There’s no specific formula for how to pursue a career in wildlife photography
and field science.
Everybody has to find their own way.
The most important thing
for me is that you need to be completely passionate about your work.
It’s more of a lifestyle
than a job.
My name is Tim Laman.
I'm a field biologist and a wildlife photographer.
I live in Lexington, Massachusetts, near Boston,
and I work all over the world. But I especially
spend a lot of time going to the tropical rainforest regions of the world
such as the Amazon,
and especially, New Guinea and Indonesia.
I grew up in Japan.
I went to Japanese public school.
I can remember that when I was in first and second grade, I had a small pet turtle.
And as part of a school exercise,
we were to write poems about something, and I wrote a poem in Japanese about my pet turtle.
And my poem was, well, it was selected to be published in the
local newspaper there.
So I guess my first publication
was this little poem I wrote
about my pet turtle in second grade.
I think I really got
intrigued with bird photography because
birds are challenging. They’re not easy -
there's flight, interesting behavior, color.
There’s lots of aspects to bird photography that are a little different than other kinds of wildlife.
I guess I like the challenge of it, as well as the beauty, and just, you know,
being out, being outdoors.
When I was twelve, on one of the summers
when we were back in the United States,
my father took me on my first real sort of experience in the wilderness.
He took me on a canoe trip up in Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota,
where we paddled our canoe off into the wilderness and spent a whole week.
And I don’t think we saw anybody
for several days.
I just found that really exciting, this idea of being out there in the
wilderness, catching fish to eat for dinner, and I think that was a real
inspirational trip for me.
I really developed this love of wild places that I keep seeking out to this day.
There wasn’t a specific moment that I can remember having an epiphany or anything, where I
realized, oh yeah, I want to become a wildlife photographer or field biologist.
It was a gradual process of pursuing various things that interested me and
finding my way to this current career that I’m pursuing.
When I went to college, I was very interested in biology.
I began to
look for opportunities to get involved in research and fieldwork.
I found out about a project
in Borneo.
I was fascinated by the rainforests. I’d never been to a rainforest.
I was living at this
research camp for an entire year,
and after many months, I really had this desire to,
you know, see the sunset or get a little more distant view.
I mean, the forest is, is so tall.
I got a friend to bring out some ropes and
I was able to climb up the rope and get up there.
And that’s kind of what got me started on exploring the rainforest canopy.
Since few scientists
bother to take that difficult step of climbing up into the tree tops, it’s really
kind of a wide-open field of research.
That canopy level of the forest is really where most of the action is.
Most people who look at
pictures in National Geographic Magazine,
they have no idea how much work goes into every shot.
For me,
I don’t have any qualms about spending one week to get one amazing shot.
I’m not going to take one picture, I may take a couple thousand pictures during
that week,
but my goal is really just to get one
publishable image.
What I’m doing now, being a wildlife photographer as well as scientist,
it really kind of requires a combination of skills or mindsets.
This combining of my scientific background and my photography interest,
it's a perfect kind of combination to make these expeditions where
I'm trying to photograph and record
wildlife to tell stories, but I'm also making scientifically valuable
collections at the same time.
To me, that's the best of both worlds.
I really enjoy going to these remote places
and I love the experiences of
seeing the wildlife,
being there firsthand
and seeing a Parotia Bird-of-Paradise do its incredible ballerina dance
right in front of me.
But then the really satisfying thing about it is
that I’m able to share with others
and have people see these places that they wouldn’t get to see.
Being able to be
the eyes to tell the stories
and to share that with people around the world
makes it really satisfying.