Regal Fritillary butterflies are pretty rare in my neck of the tallgrass prairie. A few have been spotted over the years but their locations have been kept secret to protect them and their habitat. Regal fritillaries have the sad distinction of being a rare butterfly in a rare habitat. Only one tenth of one percent of [...]
When you first start out shooting nature and wildlife, you tend to do two things. The first is to try to duplicate what other filmmakers are doing. The second is to get opinions on your footage. Both of these can be good, but sometimes getting the opinions of others can actually do you more harm [...]
Welcome to the Blogging A to Z Challenge! I’m participating for the first time this year in this activity where we blog every day for the month of April (except Sundays), posting a blog post each day for each letter of the alphabet. While I often grab my camera and head out with a specific plan [...]
When it comes to nature and wildlife filmmaking, I tend to say "I wish" a lot. I wish I would see more wildlife, I wish I could travel to Australia, I wish I'd finish my film about the tallgrass prairie. I find that I tend to wish a lot. But something happened recently that made me [...]
Sometimes the hardest part about nature and wildlife filmmaking is editing. You can shoot the most incredible footage but if your goal is to make films from your footage, you need to learn to edit. Editing however is more than just trimming clips down to size, placing them on a timeline and adding some music [...]
Traveling with Film Gear is Never Easy It's no secret that when travelling to film nature and wildlife you want to take as much gear as possible. You never know what you will need and you can be sure that if you didn't bring it, you will be in a filming situation where you wish [...]
David sent me an email asking "if you have never shot wildlife before do you recommend scouting a location before going out to shoot to see where the animals typically are or just go out and learn by trial and Error?" The short answer is yes. The long answer is going to be a little [...]
One of filmmaking's greatest strengths is its immediacy. You may think you live in dull surroundings, but the camera captures and frames things the human eye may overlook. Furthermore, it captures a precise span of time, moments that could prove to be important in ways or to people you may never have imagined. Filming nature [...]
It's not often that I film subjects outside of nature and wildlife. However, I think the challenge of going outside your comfort zone by shooting different situations makes you a better filmmaker. So here is an evening of fireworks in the small town I used to live in a few years ago. I think they [...]
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