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Transcript of "Wildlife Photography with Mark Seth Lender ’71, MA’74"
Danielle Friedman: I'd like to officially welcome everybody. Hello and welcome to Wildlife Photography with Mark Seth Lender. I'll introduce our speaker in a moment. Please note that this event is being recorded and it will be shared via the Brandeis virtual programming platform after Thanksgiving. We will also be engaging in a Q&A session after Mark's presentation. Please feel welcome to send your questions in the Q&A box as they come up. Technical photography questions are welcome. Mark Seth Lender is a producer and explorer in residence for the nationally broadcast public radio program, Living On Earth. Today, we'll get an insider look into Mark's visual process from his field work with wildlife, photographing animals and their behaviors. The imagery we're about to see serves as the basis for his broadcast essays and also stands on its own as beautiful and thoughtful photography. Mark Seth Lender is a Phi Beta Kappa Summa Cum Laude graduate of Brandeis University Class of 1971 and also holds a masters in anthropology from the university. I'm pleased to introduce Mark Seth Lender.
Mark Seth Lender: Hello, everyone. The work I'm going to show you today is being shown in this format and under the heading of the decisive sequence, for the very first time. This is something I've been working on for a number of years. The basic idea comes out of the fact that when we look at wildlife photography, there really are no iconic moments. Now, if I say to you, sailor, kissing a nurse and bending her backwards, immediately, an image comes to mind for almost all of us. By the way Danielle, who was not born when any of this happened, not until after the photographer who took that picture is already long gone. Knew immediately what I was talking about and of course that's the end of World War Two times square, the sailor kissing the Secretary. The photograph was taken by Alfred Eisenstadt, but the idea of a decisive moment and God knows that was a decisive moment, comes from Cartier-Bresson, whose book The Decisive Moment. I'm not sure you can see that title. There we go and that you should be able to see it there. This is a cover of course by Matisse, these people traveled in heavy circles, had the idea that if you are looking at human interactions and you take the right photograph, you capture the whole thing and with very little explanation. But of course, when it comes to human beings, we know the context. When it comes to animals and wildlife and even nature generally, we don't know the context. Even landscape, is somewhat problematic. Manet, for example, painted the haystacks, which I'm sure you're all familiar with at least 30 times. He said,'' It's such a problem for me, the light is changing so quickly, I have to paint them already.'' He had stacks of these canvases and he would shift them one after the next to catch the light as it changed. Is one of those Haystacks the perfect case stack? No, they're all together a set which explains that idea of changing light an aspect and this scene in a field which was completely, if you think about it plebeian and simple. Yet he made such a wonderful and complete artistic statement out of it and it was by looking at the whole. I'm going to show you a series of images that work in that direction. I'm going to share my screen with you now and if the gods of technology are willing. How are we doing Danielle, can we see it?
Danielle Friedman: We're doing great. .
Mark Seth Lender: Okay. These are Sandhill Crane said I photographed at the Bosque del Apache in December a few years ago. It was freezing cold morning, about 20 degrees. This pair of Sandhills, I had focused on because I had them well lined up. Well, there were about 70 birds on the pond. It was a frozen pond, but as I said, about 20 degrees in the morning very early. I'd gotten there before sunrise and I'm waiting for these guys to take off. Every bird on that pond takes off except for this pair and I mean literally every bird, my fingers are numb, I can barely feel the camera to take the photograph and then they leaned down and they go. My other title for this is Nijinsky pursued by the agliev, who has come back as a bird. They're just absolutely dancers, their magnificent and do we really point to one frame? I'm going to run them back again. Out of all of these, can we point to one frame and say, well, that's the frame and you cant. What this shows us is really the first thing that draws us to nature is its enormous beauty. The next thing we realize is that each moment, has a certain precious about it, a certain value and a certain merit and unless we've seen them all and unless we really look, we really don't have the picture. We have to deal with the hole. In this one called Cain and Able are can and able to reach an understanding, move to something which is an interaction. If you look at the size of those beaks and the fervor that these birds approach each other with, your first ideas is they're trying to kill each other. But if we look really closely, we see something very interesting in the behavior and that is in spite of the fact that they could do each other quite a bit of damage. They don't, they have a very ritualized back and forth, grabbed the beak, let the beat go when leans over the other and they very studiously avoid each others eyes. A lot of birds do that. It's not the first time I've seen it, but it's a particularly good example. This is too young siblings on the same nest, which is at this point has gotten quite crowded and they're at each other because one of their parents has just returned to feed them and having gone at each other, which is a sort of No, I want get fed. No, I want get fed, No, I want get fed. They eventually reach an understanding and are reminded along with their sister. These are two males, but what they really after is mom because she's got the stuff, then they encouraged her to feed them. That's okay. Today, have all indeed reached an understanding. But we're still in the realm of the what? We look at the sand hill cranes, we say, Oh, Samuel cranes and they're taking off. We'd look at the Great Blue Herons and we see an interaction in which they practice restraint was still in the, what we want to know, what's happening, what they are, what their name is, and we're naming names and naming parts. If we come to a polar bear and this one was shot by me, these are photographs I took about 571 miles from the North Pole in the asphalt above the Svalbard Archipelago.. You have a polar bear lying on the ice, so we can say, okay, polar bear. If we look a little closer, we'll see that this is one really overheated polar bear, which is why it's in contact with the ice like that. That it's very full, which means this polar bear has just eaten an entire seal. We can go a step further and note that there's no rough buffer on the forelimbs that there really isn't any main like structure around the head. We know this is a female polar bear. A very full can't believe, ate the whole thing. Female polar bear. Now she has noticed me, not just the ship, but that there are people on the ship. We have her interest. Not because she's hunting us. She's twofold for that. Not because she's hostile, because they really aren't. They have no need to be hostile. They know they're the top dog, believe me they do. They're very smart. The inner would always say, polar bear will, is smarter than you. I always say polar beer will outsmart you. They do. But she wants to know more about us. She gets up, comes through the water, shakes, just all fall off like a dog and just keeps coming into She's right in front of the ship and she makes eye contact with every single person leading on the rail. Now, if you weren't cognizant of all of this and you just looked at this frame or this frame, you'd be scared to death. But it actually and you can see there's blood on her nose that's from the seal, not not any of us. Actually. That's a stress yawn because she's just fascinated and amazed and a little bit frightened, not having ever seen