Greed – There’s No Place for it in Nature and Wildlife Filmmaking

I’ve written in previous posts about determination and effort. It’s important to have both if you’re serious about being a nature and wildlife cinematographer.  But if you throw greed into the mix, you tend to be out in nature for the wrong reasons.

The greed I’m talking about is the “I’m getting mine” attitude I hear about a lot lately.

Let me tell you about a couple that I’ve run into as well as some stories that I’ve read about.

Years ago I was filming a bear in Yellowstone. Now if you’ve been to Yellowstone when a bear has been spotted, you know what kind of crazy that occurs. People stop right in the middle of the road, open their car doors and run like mad towards the bear. Vehicles can be backed up an unbelievably long ways because of abandoned cars right in the middle of the road.

In the middle of this chaos, people are running all around trying to get photographs of the bear. Most have smart phones or point and shoot cameras that are going to do little more than show a brown blob way off in the distance.

In their frenzy to film a grizzly bear at any cost, they will run right in front of your camera. Can’t tell you how many clips I have of someone’s back that ran in front of me so that they could get their shot.

That’s really not the worst of it though.

I watched a TV show about a photographer that had found some beautiful lilies in a national park. He photographed them and the next day was bringing another photographer friend of his along so that he could get some images of these beautiful flowers. When they arrived at the spot, all that remained of the flowers were the stems. Another photographer had discovered them, photographed them then cut off the flower heads so that no one else could photograph them.

If you have to destroy something so that no one else can get a similar shot, you should hang up your camera right now because you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons.

I’ve watched photographers jump over railings that said do not go beyond this point but they did anyway. They wanted a composition that no one else would have so they broke the rules and in the process probably damaged fragile ground that may take decades to be whole again if ever.

I’ve watched people harass bison to try to get the bison to lift up its head for a better image. I’ve seen photographers drop Cheetos’s and Pop Tarts to lure ground squirrels into range so that they could get their images.

Delicate Arch in Arches National Park was damaged by a photographer that built a fire next to it at night so he could get one of a kind images.

There is no shot that is worth breaking the rules or disturbing wildlife over, period. You are a representative of all the filmmakers that come after you and if your greed gets in the way, you will bring on new restrictions to future opportunities to film nature and wildlife.

While you may not care about those that come after you as long as you get yours, what about the ones that came before you. You may have an opportunity to film something amazing one day only to have it ruined because of someone like you that happened upon the scene before you did and ruined it for everyone.

Think about it!
And as always, shoot the ordinary and make it extraordinary!