Welcome To Wilder Aperture

There’s a peculiar affliction that comes from spending time in wild places.

You begin to notice things.

At first, your eye is drawn to the obvious. An elephant appearing soundlessly from vegetation that seems far too meagre to have concealed it. Or a lion at dusk, looking exactly as a lion ought to look at dusk, simply magnificent.

The longer you sit, smaller things begin to take shape.

The oxpecker’s industrious grooming. The dung beetle’s rolling of its improbable inheritance. Or the way an impala freezes before everyone else realizes there’s something to freeze about.

Eventually, looking becomes a habit.

Wilder Aperture is the direct result of that habit. It’s about looking closer and adjusting your aperture to be a little bit… wilder.

I’m a wildlife photographer, writer, traveler, and full-time watcher of wildlife. I’ve spent years venturing into wild places, a pursuit that’s consumed an indecent amount of my savings but left me with improbable stories and very few regrets.

Photography matters enormously to me. It was my first love and it’s the art form I feel most connected to. But photography has also taught me the limits of photographs.

Think about it. A photograph can preserve the instant a leopard looks directly into the lens. It can capture a moment of astonishing intimacy and make you feel something  you’ve had a hard time finding words for. But it doesn’t tell you about the minutes or hours beforehand, when the leopard was asleep and the photographer was contemplating the surprisingly complex question of whether their left foot had permanently lost circulation.

It can show an elephant raising her trunk. It can’t tell you what she was smelling, or why an animal weighing several thousand pounds can disappear into the bush with the acoustic footprint of a librarian.

Photographs can make wild animals beautiful, which is sometimes the least interesting thing about them.

Animals, I’ve learned, are astonishingly good at being animals.

They migrate, deceive, cooperate, and pilfer. They solve problems, remember enemies, cultivate alliances, exploit opportunities, raise troublesome offspring, quarrel with neighbors, and occasionally make decisions that appear, even after generous consideration, ill-advised. The natural world is full of ingenuity, skulduggery, bravado, patience, absurdity, and lives unfolding according to priorities entirely unrelated to ours.

That’s the territory I want to explore in this blog.

There is plenty of photography elsewhere on Wilder Aperture. This space is for exploring animals being animals.

There will be stories from the wild corners of the world. There will be natural history, conservation, fieldcraft, animal behavior, and the occasional expeditionary misadventure. And there will be some photography. But that’s not the focus (pun intended). Together, we’ll consider why leopards have spots, what makes a shoebill so magnificently prehistoric, how to photograph an animal that has declined to cooperate with your artistic vision, and why some of the best moments in the bush produce no photograph at all.

There will also be questions.

What does it mean to travel responsibly in a place whose wildness is precisely what brought us there? What happens beyond the flattering perimeter of the camera frame? What can photography contribute to conservation? And how do we tell stories about wildlife and wild places without exploitation?

This blog is a space for the overlooked, the peculiar, and the inconveniently complicated.

Because the longer I spend in wild places, the more interested I become in understanding them.

Perhaps that is what an aperture really is. A small opening that changes what we’re able to see.

Welcome to Wilder Aperture.

Let's go looking.