The D850 is probably the best camera on the planet for wildlife photography
Tom Mason, Wildlife photographer
We’re only in mid-january, at the time of this interview, but Tom Mason is already working abroad. He’s in Cork when we speak, returning to an ongoing project photographing the otters that frequent the river bisecting Ireland’s second city. Then in March he heads back to the UK for The Photography Show, where he will be giving his talk, ‘Making the most of your next wildlife photography trip’ – retracing his recent travels to more far-flung locations from the Amazon to the Falklands. Tom’s voice speeds up in excitement as he begins recalling his quest last year to photograph the most elusive of big cats, the night-prowling jaguar in the jungles of the Peruvian Amazon. It’s a tale with dogged determination, artistry and a bit of luck – It’s enthralling to hear…
Can you give me a preview of what you will be talking about at The Photography Show this year?
This year’s lecture will be about going abroad on big trips and how I plan to make it different. I spent the summer of last year looking for jaguars in the Amazon rainforest and working with camera traps. It represented a big change on how I work compared to anything I’ve done previously.
Can you tell us about some of the highlights from that trip?
Every three days I’d go into the rainforest, set up a camera trap, and for the first three weeks I got absolutely nothing! You just have to think, ‘It will happen, I just have to keep working at it, working with these guides to find the most likely places.’ Two weeks after that I started to have some success, I got some ocelots local to camp and I’ve got five or six pictures that I’m really happy with.
Camera traps can be a bit a lottery.
It’s a weird one because it’s not luck. What I like about it is that you have to envisage everything to the point that you know exactly what you want as your end result – you have to find exactly the right location for it. When all that planning comes together, it’s immense. But I think it is a lottery because the animal has to walk through and if it doesn’t walk through you get nothing. I got to the last week, and I hadn’t had a big cat through… The whole point of the project was that this rainforest was cleared and since being restored has got big cats back, but I didn’t have a big cat picture!
Sounds frustrating, but you eventually succeeded?
I found this location and thought, ‘If I was a big cat I’d come right down to the river to hunt and drink.’ So I put a camera trap in, and I came back a week later and there were 300 pictures on it! I scrolled right to the first day and there was a puma walking through the trap – it had been just four hours after I set the trap that the puma walked through! That was exciting, but the problem was it was a bum shot… It was walking the wrong way.
What did you do?
I changed the camera, put it on the other side so the cat would be looking down as it was coming to the river. I had five days left in the jungle, so I left it there – I still hadn’t got the shot of a jaguar I wanted. I thought, ‘Screw it, I’ll just leave the camera here and see if it works.’ I left all of the equipment and trained one of the interns to check the battery, take it out, put it in, and I then flew back to the UK.
What happened next?
I have a long-term ambition to photograph every bear species and every penguin species on the planet
I’d been home a couple of weeks and I got an email from them, “We’ve just checked the trap, you’ve got everything you wanted!” They sent me nine pictures of this huge jaguar walking straight past and looking straight into the lens.
Tell me about the setup you used?
It’s just a Nikon D3100. It’s amazing because it’s a £350 camera that anyone can use, at the budget end of the range.
That’s a good point, because you don’t need a top-of-the-range camera for a camera trap
That’s right. Most of the bodies I use in terms of camera trapping are models like the Nikon D3100 or D3300, 24Mp with an 18-55mm kit lens and that’s it. There’s nothing special about it. The flashguns are older SB-28 models, but they’re the best you can buy for this. They have a fantastic sleep mode, then they wake up.
How many of those did you have and where were they positioned?
One right-hand side, one left-hand side, 45 degrees to the camera, looking down. On one the power is about half of the power of the other
one, so I’m trying to get it to look like how it would appear lit in a museum. They are mounted on Manfrotto Magic Arms so I can get them exactly where I want, and then everything is done with manual cables.
Not wireless?
I’ve tried the wireless setup, and they’re good if you’re working where you can revisit a camera every couple of weeks, but when you’re leaving something it’s got to be wired so that it works. That’s only £30 or £40 worth of cables. The flashes I buy for about £40 each. Then the expensive bit is the triggers. I’m using the Kinesis scout trigger, and they’re about £500 a set. That’s where the expense lies but they offer so many features – you can predict which way the animal is
going to move, how many pictures you want to take per burst, what’s the interval between each picture. Then everything is put into a Peli case. I drill out a Peli case, put a lens filter on the front and make a little housing, that’s another £50. It all adds up, but I don’t think it’s expensive if you do it slowly.
How big a memory card did you leave in the camera?
I had a 64GB card. The D3100 is only a 14Mp camera so that’s 4000 pictures on a card. The biggest problem in the rainforest is the rain on the lens – every time you go there you’ve got to wipe that lens clean, get it dry.
do you see camera trap imagery becoming your signature as a photographer?
Well, I do adore technical stuff; I really like puzzles and fixing things. I spend most of my spare time pulling stuff apart and repairing it.
So you’re a bit of a geek?
Yeah, I’m happy with that! I love that side of it because it gives you the chance to do something technical that lots of people can’t do. You have to think about something or even make kit that doesn’t exist to get that one photograph you want. That’s one of the biggest fun things to me; that idea of making something new to get a picture. I’ve always looked at National Geographic and how those photographers mark themselves out in a different way. They find a niche to create new pictures that don’t exist, and that’s the route that I want to head down with my work.