us before. But she has a fundamental question. That question about me and about the people who were standing near me is so profound that she overcomes for fear. By the way, this is not a polar bear who wants to attack you. That's a typical gesture of bears when they are afraid. Yet she holds eye contact and continues to look and stands up and stood there like this. She is from here to here, eight feet tall, and just stood there and looked. We can read her mind and she is thinking, what are you people? What are you? What kind of barrier you? Where did you come from? What are you? She stood there and stood there and stood there with their paws tucked in, thinking a thought. I could read her mind just as she's trying to read mine. That's no longer the one. That's the who. When an animal looks you in the eye, it's asking a very different question than one. Now you have a window into my process and why I photograph the way I do and what these photographs do for me because they form a writer's notebook that informs me of what's happening. I can take notes, but I would never be able to see with the acuity of the camera. I would never capture these moments in the way the camera captures them frequently. I'm shooting at 15-16 friends a second. That's about half the speed of video. I'm shooting at very high resolution with very good equipment. While I'm interested in things like focus and getting the light right and all of that. My primary interest is in what's happening. For those of you who are photographers, very often these things are shot in low-light or no light. They're shot always at high frame rates from which I have to compromise even more how much light is coming into the camera. Sometimes I turn the film sensitivity setting called the ISO, which is like ASA. For those of you who are familiar with film photography, this is of course, digital photography. I turn the ISO way, way up and take my chances because what I'm really after is the image cardiac Britt song, by the way, whom I mentioned, never worked with a light meter, never put a filter on a lens. I don't even know any filters. He tended to use the same normal lens on his little Leica, but then he was shooting people who were close and he didn't have any chance of being eaten. That is not always the case with me. I am very frequently shooting just in the opposite way with very long lens. They hadn't even attenuates the light more. But still taking my chances on what I get. There we are in the who. This is called Quo Vadic. On June fifth, little after five o'clock in the morning, I was out photographing offspring. I'm actually going to show you one of the offspring's shot on the same day here at my home on Long Island Sound. Danielle, how we doing for sound? Can can you hear me okay. Still? Okay. And I heard splashing to my right. I looked and I started screaming because to the point where my wife thought something had happened to me because something was coming down the beach that I've seen many times before, but never in this setting we're about 30 feet from the water and write on high up on pilings above the timeline. What appears. But these guys, a herd of deer, came down the salt water and stopped almost directly in front of me to recognize door. They have a very young buck leading them. He's only got one point. This is his door. This is her Calf of the previous year. This too young to have had this calf with her. She is if you look at her belly pregnant, all what stuff. But look at their eyes and their faces and watch where they look and you can see, their uncertainty. He has led them into almost to call the sack. And they're very anxious. And they have limits, of how much they trust this bug, and they're right, because he really doesn't know what he's doing. He never should have led them down, the shore line like that without knowing a point of exit. Eventually, he decides he's going to continue up the coast. And because, he is after all the leader, they decide to follow him, and off they go. Of course, we are still in a moment of enormous beauty. This is the curve, of the year leaping, in the almost no light or five o'clock in the morning. This is well before the sun came up. Again for you photographers, this was shot, I believe at ISO 3200. And at about, probably around the twelve-hundredth of a second, to capture these images probably got actually closer to one-two-thousandth of a second. But what we've seen, and I want to roll back over that. What we've seen, is animals thinking. They look at me. They look at each, they look around, they look at each other. What are we going to do now. Now, I want to focus for a minute on that eye contact. So, we find that polar bears and white-tailed deer, and in a moment I'm going to show you a bird doing the same thing. Look you in the eye, and I want you to ask this question of yourself. How does an animal, like a polar bear or a white-tailed deer even recognize your face, and having recognized that, why did they look at you? Obviously, they see something to which they relate. Obviously, they understand that there's a connection. Now we have spent 2,000 years trying to deny that connection and undo it. And it has not served us well, because we're very close to living on a dead planet. Begins with the Aristotle, my least favorite of the Greeks, who made a direct cut and separation between animals on the one hand and humans on the other. And of course, we're so much superior. And we have taken that and run with it, for all those millennia since, the apotheosis of that idea, is reached by the cow, who said that animals like these deer, like there's polar bear I showed you, like the sand hill cranes. That animals, are simply sophisticated automata, that they have no mentation, that they do not have emotions, that they simply react and, have a response to stimuli. And that they're only in the bearer is sense alive. Well, that's convenient thing to say because, it means, we can shoot them, poacher them, kill them, do whatever we want to them. And, it's very interesting that the idea begins with Aristotle. I very much doubt our committees, or Aristarchus or Pythagoras or any of the Stoics, would have felt that way or said those things. But Aristotle does, he's a very pragmatic guy. God help us and save us from practical men. I would add as an aside, and I think most of you in this audience will get this. Kosher rules were developed in part, very likely for the humane treatment of animals, as you may or may not know, if you're coming in from the field with your farm animals, with your horses, your draw horse for example. And that horse is tired, and thirsty, and hungry. The whole offer says you feed that horse first, you give him water first, you put a blanket on him and, rub him down and we don't care how tired or how hungry you are. The horse gets taken care of first. We take care of other life that's like us. We have a flood. We put the animals on the boat as well as the human beings. No of course, we get that idea from the ancient Sumerians. But then again, where did Abraham come from or the colonies, which was in Sumerian city. So this all fits together. They had this humane idea about animals. It distinguished them from the Greeks who we know from, fossils of the time, not fossils but remains that we found would work in animal with a broken leg until it died. They just didn't, there was, no concern for the suffering over their life, and we made a sea change in that. I'm going back the other way, and trying to, bring us to a point of view and understanding of that, that look, that who, that we or them and they are us. This might be a point to break in for some questions of any kind. If we have something, Danielle, you want to.
Danielle Friedman: Yeah, I have one question that I think may be of interest at the moment, and then we can go into more depth afterwards in our Q&A. So we have a question, and it says, still photographs in sequence, tell a story. But enough still photographs, in a fast enough sequence, make a moving picture. Why do you shoot stills rather than video? What did video tell a more complete story with 24 MR. Photographs per second?
