I have to be very careful when I’m trying to learn a local’s knowledge, because they’re going to agree with everything I do, instead of telling me, Nick, that’s stupid, you’re leaving your scent all over the trail, you’re coming back to this place too often. Because these people are not going to be very forceful with somebody from where I come from. They’re going to defer to me all the time. I can’t blame it on them — I can’t say, oh, my tracker didn’t know what he was doing. The tracker knows exactly what he’s doing, he didn’t know how to tell you that you were wrong. So it’s very important to try to get the local knowledge out of their head without tainting it. So I say, what would you do if you were here. Sometimes I say, what would you do if you were trying to kill this animal? They laugh and say, I wouldn’t kill the animal. They’re lying to me, of course.
When I first went out in the field, I spent every moment of daylight working. Every waking moment, I’m thinking about what I’m trying to do with the camera. Then I started to realize, okay, the middle of the day is no good for these animals. So that time I feed myself or wash. I set up a pattern where I can take care of my body, get as much active work in as possible, and the days just fly by.
I actually started getting much more homesick with the advent of satellite phones and email. Because I’m so connected to home, I really miss them. Before all this, I just used to disappear and come home three months later, and have sex in the car at the airport. I think Reba and I are kind of legendary for that. It’s a lot tougher with the new technology, because you’re so connected. Also, I don’t want to be distracted. When people know I can get emails in the field, they start asking me to do stuff. So that’s been a downside. I’d rather go for the total immersion. When I leave here, I’m completely immersed until I come back.
You can’t be in your tent, you can’t be back in town, there is no Miller Time for me. It’s all work. There was a time in my career when I would work 24 hours a day, because I liked night photography as much as I do the day, and I use flash a lot, but I’m older and wiser and use mostly daylight now. And don’t discount luck. My best pictures come from serendipity. Hard work makes my luck better, but ultimately I still need some luck.
Recent example is when I went to the coast of Gabon. Mike Fay and I had talked about that this was going to be the nirvana of the project, and it was going to be hippos and elephants sashaying down the beach, it’d be outdoors with the ocean instead of the deep cover of forest I’ve been chasing him in for ten years.
A film guy had been there about a year before and he said it was the worst experience of his life. He said he didn’t see anything but buffalo for three weeks.
When I got there, there was nothing. It was just beach. Some tracks. I knew the animals were there, because I had done my research and come at the right time. Every day, I’d go up the coast and one day I realized, wait a minute, the wind is always blowing at my back. Maybe my scent is scaring them all away. So then I would start earlier in the day and work in the opposite direction. And that cleared the scent of humans from the beach, and boom, there were the elephants.
On my tiger project, I spent 11 months following one wild tiger. She kept coming back to a particular set of cliffs, and the mahouk elephant driver said, you know, she’s got a secret water hole up there, that’s why she’s going up there. So we went up and sure enough, there’s a water hole that kept water even though it was 140 degree days, and in the highest part of the drought. So we put a camera trap in there, and that’s where we started getting major success. But then one day I’m sitting up there and this tiger goes up and jumps across a cliff. Wow! I bet he does that every time he comes in here. And then another time, a female tiger, she’s coming the other direction and she jumped across the cliff. So we realized, this is their route, the cliff jump. So we put a camera trap on that and that’s how we got the picture of the tiger in midair. We got one frame in three months. We got a tiger’s tail a couple of times, when they were going the other way, and bats broke the beam a couple of times, but we got this kind of awesome picture. And that was purely from nose to the grindstone.
