Nature’s Noel

As I sit looking out my window this Christmas Eve, my thoughts travel many miles to a valley in Montana where a family of wolves settle in against the harsh Montana Winter. My thoughts also travel to Alaska where a wolf pack follows the faint scent of a meal that had long past.

So often at this time of year we reflect on the love of family and friends and all that is good. Yet we pause not for even a moment to reflect on the incredible beauty of nature and how little we’ve done to protect it.

In Alaska more than 1000 wolves have been killed by aerial hunting. Ran to exhaustion before they are shot from the air, the wolves have little chance to escape the bullet. Protection has been lifted on the wolves of Yellowstone as well. Hundreds have already been shot for no reason other than being a wolf.

Idaho has extended their wolf hunt into the Spring denning period when wolves are particularly vulnerable. Killing just a single pregnant female can have a huge impact on the population.

Polar bears are drowning due to lack of sea ice yet no one really seams to care about the changing climate. Why can we spend untold billions of dollars to fight a war that in the end changes nothing, yet we refuse to spend anything on our planet that is dieing.

We’re poisoning our water, we’re polluting our air. We’re overfishing our oceans, we’re destroying our rain forests. Is it even possible for us to stop?

As I watch the snow fall silently upon the frozen ground outside my window, I worry about our planets future. I hope that you and your family have a joyous holiday. I hope one day our planet and all it’s inhabitants, human, plant and animal can do the same.

Below is my Christmas gift to you. It’s the most precious gift I can give.
I hope you enjoy it.

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There’s No Place Like Home

The life of a nature and wildlife filmmaker is often a lonely one.

When I’m working on a project I’ll often head out well before sunrise and sometimes won’t be back until well after sunset. If I’m someplace like Yellowstone, this can go on day after day for weeks at a time. Usually I’m by myself. Sometimes my wife, Angi, will come along.

But even when I have someone along for company, I’m too consumed with figuring out what to shoot, how to shoot it and how it’s all going to come together. I’m in my own little world. Angi will bring a book to read since she’s learned over the years that nature filmmaking is many hours of boredom followed sometimes by a few seconds of something wonderful. Oftentimes she wouldn’t understand why I was so excited about something but was happy that I was so happy.

I’ve hiked to frozen lakes in the middle of July, waded through a canyon river where the walls were only eighteen feet apart. I’ve seen ancient ruins thousands of years old. Had bears close enough to touch, coyotes chasing a wolf,snow falling in the Utah desert.

I’ve seen and done a lot of things in the natural world pretty mush most of them I was the only witness that they ever occurred.

But I thought Hawaii would be different. I got a call about teaching at a workshop in Honolulu a while back. The way the schedule was set up, It would have been easy for Angi to come along and enjoy Waikiki Beach while I was out filming. Unfortunately, her schedule wouldn’t allow her to come along.The ironic thing is that the night before I left, her schedule cleared and she would have been able to go after all. The only problem was that now plane tickets were over $2k. So, she reluctantly accepted the fact that she was going to miss out on this opportunity.

Hawaii turned out to be everything you hear it is. I met some great people there and we had a blast filming around the island. In fact, I still keep in touch with them and hope to visit them the next time I’m in town. John Chance, one of the locals, turned me on to Loco Moko and Plate Dinners. We had a great time along with his family and another friend I met there Constantino Ferrer. We sat on Waikiki Beach at sunset and watched world class films being projected onto a 30 foot screen as part of the Hawaiian International Film Festival. There’s just something about watching a documentary film about sharks while you’re sitting on Waikiki Beach and can hear the ocean waves just feet away from you. It was truly magical!

But Angi was never far from my thoughts when I was there. I knew how disappointed she was that she couldn’t join me.

On the flight back to Iowa, I broke out the laptop and started pulling clips from the trip. Angi is a California girl and living in Iowa, she misses the ocean terribly.

As the plane touched down in Cedar Rapids, it was great to be home. I had been in paradise for two weeks but nothing was as good as walking in the front door of my house, setting down all the gear and being home.

