My Photographic Education Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Shoot A Giraffe

The Emakoko, a luxury safari lodge, stands by the Mbagathi River on the edge of Nairobi National Park, in Kenya. Although barely 45 minutes from the airport, it’s a place of serenity and wide-open spaces.

- Marcel Theroux

 

With its heat and thorn trees, you could almost mistake it for an overgrown corner of Georgia or South Carolina, except for the unfamiliar creatures. I had come to learn how to photograph wildlife, and I saw immediately that I wouldn’t have to look far to find it. When I arrived at the veranda to meet David Murray, who would be my teacher for the next seven days, I noticed a genet, a tiny feline creature covered with leopard-like markings, lurking nearby. It seemed to be eavesdropping. Murray, a quietly intense Scotsman in his early 40s, was waiting with the tools of his trade laid out before him: two cameras and an array of lenses. I shook his hand with a tinge of nervousness.

I was one of the first students of Wild Studio, a new course being offered by Great Plains Conservation, a tour operator focused on protecting and nurturing communities, wilderness, and wildlife in Kenya and Botswana. The following morning we were scheduled to leave Nairobi and spend three days at a safari lodge in the Chyulu Hills, then another three days among the spectacular animals of the Masai Mara. Murray’s mission was to transform me from a virtual incompetent to an accomplished photographer. I wasn’t sure whether either of us actually believed that this was an achievable goal.

When he isn’t teaching, Murray has a successful career as a photographer, working out of a studio in the north of England. His images of wildlife have been published widely and shown in several galleries in the U.K. He told me that he used to manage a luxury safari lodge in Botswana, where he often witnessed guests’ frustration with their pictures. One inspiration for founding Wild Studio, he said, was seeing a visitor hurl down a $10,000 camera in a rage.