Mark Seth Lender: That's an excellent question, and the answer is, no video falls at all up. And the reason is that instead of giving you discrete moments, discrete sections, it tends to blur things. And that's true even of slow motion, we see a different kind of overview, when we take high resolution stills, gives us the time to examine every frame, and what does that do? That lets us see the way animals see. Their visual acuity, even if it's about the same, you probably, a deer probably doesn't see too much better than you do a little bit. But the way they process that information, the rapidity with which they process, the subtlety of the cues that result, would be entirely missed in video. You really need the still frames. You really need to look at every frame, not too quickly. Not at 24 frames a second, much less 30 frames, which is what digital video would give you. In order to understand, what is happening in front of you, in order to see the way animals see. To take that a little further, we're dealing with birds. The reaction time of a bird is at least 30 percent faster, than yours. Generally speaking, for a bird to receive a stimulus, have it go to the brain and go back to its point of origin so that it can react. Takes about a 130 milliseconds for a human being, it's closer to 200. If you don't believe that try to sneak up on a bird sometime not going to happen, can't do it. And, you combine that with the fact that their visual acuity, is a couple of orders of magnitude, a couple of orders of magnitude greater than ours. And if you want to see, life like a bird, you need a high-speed camera and you need it to be still, you'll never capture them otherwise. I'm going to move to the next frame sequence, which is of an awe spray shot the same morning is as these deer and almost no light. I mean, certainly, you might be able to capture that sequence in a video, but, you wouldn't get a sense of that eye contact in the same way. So, whoops, this is not the one I want to go to but it'll do. Sometimes when I shoot, I don't realize what I've got until, I get it back into the studio and it's over. This can be true of videos as well, by the way, and I do occasionally issue a video. This is a, just fledged male returning to nest. And, what has happened here is this parent, a male, the father of this brood, has stepped over his younger, less dominant chick, to protect her from that returning fledgling. And, he grabs him by the head when he lands. So, let's look at that one more time. Here he comes he players his wings, and grabs him, and says now settled down. In a video that would have taken place in less than a tenth of a second, you'd never see it. You really have to capture it in stills, and doesn't harm him, doesn't harm the young bird. But he gets him to quiet down. And then what happens next is truly extraordinary. Everybody's in place. We have these beautiful images of wings. The bird settled in, and if you look right here, you'll see the young male who just returned to the nest, nuzzling his father. Now birds don't do that. The only time they really touch each other as if they're doing what's called the allopreening, which is mutual preening and most species don't do that either. Watch him nozzle and nozzle that male. I'll be good, I promise I didn't mean to upset you. I'm a nice person. Don't be mad at me. Meanwhile, the other ones just in a begging posture, and he goes on and on like that. Please don't, please don't reject me, please don't harm me. And then ducks down into this crouch, which is a feed me pose. And eventually the male feeds them both. This great deal of humanity in that, if you scold a child and grab them by the shoulder and said come down, that might be the response. Particularly, if you're a good parent and the kid knows that he or she can make amends with you, so this is the answer to video. I told you this was shot, I had the sequence wrong. That was actually shot at a Great Blue Heron worker worry about 20 miles from my house. We're very lucky here in Connecticut, there's a lot of wildlife. And if you spend some time looking for it, every bit as rewarding as Yellowstone National Park. In fact, the only thing we don't have in Connecticut that they have in Yellowstone is there are three species primarily, and they are rocky mountain, big horn, sheep, wolves, and grizzly bears. But we've got everything else. We have mountain lions, we have Moose, we have Sandhills cranes, the Sandhills I showed you came from the Bosco Della pod J and New Mexico. What we do in the northern west corner of the state have Sandhills in the winter, we very lucky. And we also of course have Osprey. And here is an osprey who's just captured a fish, shaking water off himself just like a domestic dog. And so here again is great familiarity. When he finishes doing that, and as he flies by me, what does he do? He looks at me, right at me. They see very, very well. I mean, very well. They probably have about a million receptors in their eyes as opposed to our 200 thousand, and he's looking right at me. And by the way, he did this when he was even farther away, looked right at me, made eye contact. You don't have a common genetic ancestors were the bird have not had for 325 million years. 325 million years. That's three-fifths of the time, animals with faces have been on earth. And yet here we are, and here he is, and he's looking at you. By the way, there is a possibility, speaking of birds that we may be interrupted by a very loud knock. If that happens, that is Smuggle the Seagull. Smuggle the Seagull has been knocking on my door to be fed for 14 years. He's roughly 16-17 years old now, and he's a herring gull. A wild herring gull makes his living in Long Island Sound, but figured out it was possible to train humans, and he has done, and when he knocks, I drop what I'm doing and I'm run. Maybe that statement about I will offer, I take it seriously. If this animals are angry, I go. He has food preferences, which he has shown me both in terms of size and shape and where he wants to eat on the food chain which is very low down, and it's way beyond eye contact. Smuggle doesn't think I'm very bright, but he does think I'm more or less malleable. We had a day where he came. It was very hot. He knocked, I brought food out for him and he off, in a little bit, was very cranky and left and he was panting, like this, which birds do it's called galore breathing. Came back again, knocked, panting even harder. Didn't need any food. Very cranky left came back a third time, walked away from me on the deck, turned around and face me and went, which birds don't do. And I ran and got him additional water and put it out, filtered water by the way, and he drank and drank and drank and drank and drank. Then instead of flying away, like he usually does, stood back a little and looked at me like, you are dumb as this dumb. Three times I had to ask for a drink of water on a hot day and took off. So what this bird did, a herring gull, which we don't really think very much about most of us was, he used repetition and exaggeration to get the stupid human to do what he wanted, so there we are. Life is very, very closely related. Danielle, anything else any another question that might hit on some of this?
Danielle Friedman: Not at the moment.