So when she asked me how was the trip, I played her this video that I had edited on my flight home.

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Do Pictures Lie?

What do you think of this picture?

It’s a beautiful picture isn’t it? One of those Golden Graham mornings.

How about this one?

Not quite the same impact is it? Would it surprise you to know that both pictures are at the same location? Would it surprise you even more to know that the “mountain” in the background is actually our local landfill “Mt. Trashmore”?

We’ve all heard the pictures never lie, but they do all the time. There’s an old mission in Montana that I’ve seen in books and magazines for many years. It shows this beautiful mission seemingly in the middle of nowhere with majestic mountains rising up behind it.

So one year, I made the trip to photograph the mission. As I travelled up the highway I happened to glance over to my right and there was this building that kind of looked like the mission. I was puzzled because this building was right in a town. There were telephone lines running every which way run down buildings, junk cars. It couldn’t be the same mission could it? Well, it just so happens that if you set up at just the right angle, you can eliminate all the distractions and get the iconic shot of the mission against the mountains that you see in all the magazines.

As a photographer and now filmmaker, I’ve learned that it’s not so much how things look but how you see the possibilities within them.

Here’s a shot from a recent short I did. It’s a tranquil pond seemingly set in a Waldenesque setting.

You can feel the peace and tranquility in this quiet little spot.

In actuality, this pond is in my housing development just off a major highway, Tons of traffic on the highway, dogs barking in people’s yards. It certainly wasn’t peaceful by any means.

This is what it normally looks like whenever I drive by.

Do pictures really lie? I don’t think they do. I think they can show us the possibilities that we’ve chosen not to see. They show, at least to me, that there is beauty everywhere. We just need to take the time to see it. I feel fortunate to be blessed with the ability to see beyond what’s in front of my eyes and find those possibilities that seemingly lie hidden away.

Ghosts Among the Corn

Several years ago before I made the switch to HD and started Silver Phoenix, I had a production company called Pawprint Productions. At the time there were quite a few stories about mountain lion sightings in Iowa.
Usually every TV news story or newspaper article ended with a bunch of people wanting to go out and kill it. Pretty soon it seemed like everyone was spotting mountain lions. There were even rumors that the Department of Natural Resources were using Blackhawk Black-Ops helicopters under the cover of night to establish a breeding population to control the exploding deer population.

It saddened me that Iowans wouldn’t even give mountain lions a chance. You’re more likely to die from a whitetail deer than you ever would from a mountain lion. Even today, they are shot on sight. Yet other predators like bears that come down from Wisconsin and Minnesota are protected by Iowa law. So why do mountain lions have no protection but a bear, which can kill you just as easily, has full protection?

So, I decided to put together this film. If people would take the time to educated themselves instead of living in ignorance, they would find that it is not very difficult to live alongside nature.

Baba Dioum said, In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we have been taught.

Do we have no time to learn about the mountain lion?

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The Little Things in Life

They say you get wiser the older you get. I think the same is true when it comes to cinematography as well.

I remember my first serious video camera like it was only yesterday. I couldn’t wait to unpack it, charge the batteries, stick in a tape and start capturing the natural world around me.
I don’t quite remember what was the first thing I ever pointed it at and hit the record button, but I do know I was all over the Iowa countryside filming anything and everything.

I also remember I couldn’t wait to take it to Yellowstone. I had been going there for years shooting still photographs and couldn’t wait to capture Yellowstone in motion. I wasn’t disappointed. I captured moose, elk, grizzly bears, glorious waterfalls, fantastic geysers. I was a happy camper.

And so, that’s the way it was year after year. Arches National Park to film Delicate Arch. Grand Teton’s to capture Mount Moran reflected in a still alpine lake. The Grand Canyon, Kings Canyon, Yosemite all stood in front of my camera lens.

