An eye for the cats
Starting his own business to promote wildlife tourism and with a coffeetable book of his ‘captures’ on the cards, Riaz Cader talks of his passion for wildlife photography
He is just back from the wilds. Without attending to work piled up from his fledgling business while he was away, he has been sorting out his “captures” from the wild, drawing the ire of his wife.
The “captures” have been “really good”. Seven leopards, three sloth bears and “loads of elephants” including a couple of tuskers. What more can Riaz Cader wish for!
It is the wildlife photographer in him that gets precedence, with the feline kind being his major focus, although he will click anything that catches his lens, while he patiently awaits the passion of his life.
Cats, big and small, in all their sleek and powerful splendour fascinate him. He always yearned to see Sri Lanka’s Big Cat, the leopard, like its small domestic cousins, roll-over, cross its forepaws and give him an ingenuous look. He did catch this image after patiently sitting still for nearly two hours at the Wilpattu National Park, which till today remains one of his favourite photos.
Whether it is a domestic cat or a Big Cat, the “sequence” is always the same and the “pose is identical”, he says, recalling seeing a cat stalking pigeons in a park in Melbourne, jumping and sometimes missing and similar visuals at the National Parks in Sri Lanka with leopards.
How did it all begin and 33-yearold Riaz is very specific – it was his love of wildlife particularly leopards that led him to pick up a camera. A glimpse of a leopard at the Yala National Park when he was about nine, sparking a lifelong passion.
It was a usual childhood for National Parks on holidays -- and finally about eight years in Melbourne, Australia, securing a Bachelor of Commerce degree. He studied accountancy and finance, he laughs but always wanted to come back and take time off to do what he loved.
‘Shooting’ wildlife, happy even to click images of parrots or barbets in his garden, he started off with a tiny digital point-andshoot camera when he was about 14 years, graduating to a manual Nikon SLR he didn’t use for too long and then onto a digital SLR Down Under, honing his skills by taking photographs of city-views and any animal he saw over there.
On his return from Melbourne, while he was looking for a job in finance for about two months, he grew bored and restless at home. Then he joined Jetwing Hotels as an intern as this chain was into wildlife and nature-based tourism, coming under the influence of environmentalist Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne. It was from Gehan that he learnt the art of cataloging of his photographs meticulously.
After Jetwing, it was a stint with &Beyond, a worldwide group, with Riaz based in Sri Lanka handling in-bound highend visitors keen on getting on the wildlife trail and finally Classic Travels when they set up an inbound travel company.
Deciding that it was time to take risks as they had not started a family as yet, he and his wife, Nidaal, have now launched their own business, ‘Natural World Explorer’, linking their finance backgrounds to get wildlife and nature tourists to explore the wonders of Sri Lanka but with hopes of branching out to encourage Sri Lankans to go in search of tigers and culture in India as well as East and South Africa by next year.
Riaz’s name is closely associated with National Geographic’s ‘Wild Sri Lanka’, Disney Nature’s ‘Monkey Kingdom’, CBBC’s ‘Deadly 60 -- Sri Lanka Episode’ and a sequence on filming whales for BBC Earth’s ‘Monsoon’.
Before crisscrossing the country with the National Geographic team when they were filming the three-part documentary ‘Wild Sri Lanka’, it was Riaz who went ahead often to sort out the logistics, checking out the locations of ocean and coast, dry lowlands and rainforest and cloud forests, all the while with camera slung across his neck. When the filming began there were not only jeep rides but also helicopter and boat rides.
Smilingly, he says that he is on CBBC’s ‘Deadly 60 -- Sri Lanka Episode’ for “one second pointing at a leopard in Yala”.
Currently, a coffee table book is on the cards from Riaz, which is to be published at the end of this year or early next year, with a promise that “it will be different”.
As we wind up our interview and Riaz heads back to his beloved photographs, to add the latest from the wilds he has taken just last weekend to his presentation to the Sri Lanka Natural History Society tomorrow, he has a quick word of advice to all those budding photographers.
“It should never-ever be a photograph at any cost by causing a disturbance to animals in the wild. We need to let them behave in the natural environment as they would usually and then click, may be that award-winning image. This requires much patience and roughing out. You simply have to work very hard.”