Mark Seth Lender: Not at the moment, okay, then I'm going to divide this by the way is on. This is smuggle's portrait. I don't have a picture of him handy, but that's him and that's really what he looks like. And by the way, it's not just eye contact. That's what that bird looks like. This is his book. Every Seagull, every harrowing role has a slightly different face, a different manner of carrying themselves, a different personality, a different voice. There is individual as we are, and I think that is worth remembering. Osprey also have slightly different personalities, not through the extent of seagulls because herring gulls are pretty much extraordinary, but there is that element of personality. This goes back to the who again, that there really is who. And then our offspring goes on his way with his flounder, and he's off. Here we have an even more complex interaction of this is an Atlantic walrus that I encountered at the (foreign language), which is in this Svalbard archipelago in a large fjord. There's the sand bar there and walrus are known to haul out, and the great thing about walrus and Svalbard is they haven't been hunted for 60 years, and so they're for walrus, pretty tolerant of humans. Nevertheless, they are really big and really formidable. And I had made landing and set up and there was a herd ahead of us in this one old guy who was returning to his herd, and SaaS. They don't see all that well, but they see well enough. That's a blue iceberg. That's one of the glaciers nearby. Just to give you some context and that is the background behind poorly pins on the day that I had this encounter and shot these photographs. Very overcast, very dark. And there's the herd. And here's the walrus who turning and he sees me. This piece is called walrus changes his mind in the text that I wrote about it, and down the BG comes and he looks right at me and he gets up and says, in effect, what the hell are you doing here? And kind of relax this and says, well, I guess you're probably not that much deal with, yeah, you probably don't mean any harm or at least aren't capable of doing any. But I don't know, maybe you are. I'm not so sure about you. You're really making me angry. You see that red in the eye. That's one angry walrus. This is several tons of angry walrus who at this point is about 50-60 feet away, and the little photographer, me, is trying to decide if I'm going to take time to lay down my very expensive long lens and camera body and then run, or I'm just going to run because over a short distance, he can move it about 20 miles an hour. And I want to tell you, nobody can run, hit a short stretch of beach and it was really keep really had it. He's an old walrus, he's got a lot of scars and he's really tough. And he relaxes a little bit, and then he looks at me one more time and he says, well, you just stay where you are, and he leaves. And he goes back and joins the herd. That's a little animation we did him clumping up and he's greeted. That is an artifact, they don't really point their fingers at each other. But all the while, he keeps an eye, every once in a while he looks back and keeps an eye on me just to make sure I don't move. Believe me, I didn't move. That's pretty complex behavior. To look at you, to assess you, to think about letting you habit, to change your mind, to communicate. And in that communication, one of the interesting things that happens there is the walrus assumes you get it, just like Smeagull the Seagull assumed I can be communicated with, that I get it, that I know what he wants, that eventually I can be made to understand. And here again as a statement of the oneness of animals with faces now. Before I go on to a closing piece, I want to add something about that statement, about faces and animals. We have only had eyes on this planet. We have only had faces because eyes make the face. We have only had faces since the Cambrian, 541 million years ago. Sounds like a very long time, half a billion years, until you consider that life has probably been on Earth for 4.1, 4.2, maybe as much as 4.3 billion years. Started with something not at all like us. Some sort of extremophile gradually progressed after quite a bit of time, at maybe 3.7, 3.8, 3.9 billion years ago to something like cyanobacteria. Which I already had a cell wall and a sheath and lived in colonies and was sensitive to light and darkness, which means they had opsins, like the opsins in our eyes that let us see. But it was still, several billion years before we actually had eyes that's in the Cambrian. The animals with eyes have been on earth for less than one ninth of the time, life has been on earth, alright, or just about one ninth. 127th of the time since the beginning of the universe, we are relative to time and space are very small cohort, and there is a tendency for all animals with eyes, a tendency not every single animal does this to recognize each other's faces, that extends to paper wasps, honeybees, bumblebees, dragonflies. Not just mammals, not just vertebrates, not just animals that are very much like us, but animals that are barely like us. It isn't just mountain gorillas that recognize you as being similar. Polar bears as we saw due to. All this life is closely related. All this life is very precious. It is ridiculous for us to assume that we can get rid of everything else on this planet and continue to survive ourselves. It's just a wrongheaded idea. So before I read the last piece I'm going to do for you. Any of you want a break or should I continue, Danielle?
Danielle Friedman: Let's go through a lot of my sequence and then we have some really exciting and relevant.
Mark Seth Lender: Okay, very good. I think we may have run, did we run the last sequence? I think we did.
Danielle Friedman: If you're ready, we could also go right into the questions.
Mark Seth Lender: Well, no we're going to do this piece which I wrote. I'm going to read you something from my radio work. This one hasn't been broadcast yet, but it'll give you an idea of what I do with these images. Contrary to everything I've been telling you, that it requires sequences every once in a while, a single photograph will tell the story. This piece was written for Earth Day of this year. It's called The Day of Perfect Sight because this is after all, 2020. The occasion that made me write it, aside from the wildlife, I've been looking at, much of which you've just seen and particularly the deer and the osprey and I'm going to show you some Ibis. But the occasion that particularly brought me to write it was the Passover Seder, the penstock Seder, which for our family has always been the most important holiday. Well, we couldn't have when this year and I'm sure a lot of you are in the same boat. There wasn't any Easter, there wasn't any pace of Seder, there wasn't any Christmas and it looks like there's not going to be any thanksgiving because we're in a terrible moment. The politics of it I won't get into, but you can imagine how I feel about the way this country has handled the virus. Much more could have been done and many lives, could have been saved. Now, here we are living in a time of plague. So I wrote this. It was my reaction to it. The particular photograph that brought a lot of this into a point of focus for me is this one, and it's a single frame. These are ibis very early in the morning. The ibis had already returned to their nests on a barrier island that I can see from where I'm sitting now in my office. Very persistent these ibis, nothing dissuades them. If you look at this extraordinary color in view of the background and that globe of the sun up and them crossing the sun. Actually, what you're seeing is quite terrible because the reason the sky is that color is because the air is absolutely filthy. There's all kinds of particulates and garbage. A lot of it based on auto exhaust. Other things that we've kicked into the air, dust and coal dust and it's made the air, air quality in Connecticut in particular are very poor. That single image captures both the return of these ibis who have come back here to breed. It gives you an idea of what they're up against, which is the destruction of the world around them, even the atmosphere which we have engender. I'm going to read you that piece. The Day of Perfect Sight. "The angel Luca strides across the earth. His gold wings and gold robes too bright for mortal human beings to look upon. He holds a black sword. It glows, sputters like a candle and drips a black oily fire and the smoke of it makes the air impossible to breath. Where his foot falls, the water turns fall and impossible to drink. Life cannot live in his shadow nor in his light. Abroad among us He knows no bounds or borders and strides the seven continents at will. No red mark painted on the lintel of your house will prevent him. All magics fail. There will be plagues. A plague of darkness, a plague of fire, a plague of drought, a plague of flood, a plague of amphibious creatures and those that only swim, and those that on the walk on solid ground. A plague upon the creatures of the air, a plague of fever, a plague of the firstborn, who are now the oldest among us. We are in slavery. We cannot see the horizon. A flock of