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John Isaac,
the distinguished former United Nations photographer, has been
traveling to his native India for the past 20 years to photograph
tigers and other indigenous wildlife. His images featured on
numerous United Nations posters and in two books (The Land of
the Kodas and Look Into the Glittering Eye) have helped raise
awareness about the plight of the tiger and India's other endangered species. |
In the past Isaac worked solely in film, always
carrying heavy gear complete with multiple lenses. This time,
however, he took a different approach.
"I wanted to shoot entirely in digital," he explains.
"Recently I began to work with Olympus digital cameras,
the C-2100 and the E-10. The results have been excellent."
Isaac traveled to India's Bandhavgarh National Park, where
he hired a naturalist to take him into the jungle.
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 "I didn't even know if I would
see any tigers," Isaac says. "And I was still a little
nervous about having the right equipment. At the same time I was really excited to try it out.
At Bandavegar I joined a group of people in jeeps and on elephants.
A call went out that the mahouts, the elephant drivers, had
spotted a tiger. I had a perfect view of him and I shot a lot
with the C-2100, which has an incredible zoom. The images were
fantastic, with lots of texture and detail. You could almost
feel the tiger's skin."
Over the next few days Isaac saw ten more tigers, including
a mother with two cubs and a 500-pound male tiger, which he photographed cutting across
a dried river bank and then lounging about a small cave. Isaac
used the C-2100's powerful zoom to capture the tiger's playfulness
up close. He also used the C-2100 and the E-10 to photograph
a variety of other animals, including wild boar, spotted and
sambar dear, as well as birds like Indian roller and rufus-backed
shrike. Both cameras afforded him the ease-of-use and flexibility
necessary to quickly capture the shots he wanted.
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In the process, Isaac was able to convert
two non-digital photographers, who have come to the jungle
laden with all their 35mm gear, and were busy changing lenses
as Isaac was shooting.
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| Isaac laughs about the encounter.
"They saw me with this little camera and probably thought
I was an amateur," he says. "The next day I showed
them the 4x6 printouts from the P-200 dye-sublimation printer
and they were amazed. They couldn't believe the sharpness and
the level of detail. They said they were going to buy digital
cameras the minute they got back home."
Following his visit to Bandhavgarh, Isaac traveled back to
Delhi where he rented a jeep for an 18-hour trip to Rajastha
and a visit to another jungle. Along the road he stopped to
photograph a group of women picking fruit. The women noticed
that he was photographing them and gathered around the jeep.
Isaac was able to instantly print the images on the P-200
and give them to the women as presents.
"You should've seen their faces," he says. "They've
never seen anything like this. They probably thought it was
a magic show."
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Isaac
is thrilled with the results of the trip. He plans to show the
photographs at several upcoming exhibitions, including one at
The Nehru Centre in London. And he is excited about using the
digital cameras for his other projects, one of which is photographing
pets. "I have been taking pictures of my two Bengal cats
with the E-10, and I've also begun to teach others how to photograph
their pets with a digital camera," he says. "After
all, little cats are as interesting to photograph as the big
ones, and you don't have to rush into the jungle
to do it." |
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