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Tuesday, January 18, 2011

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Chris Eckstrom and Frans Lanting are passionately committed to their work. For the past 20 years, the couple has traveled the globe enduring extreme conditions to produce award-winning books, magazine articles and multimedia presentations, as well as videos featured on the National Geographic channel, the PBS series Nova and the National Geographic website. Their biggest hope is that their work will inform the public about the wonders of the natural world and the urgency of protecting our shrinking natural habitats. Lanting is an internationally acclaimed photographer, while Eckstrom is a writer and videographer. The two met while working for National Geographic where Eckstrom was a staff writer for 15 years, and they have since gone on to a long and successful collaboration. To many observers, the couple has a dream career, but as anyone who has attempted to capture the behavior of animals in the wild can attest, coming back with the goods is no walk in the park.

Lanting and Eckstrom began their collaboration as photographer and writer, but they soon began to discuss the possibility of having Eckstrom also shoot video to accompany the beautiful still images that Lanting was capturing. “Our first attempts to combine video with still photography were in the early ‘90s, but the equipment wasn’t really as accessible, or as compact, as it has become in the last couple of years,” recalls Lanting. “It wasn’t until the late ‘90s with the arrival of compact digital video cameras that shooting video in remote locations seemed like a possibility.”

Eckstrom’s first video camera was the Sony DCR-TRV20, which she used to shoot a story on elephants in India’s Western Ghats. Her next purchase was the workhorse Sony DCR-TRV900, which many readers may recall as the first “broadcast-quality” prosumer camera.

Lanting and Eckstrom are based in Santa Cruz, Calif., but travel all over the globe for their assignments and have developed a dual packing system to ensure that their gear makes it to and from locations safely. “Typically we leave with a couple hundred pounds of gear from our studio in Santa Cruz, and we move things through airports in a combination of hard cases and soft luggage,” says Lanting. “We use Pelican cases, but they weigh a lot and they also stand out a lot. We got hit in Johannesburg a year ago. While in transit at the Jo’burg airport, someone snapped the locks off of a Pelican case and took off with all the video gear inside. Soft luggage is less conspicuous. What we often do is, once we get out of the airport in some city at the other end of the globe, we ditch the hard cases, and everything goes into soft luggage, backpacks and duffels, which are more compact and better suited to moving things around by car.

Filmmaker Chris Eckstrom and master still photographer Frans Lanting began their collaboration as writer and photographer, but Eckstrom started to shoot video to accompany Lanting's photo assignments.

“We use Tamrac photo packs and bags of all kinds,” continues Lanting. “We find they work well in the field, have a variety of accessories, as well as a modular system with pouches that latch onto photo packs. Depending upon how much stuff you need to bring into the field on a particular day, you can increase or decrease your pack in size or volume.”

Because much of their work involves hiking for miles through rough terrain, lightweight gear is a necessity, and it needs to be able to fit into situations where being fluid, mobile and inconspicuous is extremely important.

Eckstrom brings up an assignment in Senegal that required the couple to track chimpanzees through the bush. “We had to get up before dawn to be with the chimps before they got up,” she explains. “Otherwise we would never find them, and they would be off and running. So we had to hike with them all day long from the time they woke up to the time they went to bed, so we would know where they are the next morning. And that would sometimes be a 12-hour day, and we would be walking 10 to 15 miles to follow them all day long, and the temperatures would be super-hot and humid. Under those conditions, I have to have a light kit. I’m a really small person—I don’t weigh quite 100 pounds—so a 35-pound pack is about as far as I can go in order to keep up with chimps on the move.”

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