birds pass overhead. Sure, in their flight. Grady eaglets, the first of their tribe cross the byte toward the tidal flats where they will feed. Then osprey sailing against the curling grease down the shoreline towards the sun, osprey are a month late, grade eaglets are a month early, no matter they are here. There was a pair of grebes diving and fishing above the sandbars and cruising behind crested mergansers the white disc brakes, head markings. I've seen the both of them many times, but never here in this closed stretch of water. Double crested cormorants, they are the harbingers. This morning I heard an oyster catcher and yesterday glossy ibis, only a handful. But look, now on this day, different from all other days and nights, the entire, the whole migration, ibis and the long line cleaving dark and low beside the breakwaters toward the barrier island. Their wings beat the flashing of waves roiling just beneath the lift and circle and break apart, sputtering like leaves among the islands, beneath the streets where they will nest and breed and lay down their precious cargo. A flock of snow is white plumage adorned for the season than its intent rise in greeting deep in the woods, a great blue heron tend for young grady eaglets now in their numbers, sit and wait. The manacles are rusted but have no locks. One kick would be enough to break the chains. Luca, the Angel in his golden aspect roams even the lands of ice and the lands without rain. Next year or the year after we will banish him, the angel and his minions forever from our oceans and our cities and our mountains and our plains. We will bid them depart. Once like the child Moses, we were drawn to shiny things, but our hand was stayed. Though we took instead the burning ember and touched our lips and were burned. We are not destroyed. We are still here. The earth will have its day." Your children and your children's children, will be led out of slavery. We were captive to the brilliant that was an empty meal with no saver and no meaning. They will live and you will live to see it. Thank you.
Danielle Fredman: Thank you so much Mark, such a beautiful pieces of writing. So we are going to spend about 7-8 minutes, in a Q&A section. We have some great questions for you. Then I'm going to share with everybody some information before we say, good afternoon. So, let's start with a very technical question. A lot of interests and similar question from a lot of people, is for those who are casual photographers and might only have an iPhone, as we encounter local wildlife. What settings or camera apps do you recommend, so we can get the best possible shot? Also included in that, somebody had asked about, what you think about the new iPhone 12 Pro Max camera for similar purposes, for sheeting, encountering local wildlife?
Mark Seth Lender: I'll start with the the most recent iPhone. From what I understand, that phone, there's also a very good Samsung. The previous generation is also very good. These cameras, these little cameras in these phones, do almost all the work for you. There really isn't a lot to do except point-and-shoots. So I have two recommendations. Be very steady and think about where you're pointing. If you want to be able to see, if you're shooting at something that's relatively dark, which is to say, there's a lot of light behind what you're shooting. But you can see it, in fact, we're having problems in this setting because if I get in just the right place, my face is in the light and if I lean forward, it's brighter behind me. So it's very difficult to get. So that's the thing I'm talking about. If there's a lot of light behind, you want to focus on, the darker part of the image and that will bring everything you're trying to see that darker section, assuming that that's your target, the exposure will be set more correctly for that. So the first thing I would say is, considered where you're pointing the camera, in terms of light and dark and the second thing is think about your composition. Do you like the way the picture looks? Those cameras do almost everything for you. There are some attachments you can get, that will give you one angle more wide. These are generally wide-angle cameras in phones, that will give you a wider view and will also give you telephoto. Those are worth having if you're really going to try to take some pictures with some. So I don't have a preference among any of the phone cameras. This is a, I'll get an image up and show you. The one I use is a Galaxy 3. It's an antique, I've had it since 2011, it works fine. Let me see if I can find something that I shot here with it.
Danielle Fredman: I think Mark in the interest of time, I would love to actually ask you about what cameras you use that are not an iPhone or not a phone camera, but a lot of people would like to know about your equipment?
Mark Seth Lender: I'll get to that, I just want to show the photograph of a night blooming serious shot with a 10-year-old Samsung. I think you can see it's quite detailed and very beautiful and the flash that fired, isn't the camera. I didn't have to do anything. I look at that I can practically smell it. So any camera will do. I want to say one more thing about that. When people ask me what camera gear should I get, I'm going to Africa. My general responses don't take any because this is the best camera and that's the best film. Try to see and remember, there's a million photographs out there. You want to take a photograph of yourself in setting, use your iPhone, but moving on to equipment. So what I use for equipment, I'm Cannon photographer because I used to shoot Nikon, at the time that I converted to digital, which was around 2004, 5, it was twice as much to buy a Nikon long lens as it was to buy a Cannon lens. So it was merely an economic decision, although Cannon glass is incomparable. So a lot of what I shoot, I used to shoot principally a 500 millimeter F4. I always use the best professional back I can get all though, I usually have a second camera with me. Because if you break a camera and you're on the Antarctic Peninsula, you can't call up B and H Photo and have the mere lift you in another one. You can, but you've probably freeze to death waiting several, that isn't going to work. So I carry two of everything. I don't carry too long lenses, but I have a lot of backup. I carry a lot of cards, I carry more than one card reader. I'm always prepared for things to go wrong. They sometimes do. I just had a very expensive camera, say error 20, and that's going to have to go out for repairs. Luckily, I have my main body, which for those of you who follow these things as a Cannon 1DX Mark II, I will probably, in the next couple of weeks, when I'm ready to give a beating for several months, buy a Cannon 1DX Mark III is going to give you an idea of what we're talking about. My 600 millimeter lens, Cannon F4, 2US M2 lens, my US M3 1.4 extender, which makes that lens into 840 millimeters, which I need for a lot of my work because I'm often reaching the camera body on it. The 1DX Mark II, you're talking roughly 20,000 dollars worth of gear with a tripod and you need a very heavy tripod to carry that equipment. So it's expensive to get into this. It just is. Then you've get to schlep that thing. There are some halfway measures I can recommend to you and I'll get to that in a minute. But when I'm in the field, time is precious and being camped on my trips by tour groups, by countries, I got Iceland. Usually Iceland takes me, because I promote ecotourism through my work, effectively, I'm encouraging people to go where I've been and I can't make mistakes. I don't have time to go back. I can't afford to. So I'm carrying very high-end gear. But for those of you want to try to make a compromise, there are a lot of semi-pro Cannon cameras and Nikon cameras. You can, for example, in a slightly less expensive a couple of 1,000 dollar camera body as opposed to a 7,000 dollar camera body. You can go out and get yourself what's called a 70-200 lens. It's an f 2.8, it's very bright. You can even put a 1.4 extender on that and you're up to almost 400 millimeters and it's a zoom and it works very well. If you have to have one piece of equipment and you have a few 1,000 dollars to spend. That's what I would do. If you can go a little bit more. You can get, let me show you the lens. You can get one of these which has the advantage of being very light. It's only 3.5 pounds. This is a 400 millimeter DO, which is diffractive optics, f4 lens. It's about 6, $7,000 and it's light. You can hand hold it even with the camera body on it. You can't hand hold the 600. Although I did once meet a guy in Svalbard who was carrying a 500 and a professional body and an extender and he was hand-holding that and I hit him. A complete stranger. I said, "You carry that? Are you getting anything?" He showed me this gorgeous picture of a photograph and I hauled off and I slugged him. I said, "That's unfair." I'm by the way, 5.5. Well, I used to be 5.5, I'm 5.4. I weigh a 130 pounds on a good day. This guy was enormous. But for most normal humans, 3.5 pounds plus a 2 pound body. You're reaching the limit of what most of us can hold up and hold steady. That's another option.