One day, a few years ago, I decided to participate in a program at the Indian Creek Nature Center. It was a prairie walk. The Nature Center had been working for years to re-establish a tallgrass prairie and the effort was really paying off. Only about one percent of the native tallgrass prairie remains in Iowa having been plowed under in just a single generation. I had been to this prairie many times before and thought this trip would really be no different.

As I walked through the prairie with Education Facilitator Jan Aiels, I was looking for the big prairie prizes as I always did. The Cardinal Flower, Purple Coneflower and the other “stars” of the prairie had always been the object of my interest.

I didn’t know that in just a few moments, my view of the natural world would be cut down to size and forever changed.

We walked on the trails cut within the prairie until we came to a clearing where the center had laid logs around the perimeter for people to sit, talk and contemplate. I sat and listened as Jan talked about the vast prairies that once covered Iowa and just enjoyed being there taking in the cool early evening air as I listened.

Jan talked about the diversity of the prairie and the amazing amount of life it supported. She handed each of us a small plastic “bug box” and suggested we all fan out and try to capture something that interested us.

The moment of change was upon me.

For the first time I really had to slow down and actually “see” the prairie. I was amazed at all that I had passed by. It was easy to see that the prairie was teaming with life if you just took the time to look for it. After a few minutes we all gathered together to look at what we had each discovered. Everyone had “found” something and pretty much everyone had something that was different from what anyone else had.

I had found something that I had never seen before but learned was quite common on the prairie, a froghopper.

It was at that moment that I realized that I had passed by so many opportunities to film amazing creatures and plants. I never realized that there was an entire world right beneath me.

I began looking at things differently. I slowed down, I took the time to really get to know the areas I visited. There were so many things I would have missed had I not taken the time.

How many Monarch chrysalis had I walked past and never noticed?

Now I realize that it’s the little things in life that are important. No longer do I look ahead to see what’s bigger and better. I know that some of nature’s best are right at my feet.

Africa: A Moment in Time

Back in January and February, I had a fantastic opportunity to travel to Africa and try out as of then an unannounced camera for Panasonic, the HPX-300.

In previous posts I’ve documented the experience but never really posted any footage.

I have a habit of editing footage together while I’m on a trip so when I get back, I have something to show my friends and family as soon as I get off the plane. Africa was no different.

We arrived home late but still broke out the laptop to show everyone some of the fantastic wildlife we encountered while we were there. My intent was to always go back and re-edit the piece since I had juts taken bits and pieces from each days shoot and put them all together. I still intend to do that, but while you’re waiting for that, I thought I’d show you the footage that I had put together when I stepped off the plane.

A big thanks to Jan from Panasonic for believing in me and letting me take this camera to Africa. Course, I guess a bunch of footage from Iowa wouldn;t have had the same “wow” factor.

I hope you enjoy the footage. You can view it by clicking here.

If you have a moment please leave a comment and let me know what you thought of it as well as what else you’d like to see posted on this blog.

Silent No More

A lot of times when I’m out in the field, I like to just sit and listen to the sounds of nature. I enjoy this so much that I invested in a Zoom H4n digital audio recorder to take out with me and capture some of the natural sounds I encounter.

The Zoom H4n by the way is a remarkable recorder. It can record fantastic audio with it’s built in stereo mics but also allows you to plug in 1/4 inch and XLR mics as well.

My first experience recording with it was in Monterey, California. My hotel was right on the beach and at night I could listen to the waves and seabirds outside my window.

Returning back to Iowa I took the Zoom with me on my trips to a tall grass prairie about 15 miles from my home. I was working on my latest film, “The Prairie” for the UWOL film challenge.

It was late in the afternoon and I could hear owls hooting in the nearby forests, birds settling in for the coming night, frogs in the nearby pond, etc. But what amazed me when I returned home to listen to the audio was how much other sounds the Zoom had picked up.

