So many species are at risk now every color of the rainbow's at risk. This is a big deal and a big problem. The goal of my project is to try to get the public to care about extinction. The thing is, as I've been doing, these portraits for the past 15 years or so more than 11 000 animals. If they're, really beautiful and striking, we notice that's just human nature. We've seen the colors of animals literally get them saved from extinction.
It gets people's attention, they stop, they look, and maybe they want to learn what they could do to try to save them. So this trip started out with a visit to the Lincoln children's zoo in Nebraska, most of the animals that we're working with on this trip are born and raised in human care and just very tolerant of us. That gives us the time we need with this Oppo phone to really work the pictures and craft them well. It's got a lens array, which is great, because then we can compress distance and then there's another lens for microscope, which is good for feather details and that kind of thing we use true white light, and we try to get in close and wait for a good moment to happen. A nice clean background, good light and something interesting.
Those three ingredients are what help you get close to the perfect picture, not that I'm sure I've ever shot a perfect picture, but I try with the gray crown cranes at Lincoln. We couldn't really physically get close because they're skittish, but what we did is use a selfie stick and then stick that out towards them, and they tolerated that just fine. So that worked out very well with the cheetah. We could get right up in the face of her because she's very tractable, her name's Bella at the world bird sanctuary. We photographed a thick build parrot, which is a native to Mexico, and this one was named Arizona because they did range up into Arizona at one time.
Thick-Built parrots have been on the verge of extinction for many years, and zoos have really helped to save them through captive breeding. That's the case with a lot of the animals we meet with the blue, frogs they're, very vivid, and they make for great pictures on black, especially we find that black really brings out the colors. Most cameras would want to open that up or brighten it, because it sees too much black. No, we can set this exactly as we want it, so the black remains very rich and the colors really glow, and it shoots raw files, which is amazing. At the john ball zoo in Michigan, we have a red panda named Wyatt who's, pretty laid back.
He didn't like our table-top set up very much, so he hopped down and ran around a little, and then we literally built a kind of playpen on the floor for his offspring to kind of play around in and that worked out wonderfully. We just kind of adapt. These different sets to whatever the animal would like. They work for cubes of cut up sweet potato, including standing up on their hind legs for a little, so that was wonderful. I've used a variety of cameras and lenses over the years, a variety of lighting variety of techniques, but the bottom line is always the same.
Really, the animal pictures are a way of getting the public engaged in nature, so, whether it's an animal in red or green or blue or any color in the rainbow every species is a new opportunity for us to reach people to try to save the world. What could be better than that? You.
Source : phone's