Danielle Friedman: Mark, could you click and share your screen quickly. I think because we're sharing screen, it's hard for everybody to see the lens full-screen.
Mark Seth Lender: Okay, so let's kill the share.
Danielle Friedman: There we go excellent. If you could just show the. Great.
Mark Seth Lender: Good? That's the lens. If you were to look at the front of this lens. Well you can't see it. There's not enough detail. It has these very fine rings around it, basically like a funnel lens. That helps you focus more lights, not quite as sharp as the 600, but it's a really good compromise. If you had this lens and a $2500 body, you'd be up around 8, $9,000 and you'd have something that I use a lot when I'm running and gunning if I get to carry a tripod. It would give you a very close approximation to what I get with a 600 millimeter lens, which is $12,000. Actually, it's more than 12,000, so literally twice as much. One last word about this used equipment. If you go to where optimal place like B&H, sometimes you find these things used. Lenses in particular, pretty good used. If they're not scratched on the back element, back here. If that back element is in good shape, even if the front element has a nick or a chip in, it isn't going to matter that much because the way the optics work, it's the back that counts. That would get you down a couple of 1,000 more or as I said you can go with the iPhone and you're going to get great photographs and the other way is just go with your eyes because that's the best camera in the universe.
Danielle Friedman: We're going to go with just one more question and then I'm going to share some closing remarks with everybody. But I think that this is a very important question for everybody to hear whose on and it has to do with how you got into wildlife photography. How did you get into wildlife photography and were you already photographing wildlife at Brandeis and if not, what led you to it?
Mark Seth Lender: I was coerced into wildlife photography. I had a newspaper column for a local paper and they kept pushing me to add photos and my assessment, and I was completely correct in this, was that it was going to quadruple my workload and make life almost impossible and I was right. I began grudgingly. I had taken photographs since I was a little kid. My father had an old Rolleiflex with the two little lenses on old box camera and took family photos with that, and so I had played with photographs in a dark room from the time I was maybe eight or nine years old. I liked photography. I always had it in the back of my mind that it was something I could do, but I was much more interested in the written word. That, by the way, is still true. But photography has come to stand on its own because you do something and you do it and you do it and you get better at it and if you're a person who just doesn't know how to not get better at it. In other words, if you get drawn into things the way I do and you want to improve because it just happens. There are people like that. It's begun to stand on its own, but it took me a long time to recognize that and to admit it. The photography came gradually, it came as an adjunct, and now it is absolutely essential to me. In my line of work now I'm doing several jobs. I'd like to tell people if I were CBS I'd be a crew of four if I worked for them. Unfortunately, I work for, despite the fact that we're nationally broadcast and we have an audience of 1.6 million a week, it's a fairly shoestring operation I'm afraid. People value this work, but it doesn't monetize. There you are. But anyway, as you can see, the photographs had become important to me and they've taught me a great deal. Just like Smeagull, the Seagull teaching me that he was thirsty and that I'm an idiot for not having figured it out on the first ask. The photography has taught me to really look and it's taught me to see like a bird, like a polar bear, like an elephant. That's been very valuable. Over the years I've become increasingly committed to it. There's a camera always set up in the living room here because just as I said, I'm right on Long Island Sound and I see these extraordinary things and I get these extraordinary photographs. I will tell you that every time I go into the field like that great blue heron grabbing the head of its offspring to say, "Cool your jets." All I could think of when I saw that was, "Taisez vous. Sheket bevakashah." It was like I had it in several languages in my head. "Basta cosi." It was something that you see parents do with their kids. If I hadn't had the photograph, believe me, I would have missed it. If we have a minute I'll give you a couple of other examples of things that I saw through the photos that while I was looking at the scene, literally did not see with my naked eye. Does that help? Just to review that, if you're doing wildlife biggest lens you can afford. If you can't afford a really big lens, let me just show you that one too. This little guy, which is even lighter, is the 70 to 200 zoom. That's the zoom mechanism there. It weighs very little. It's a pound in change. You put that on a professional body and you can put an extender if you want on the back of it and you're golden, you're good to go. One other thing about that, don't change lenses out in the field, particularly if you're in a place like Africa or the Arctic or the Antarctic, or out in the plain somewhere where there is a lot of dust because you'll get dust all over your sensor and you'll never get rid of it. I recently had a change in sensor on a camera because we just couldn't get the dust off anymore. That way you could get into really high-quality equipment for not a great deal of money. Otherwise, iPhone.