The tall grass prairie is really out in the middle of no where. Yet, I could hear the sound of tractors out in distant fields, motorcycles roaring down roads far in the distance. There were airplanes flying over head and the rumble of freight trains as they made their way across the state. I could hear dogs barking from nearby farmhouses, cars traveling down the lone road that passes by the prairie.

What amazed me even more was that long after a plane flew overhead or a car drove past on the gravel road, their sound continued to be recorded. The pristine natural sounds of the tall grass prairie were being contaminated by a world that had seemed so far away.

No matter how much I felt as one with nature while I sat in the prairie it seems that the sounds of man are still there no matter how much I wish they weren’t.

Africa 2009: Chasing the Sun

In Africa, there’s a multitude of creatures that can kill you in a heartbeat. In fact, I think the list of animals that can’t kill you is significantly smaller than the list that can.

In order to enforce their no feeding the wildlife policy in Kruger, they lock you inside camp at night and let you out again in the morning.

It’s a little unnerving and feels like you’re in a Jurassic Park movie with the tall fences topped with strand after strand of electrified wire. But watch a hyena crack the femur bone of a zebra and you’ll be glad you have the protection.

The downside to being fenced in is that you’re captive until they open the gate again in the morning.

Since it was my first trip to Africa, I wanted a classic sunrise with an Acacia tree silhouetted in the foreground. Now Acacia trees are plentiful but finding one that has a clear background and close to the camp is a tough.

Before I left for Africa, I printed off a sheet of the sunrise and sunset times and the headings for each.
So I could tell where the sun was going to rise as well as when.

On February 1st, the gates don’t open until 5:30AM. The problem with that is the sun rises at 5:34AM. Not much time to get to a great spot.

I had tried earlier in the trip but overcast skies prevented any attempt. Since the gates opened at 4:30AM in January we would have had a decent amount of time to find our spot and get ready. But, it wasn’t meant to be.

So, every afternoon I’d look for a location that was close to the camp we would be staying at that lined up with where the sun would rise the following morning.

Close to the end of the trip I awoke to find stars overhead. That meant with a little luck the sun would show itself this morning!

Getting the gear packed we headed towards the gate and were the first in line, ready to head out the moment they opened.

It was tough watching the sky get brighter and brighter as we waited behind the locked gate.

Finally the guard opened the gate and we were off to try and beat the sun.

During the African Summer, the sun rises so fast that you can actually watch it climb into the sky.

You have just moments from the time the sun peeks over the horizon to when it’s above the horizon and getting brighter by the moment.

Luckily the spot we picked out the day before was close enough that we were able to capture the sunrise not long after it cleared the horizon.

It’s not the perfect postcard shot that I had hoped but with literally two minutes to drive, set up and shoot, I think it turned out pretty well.

Welcome to 2009!

It’s hard to believe that another year has past. 2008 was certainly a roller coaster of a year for Silver Phoenix. Hopefully the changes we put in place last year will start to pay off in 2009.

Some choices were very hard to make, others much easier. All of them whether good or bad were changes I felt had to be made in order to move Silver Phoenix forward.

But enough about the past. The past can’t be changed so why dwell on it?

This year will be a busy one for me. In addition to shooting all the HD footage for Silver Phoenix, I’ve taken on the role of marketer as well.

Marketing doesn’t come to me as easily as shooting with the camera. I think it’s rare to find someone who has both great natural born artistic talent and savvy marketing sense. I also believe that with enough hard work, you can become proficient at both. So now you’re just as likely to find me reading a book on marketing as one on wildlife behavior.

So what does this mean for 2009? Big things. In fact for several months now we’ve been planning for a major trip that’s coming up this month.
Where are we going and why? Well, you’ll have to wait a bit for that one.

I’m also starting work on a feature length documentary. The goal is to have it finished by early 2010. The subject matter might surprise you but I think it’s a great story. I’ll fill you in more on this one too in a later post.

I hope all of you said goodbye to 2008 in style and I hope that 2009 brings you closer to the things you hold dearest in life.

Happy New Year!!

