Episode Three: Masterclass with Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2020 winner, Sergey Gorshkov

well hello and welcome today i'm going to be talking to sergey gorskoff who won the 2020 wildlife photographer of the year competition with his absolutely stonking image of a wild siberian tiger it was picked the best of 49 000 entries and we'll be talking about how he took it and why it took several years to get the shot and incidentally not only that sergey became the first russian to have won the competition in its 56 year history well here it is a wild siberian tiger rubbing against a manchurian fir tree it's called the embrace everything about it works the lighting the colors the texture as roz kidman cox who's chair of the judging panel so perfectly put it it's almost as if the tiger is part of the forest a tail blends with the roots of the tree the two are one [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] sergey was born in a remote village in siberia in the middle of nowhere and he's been taking wildlife photos for the last 12 years he was one of the founding members of the russian union of wildlife photographers which has had a huge influence in russia encouraging a lot of people there to take up wildlife photography and it's been a massive influence in persuading hunters to swap their rifles for cameras you'll almost certainly recognize many of sergey's pictures because they are very memorable taken all over russia from kamchatka to one of my favorite places on the planet wrangle island [Music] but first let me show you where his siberian tiger image was taken it was in a reserve called the land of the leopard national park or you might see it as zemlia leopard national park zemlya just means land in south eastern russia right there by the sea of japan so anyway i began by asking sergey why he picked the land of the leopard national park for this particular project two years ago i started i have been on my first visit to national park uh looking for place and i came and i understood that's a really very interesting place but not so many people showed pictures and now there are around 100 amur report and maybe 5 100 600 tiger and amur leopard all you can find only in land uh national park and it was originally the animal leopard wasn't it that you were trying to photograph i like the leopard i have been in africa many times maybe 52 times but why come back every year to africa but i think i come back to i'm looking for a more leopard and very difficult to make pictures it's not like africa it's absolutely different you cannot see leopard white leopard from maca or it was impossible but in the meantime you just stumbled upon the siberian tiger leopard in this area so how did he go about finding the best the most likely locations for setting up the camera traps for the photography usually i'm early but stay a little bit high on top of the hill and close the cliff and but tiger usually stay close to the river into valley and sometimes they come the same place i have picture close to this tree leopard two between maybe four or six days from each picture i have actually um been to that national park and i remember it's incredibly remote and wild it must have been a unbelievably difficult place to work in it was really very difficult very very difficult because it's really jungling when i came in beginning of october i spent 10 days for cup three and clean road for quadra mobile were you on your own or were you working with a biologist or a ranger or someone else i came only with ranger because it's uh national park i cannot come alone he spent all life it's uh tiger forest and his nose very well tiger leopard and uh he helped me a lot but maybe ninety percent for success independent of a guide a good guide and he good to tracker but i know how to make picture now i know he started off with i think he was roughly a hundred um simple and relatively inexpensive trail cams set up all over the place just to try and work out what was around where the leopards and the tigers were and where then to put the main cameras i use browning small browning camera then i change and put a big camera but sometimes i i use both one camera for video second camera big one for photo how many camera traps did you have out all together at the same time more than 10. but it's really a very big project and a really very expensive project and that was over a big area of land presumably but not so big maybe maybe 20 25 for five kilometers it's very beautiful area but very difficult for a picture because too deep forest very very deep forest and not you cannot find open space now i know you are using nikon z7 mirrorless cameras for the project why when there are so many different camera models to choose from did you go with that particular one well the first reason that without noise without loss of mirror you mean otherwise if you were using like a regular dslr with the mirror clunking up and down um you're more likely to scare the animals yes because sometimes when mirror jumping and animals is looking to the camera i don't like it when anyone looking to the stretch to camera but you i prefer when the animal uh his behavior is normal without so how often do you have to check the camera traps and particularly the batteries i'm thinking and and the memory cards usually every three months i come back to forest and check my camera check my battery change battery and check my memory card and sometimes it's a big problem because maybe there check my camera jump my camera around sometimes be a broken my camera and tiger sometimes broken camera how about the batteries surely they didn't last for three months today of course of course so uh for each camera i use a big battery from car it's uh sometimes i can not change maybe six months i can use one battery i'd imagine even with i don't know 10 or more cameras you probably didn't get that many photographs did you sometimes you'd you'd go there and there'd be no pictures at all usually it's a good result if each month i will have one shot usually one shot at maybe seven or twelve picture but i guess it's not about um quantity is it it's more about quality and one stunning shot is better than a hundred or a thousand mediocre shots it's uh i like it open box and to check yes it's the best time because you can see what the result for last three months and really very interesting tell me about that tree that now famous tree did you know when you saw it that that was a likely spot did it feel that it was going to be a good place to get a tiger i found this strip by smile because i i walk across this close to this tree and smell from tiger and turn around i found that a lot of fuel for the to the tree and a lot of scrap i understood that's a good place for pictures so what i'm bursting to know is how long was that particular camera in position facing the scratch mark tree before you got the shot i put my camera footing of january last year and uh end of november i got a picture so it took 11 months all together so come on then sergey how did it feel you took the camera out of the camera trap you looked in the back and there was that mind-boggling photo uh it was my first picture of uh a siberia tiger and i jumping from the sky to the sky because i was very happy when i found this picture one thing i've been wondering is you you've obviously took that photograph of a siberian tiger with a camera trap but have you ever seen a siberian tiger or an animal leopard for that matter in the wild yourself at night not face to face but only night vision binocular and leopard also maybe two times a lot more so is that it now have you finished photographing siberian tigers you've got the best picture of one ever taken in the wild in the history of the planet or have you got other images in mind is this going to be an ongoing project i i make story about this territory about uh uh and other animals landscape and then i will publish book about this area it's my dream about amur leopard and siberia target and therefore i will spend maybe two years [Music] you

Channel: BBC Wildlife Magazine

Views: 10,496

Rating: 4.9704432 out of 5

Keywords: BBC Wildlife Photography masterclass

Id: rGUgxb-4p20

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021