Danielle Friedman: Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Mark for such a beautiful and informative and moving presentation. I'd like to mention a lot of you were asking where you can follow Mark's work, where you can see more of his work. I will share information with you shortly, his website and his email. I'd also like to mention that he is working on putting together an in-person show of a lot of these images at the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. Do get in touch so you can follow his work and have more information on the upcoming events. His e-mail is, you can reach him at msl@marksethlender.com. It's msl as in monkey, salamander, lion, @marksethlender.com and there on his website you can see a lot of his work as well. Also I'd like to share an opportunity to give back to our community. While so much remains uncertain in our world, reliable constant is Brandeisians from across the globe coming together to support our students and each other. This is the case more than ever on Giving Tuesday which is coming up and it's now known as Giving DEISday. When our community connects for one day to raise vital support for Brandeis. It's on December first Tuesday and we'll be hosting this digital fundraiser. When we secure 1,948 donors to Brandeis, it will unlock an additional $100,000 for our students. For those of you who would like to give early, please feel free to use the link in the chat box. I'm sending it right now, so you'll see it right there in the chat box. Click on it, give to Brandeis. Also on Giving Tuesday coming up. I'm going to repeat once more Mark's e-mail address, it is msl@marksethlender.com. For those of you who would like to stay on for five to ten more minutes, we are going to answer a few more questions. I hope everybody stays well, be safe, and thank you so much for joining us today.
Mark Seth Lender: Thank you. Are we good to go? Can I continue?
Danielle Friedman: We are. For those of you who are setting off, those of you who are staying on, there's a couple of questions here, Mark, I think it would be great to. It's hard to say who asked what and who's going to be tuning in but here's a really practical one just to start.
Mark Seth Lender: Before you do, can I interject something? I just want to add something to this. Eventually there's a possibility of me taking some people into the field just right here in Connecticut because we're very wildlife rich place and this if we put it together it would be at Brandeis event and it's going to cost you and you're going to have to help the university in order to come along, but we'll let you know about that. Secondly, if you have anyone in your family or anyone you know, who is interested in going to Brandeis. Everything you saw me do today is based on a solid liberal arts education. I've been to several institutions, among them Goddard College and MIT, and I learned different things in each place. The heart of my liberal arts core comes out of Brandeis. I wish to God I had taken more literature courses. I took a lot of philosophy courses, but I wish I'd done more of that. I wish I'd taken more history. I hope that we can continue that tradition because I think especially in today's world, it's enormously valuable. If you have anyone who's interested in going to school and you want to refer them to me, I'm happy to talk to them. I'm sorry, go ahead with the question.
Danielle Friedman: That's great. Two questions regarding Smigal and Spiegel. I think it'd been fun place to start. One is you have actual photographs, Smigal and Spiegel?
Mark Seth Lender: Yes.
Danielle Friedman: You can share a couple of us and two why wouldn't Smigal just go right to the water as opposed to coming to you and asking for water during that hot day?
Mark Seth Lender: Well, they can drink salt water they don't like to. What I was offering was freshwater. Now how he figured out that I could do that is a frightening question that goes into the intelligence that we deny to other animals thanks to the cow again. He may think therefore he is but never allowed that to anyone else on the planet. This girl in particular was exceptionally smart, he had a way of psyching out the fact that I was an easy mark, no pun intended, and has taken every advantage of it, but he does not depend on me for food. Actually, he was here today for the first time and, I don't know, probably two-and-half weeks because on the Manhattan had been running, we have had half a million Manhattan in the sound at a time. You can literally have walked across the water on their backs. You just see fin after fin after fin. Of course that brings the bluefish and it brings the gull and it brings the cuomers and it brings the horse sprays and just this entire ecosystem is laid out before you sometimes like that. The gulls have been doing very, very well. They eat everything. They eat four different kinds of crabs out here. They capture insects at certain times of the year. They capture eggs that are laid by the crabs exes eggs. They eat small fish like peanut bunker, and sand lance, and a whole bunch of other things. They will capture larger fish, although unlike the herring gulls in Iceland, they don't swallow them whole. They tend to take them on the beach and eat them. They harass other birds who have caught fish that they can't like diving ducks who can bring up small things that they can't get for themselves because they're too deep. They are so deep they can plunge. He has quite the diet, even shellfish. But only by the way, with shellfish if he catches it himself, he will not take a shrimp, even a local shrimp. He won't take a blue mussel, he will not take a quahog from my hand because those things they have to be absolutely sure that they're fresh and that they come from clean water and the only way you can do that is to catch it themselves. I would hesitate to say he it's kosher because but it's close to that. They know that shellfish will kill them and a bad fish might make them regurgitate, but it won't kill them. They're much more trusting when it comes to fish. By the way, as I said, low on the food chain, they much prefer stuff that's got a lot of oil and fat. I have photographs of herring gulls sharing, crayons with polar bears. They eat the same way. That's the answer for the Spiegel question.
Danielle Friedman: Can you talk about the amount of time it takes for you to pursue a particular photo or a photographic adventure. I mean, it must vary, of course, depending on what you're shooting but if you would give a sense of the time it takes for you to set up and to go out into the field and what might determine that time window?
Mark Seth Lender: It's very time-consuming. Basically, I take all the time I can get. The last time I was in the Arctic, which was in Lower Hudson Bay about 18 months ago, two years ago. We actually only had two working days, but I was very lucky because I was in Churchill point and it's a very rich location. I was getting actually more like two and three stories a day so it was well worth going up. But normally, I want to spend at least five or six days in a single location and preferably twice that because it gives you a chance to understand what's going on, to see it, to review it, to shoot it again, shoot it a third time, look at it, sometimes just put the camera down and look at it and try to get a grasp of what's happening. When I'm in the field I work from before sunrise to after sunset. There's a reason for that. A lot of what happens, happens very early in the morning or very late when things are all but done. If you want to see cheetah going out to hunt, chances are they're going to do it in the near dark. I have caught cheetah on a kill in the middle of the day and it was an extraordinary encounter. But you're more likely to be aware of them late at night. In fact, sometimes the sound of things tells you more what's going on. When the lions are out hunting and they hunt cooperatively. You'll hear the males off in the distance giving a call which is very difficult to locate but the females know exactly where it is and it is made to scare the game, to get them to move. They had this thing that almost sounds like a cough and you can hear it from miles off and it goes (sound of animal), you can't locate it. You hear that in the dark and then you'll hear the hyenas go off. The hyena is will we yip and whistle and because they're in competition with the lions. So sometimes your ears will tell you what's going on. I've written a number of pieces just in the dark, having seen in the day and then translated that into a vision in the mind's eye from which I work. But basically I'm working 14 hour days in the field. There are times like the blue herons you saw, you get there at six o'clock in the morning to that rookery a couple of miles through the woods, mile and a half. I'm getting older, that lens gets heavier and heavier. I have a special pack to carry it in, but believe me, it's a workout and it's up and down hill and crossing streams and all kinds of stuff and I get to the rookery, and once I'm in there because for weight restrictions, I can't even carry water. It's just one few pounds too many, and I'll stay for six or seven hours and shoot and as the light changes until finally once the sun is really up, things start to get burnt and so that'll shut you off. But yeah, I put in very long days and anywhere there's wildlife and anywhere I can get to in any way they'll cop me to go because we have no travel budget, I'll go and I'll stay. I stay in place long as I can.
