years. So, what does the future hold?

Well, I’m affiliated to Tusk and that’s why Prince William [the charity’s

patron] wrote the foreword to Wild

Encounters. I don’t want to be too extreme about it. Some wildlife situations I’m less worried about than others. I’m not too worried about polar bears; where I was last week there were 60 within a mile of the cabin I was staying in, and they were obviously quite big and well nourished. The elephant situation is not good, though, and neither is the rhino situation. The animal I’m most concerned about is the lion. After the Second World War, I think there were 350,000 lions. I work very closely with a chap known as the Lion Whisperer, Kevin Richardson, and Kevin reckons there are probably only about 15,000 left now.

So what do you believe wildlife photographers can do to change the situation, beyond creating awareness with their pictures?

Ha! That’s a big question. I’m quite frank about things, and the brutally honest answer to that is we can do very little, but that’s the reality. It would be lovely to dress it up and make it cuddly, but how can awildlife photographer taking a few pictures change the behaviour of local tribes people, or the courts in Pretoria? They don’t have the money to do that. The only thing that could really change things is money, and as we know the vast majority of wildlife photographers use a zoom lens to save money, so how on Earth can they change ingrained hunting habits in Africa?

How long have you been working with Tusk?

For about three or four years. It’s probably the best in class. In New York, it auctions off my pictures every

year, and to a good crowd they tend to sell for about $50,000 each [Tusk gets 10% of David’s photography sales]. All of the royalties from the book go back to Tusk.

What is your best photographic career moment?

I think two weeks ago, when I was asked to give the keynote speech at the inaugural Xposure International Photography Festival in the UAE. There were maybe 18 photographers from around the world speaking there, and two big British ones, Don McCullin and Tom Stoddart, were two of my complete heroes. To get affirmation from my peers – hanging out with the two of them, speaking in front of them and hearing them saying kind words about me – was probably my highlight.

So my best moment isn’t a picture, because I think that it’s about a body of work as much as anything else. If I can take four good pictures a year, I’m happy. A mistake that a lot of photographers make is they go up the Amazon, then come back and put 80 pictures up on their website. I’m sorry, but that’s just crazy.

That sounds like Ansel Adams’ quote: “Twelve significant photographs in any one year is agood crop.”

Yeah, I agree.

What has been your worst or most embarrassing moment?

I think I was taking the last official picture of golfer Arnold Palmer at Augusta this year and there were about 400 or 500 people watching. There was him and Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player – the big three. But I had the wrong lens, an 85mm, because I didn’t know I was going to be asked by Augusta to do it. So to make the shot with my 85mm I kept on stepping back and stepping back, until I fell into a hedge. I should stick to wildlife!