My Favorite Story of the Year

One of my favorite shots of all time is not because it’s a great shot, but because of the circumstances that enabled me to get it.

I was working on a short film for the UWOL Challenge. UWOL, or Under Water Over Land film challenge, is a nature and wildlife competition for filmmakers across the globe. Filmmakers are given a topic and have three weeks to complete a three minute film based on that topic.

The topic this round was wildlife. Since we were in the middle of a 500 year flood. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get a lot of wildlife as some of the prime wildlife habitat was already under water. I also wanted to minimize any disturbance that I might create since this was a time of extreme stress for the animals displaced by the flood.

Every night on the news, they would talk about how many homes had been flooded, how many people had been displaced. But no one was really talking about what effect the flood had on the wildlife.

The wastewater treatment plant was flooded and out of commission which meant twenty-five million gallons of raw sewage was being dumped into the Cedar River every single day.

So, I decided my film would be about how this epic flood was effecting wildlife and their habitat.

On the first day I was able to get out and shoot, I was up and out the door before 5AM to try and get some footage for my entry.

I headed out to some of the worse spots along the Sac & Fox trail but it was so mucky and some roads were still closed so I couldn’t get any good shots.

So, I went to the Rosedale area of the trail as it was a bit farther from the worst spots right by the river.
It was still pretty bad. The trail was covered in muck and large sections were washed away. But, I was able to follow the trail a ways and found some good shots.

I was filming some cool water ripples ( which didn’t make it into the film ) and I heard some splashing and whimpering upstream.
Two dogs were trying to cross the stream. But, the water was deep and fast so they would go back and you could see them struggle as they sunk in the muck and the mud. They would keep trying to cross and then move a bit downstream to try again. But, they couldn’t make it across. After each failed attempt, they would whimper and try to find another place to cross the stream.
They had collars on so I knew they belonged to someone.

I hopped in my car and ran to the store to get a big box of milk bones. I figure it would hold them over till I could get some help. I had no idea how long they had been out there or what their situation was.
When I got back, they were no where to be found. I was able to toss most of the box of bones across the creek in hopes they might come back.

I hung around and filmed some more and hoped they would come back but no sign of them.

As I was packing up my gear and headed back to the car, who comes walking down the road on my side of the creek? Yep, the two dogs. They must have made it to the bridge that crosses the creek and crossed over. They were headed down the road when I saw them. Now I was worried that they might get hit by a car as they were walking right down the middle of the road.

I called to them and they turned around and came over to me. I had a few bones left and they wolfed them down. They were obviously hungry.

I was able to make out the phone number on their collars and called it. The owner was an hour away from where I was with the dogs.
He said they let the dogs out several days ago to do their business and they never returned. There was a storm that night and he thought maybe they had been spooked and became disoriented or maybe they had chased a skunk and had simply lost their way.

So, I loaded up the dogs in my car, offered to drive them home but he said he would come and get them.
The dogs were exhausted. They were asleep in the car in less than a minute. Every now and then, one would lift his head to check things out but then would fall back asleep.
So, we all hung out till the owner came and picked them up. They were sure happy to see him and he likewise.

He said he had had one of the dogs “Hot Rod”, for almost thirteen years and she had arthritis and couldn’t get around very well. Struggling in the mud had exhausted her.

The other dog “Stubby”, was a rescue dog that they had only had for a year or two. She had spent her entire life locked up in a small cage on a damp concrete floor. He said that they were inseparable. Where one went, the other would always follow.

I said goodbye to “Hot Rod” and “Stubby” and started to pack up my gear and was getting ready to head out when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. A doe and her fawn had made their way down to the stream to drink. They were in shadows except for one spot of morning light that lit them up. It was almost as if I was being rewarded for taking the time to help out a couple of lost dogs.

If I hadn’t hung around to hold onto the dogs for an hour, I would have missed the opportunity to get this shot.

The doe and her fawn put a “face” to the wildlife that were displaced by the 500 year flood.

Kind of nice when karma works for you.

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