Every three days I’d go into the rainforest, set up a camera trap and for the first three weeks I got absolutely nothing!
your travels have also taken you to Canada to photograph bears. Tell us about that…
I have two obsessions in life, two types of important animals in my life, bears and penguins. I have a long-term ambition to photograph every bear species and every penguin species on the planet. I went to Finland a couple of years ago to photograph brown bears and that was amazing.
Photographing every species of bear and penguin? That’s quite a goal. How long will it take?
The key one I’ve got to do next is polar bears because they’re facing massive problems with melting ice, so I’m making tracks to get up there in the next year or so. I got down to the Falklands, so I’ve made a start on penguins, but there is a lot of travelling. Sometimes you can travel too much.
That’s something I’ve considered for my business – I want to make it fully carbon neutral. I want to offset everything, because you have a responsibility as a photographer to not only be trail blazing in terms of taking images, but showing the ‘correct’ way to do it is key as well. I’m very cautious about the way I approach subjects because the ethics and environmental aspects when travelling have to be taken into account.
Why are you in Ireland now?
I’m photographing a project on otters. I’ve been doing that on and off for two and a half years now. They have otters living right in the centre of Cork, there are some that live on a pontoon in the harbour just down the road from me. I’ve just spent six months engineering an underwater housing to get a ‘half and half’ shot of an otter underwater with the background of the harbour town behind, but that’s taking forever.
What will I find in your kitbag?
The Nikon D850, straightaway.
It’s probably the best camera for wildlife photography. It’s so adaptable and the sensor is gorgeous. Backup camera is a D500. I’ve just reviewed the Nikon Z 6 and I’ll probably pick up one of those for video. My 70-200mm f/2.8 is probably the first lens that goes in for every trip. My 300mm f/2.8 is my favourite. I bought that when I was 18, it’s such an amazing lens. Then the 24-70mm f/2.8 is being used less and less, but if I’m doing anything that’s commercial-based or environmental people shots, it will come along. The 20mm f/1.8g is an incredible lens, super wide and with a closest focus of 20cm so you can get close to your subject and maintain a background that’s just immense.
What else?
My binoculars, they’re probably the
The D850 is probably the best camera on the planet for wildlife photography. It’s so adaptable and the sensor is gorgeous
first thing I pick up every single day. I’ve recently picked up a Steadicam stabilizer and I’ve also got some prime lenses and film cameras; a Nikon F3 and F6, they’re for personal projects.
Which is your desert island lens?
That’s such a tough choice! If you wanted to shoot wide the 24-70mm f/2.8 is the obvious choice because it is the most practical, but my attachment to the 300mm f/2.8 is just too strong for me to not pick it.
Why is that?
When I was 15 and I said to myself I want to be a professional photographer, I looked through so many photographers’ bags and equipment lists and said to myself, ‘all these professional wildlife
photographers have one thing in common: they own a telephoto prime lens of super quality from the camera brand manufacturer.’ So, I set myself the task of saving up over three years to buy my Nikon 300mm f/2.8.
And you stuck to it?
The week before my 18th birthday I had pretty much all the money saved up and I logged onto Grey’s of Westminster and they had a used 300mm f/2.8 VR II, the brand new one that had only come out two months before that. It had belonged to a professional sports photographer who bought it for the Olympics because he couldn’t rent one. He must have then sold it back after the Olympics because he didn’t need it anymore – it was about £800 cheaper than it would have been if I had tried to buy it brand new.
Absolute bargain!
I rang up Grey’s and said, “I’d love to buy it but I can’t buy it until next weekend because I’m at school.” I also explained that the actual day was my 18th birthday and I’d been saving up and they said, “Okay, we will save it, but only for you for that reason. If you don’t buy it on the Saturday it will go because we’ve had so much interest about it.” So, I walked in on my 18th birthday and I bought it with cash! I had to put the money from my own account into my mum’s account over a week, transferring £500 a day because that was the maximum I could take out of my young person’s bank account! That lens has a special attachment in my heart.
Are there any photographers or photographs that inspired you?
There are lots of photographers I have been super-excited by. Charlie Hamilton James, definitely; he always comes up with something incredible. Vincent Munier; his pictures are always immaculate. Peter Cairns; when I was 18 he let me come up and stay with him for a week in Scotland. I really like his progressive approach to photography and he has such a refreshing attitude to conservation. Steve Winter has been inspirational with his camera trap images. I looked at his pictures of snow leopards and when I first saw them at Wildlife Photographer of the Year a few years ago, I thought to myself, ‘that’s the sort of picture I’d love to take one day.’ Lots of other photographers and personal friends, like Bob from my local photography club. Some of his pictures are astounding but no one knows who Bob is.
Well, now’s his chance. Who is Bob?
Bob Norris. He’s done photography for years now. You can talk about the big-name pros, but at the end of the day I don’t know them really. I set myself these goals – I look at areas these photographers specialize in and I say it’s time to educate myself in this way, so camera traps have been something over the last five years.
Landscape photography is something I’m getting into at the moment. I’m spending lots of time educating myself to improve. I think you have to break down everything to make yourself better, and that’s something I like to do regularly to try and always improve.
Tom Mason appears at the Behind The lens Theatre (4pm, 16 March) at The Photography Show, NEC (www.photographyshow.com)