Danielle Friedman: Excellent, such dedication. So when shooting wildlife portraits, do you focus on the eyes, making sure that they're the sharpest part of the image as with human portraiture. Also, I always thought looking at animal in the eye was challenging or aggressive, is it?
Mark Seth Lender: It depends on how you do it and it depends on the animal. If you soften your aspect, if you're just very soft and you look, there's, let me see if you can I don't know if I can get into the lights so you can really see my face, I guess from here. This is is the universally hostile pose let me get my glasses off so you can really see me. You lower your head and look like that. This is I'm going to bite you like one more step and you've had it. I've had hyena do that to me. This is a come hither. If an elephant looks at you and raises its chin, it's I'm going to come when you come closer to me. So head angle gesture, whether the head is slightly cop square on, whether it's like this. If a grizzly bear looks at you like this, that's a really deadly warning. A female bear, even a male bear, they're going to do that once, they'll do it a second time and the third time they're on you. That is the loudest worn off they can give you. With moose, they'll do this they'll open one eye wider. That shot I showed you of the walrus, where you can see the red of his eye, that's his warning. So these things are hardly variable. Just looking at you isn't necessarily a challenge it's more complicated than that. Generally, you don't stare at grizzly bears because there are particularly in tolerant. But other than that, it varies. In terms of what I focus on, I have to make compromises. Sometimes the eyes aren't as sharp as I like and what I really like to get some light in the eye because it really gives you a sense of the life of the animal. I'm often just too busy trying to capture the image than to worry about exactly where my focal point is. But in general, yes, I mean, you know, focusing for the eyes is good. Trying to get the whole thing in focus is even better. So the polar bear I showed you some of the shots that I took in that sequence the nose is a little out of focus, but in most of them, I've got the nose and the eyes and the teeth, and it's all open sharp you know. That's a high F's that's the higher the F-stop number as some as you may know, the smaller the aperture and the more visual acuity you will have. However, less light is coming in, and that can attenuate your speed and I will always go for speed over depth of field.
Danielle Friedman: So this is a pretty specific question. So if you're not familiar that we can just skip it. But somebody wanted to know that a number of your bird pictures evoke, I don't know how to pronounce name, but Audubon. I looked him up so are you familiar with him? I think John James, but Audubon?
Mark Seth Lender: Audubon.
Danielle Friedman: Audubon John. Does anybody know what that is? They thought that your bird photos evoke Audubon John's. Like the crane father guiding the landing the ostrich making eye contact. Can you speak to that?
Mark Seth Lender: That is a compliment I've never received before. I'm just going to go out of the room and kvell now and then I'll come back. Audubon's approach was, you know, he killed those birds. He had to, he couldn't get them to sit still long enough to work them. Of course, he didn't have a camera. So he tried to pose them in a life-like manner, and that was his great departure. He tried to show you the life of the bird. So in a certain sense, I guess there's a kinship there. I mean, of course, Audubon is, you know in spite of all his awards and he had plenty. I am by the way, not someone who tends to condemn people for doing things at their time that we would find abhorrent at our time. I would never shoot a bird in order to get its photograph or to make its drawing. But I don't condemn Audubon for that. He was also a bit of a racist and I don't particularly condemn him for that. I'm a little less forgiving with Louis Agassi because he really was a son of a bitch. But generally, you know, people did what they did in their time and whereas morally enlightened as they could be. So Audubon was trying to show you what it was like. He mounts his birds on branches and things. He shows you a sense of them in life. He by the way, had an assistant who did all of the branch and tree and grass and plant drawings for him. He would draw those in and Audubon would do the birds. So I mean, I really appreciate that comment that was very kind. I'll show you someone who also has that kind of an eye and he is a painter. That is Robert Bateman and he's a Canadian and really extraordinary, really extraordinary artists. Let me see if I can just get something here that really - He just has a way with his drawings. Can we see that? How we are doing? Is that reasonably visible?
Danielle Friedman: Yeah, we can see. I'm also going to put a link in the chat box for those who would like to see more of Bateman's work I think that's a great reference. To show he is a painter. With that we are going to-.
Mark Seth Lender: That is megafauna by the way. This is just a tree swallow. That looks very much like my photographs of tree swallows. I mean, he's just really got the life of that. So this particular book is kind of forward by Peter Mathiessen it's just called birds. But he does other things. He doesn't just do birds, Bateman. He's still alive. He's in his 80 's and he's still with us.
Danielle Friedman: They are telling there in the chat box the Bateman foundation and as a painter speaking, it's always great to have the physical books in your spaces so that you can look through them. Another one, natural worlds. With that, we're going to wrap up our conversation today. Thank you so much everybody who's present and who's joined and who's asked such insightful questions. Again, thank you so much, Mark Seth Lender for sharing your work. We appreciate you immensely.
Mark Seth Lender: I would like to close by saying, as one of my favorite polar bears says, you know, some days this may be how it feels. This is kind of like why does everything happened to me? But I think it's really important for us to keep our optimism and do what we can for the natural world it's really up to us. Remember this, nature is not your mother. Nature is your child. The future is really what matters our children and our children's children. In order to do that, we have to preserve the possibility of a future. We have to preserve the natural world because without that, there's nothing. I thank you. Thank you for your time all of you.
Danielle Friedman: Thank you so much. Have a great rest of everyone's day. Please take that message to heart. It's so, so, so key.