Words of Wisdom

Great insight from photographer Joel Sartore

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about National Geographic's "Live Q & A with Explorers." Though I haven't been able to tune in to as many of the live broadcasts as I would have liked, I made sure to catch last week's talk from Joel Sartore.

Joel is a long-time Nat Geo photographer and you may have seen some of his work from his Photo Ark project. Take a look at this montage of primates:

Some of those lil' guys have tempted me to betray my loyalty to Chewbacca. I mean, c'mon, the Philippine tarsier – are you kidding me?!

I could browse through The Photo Ark for days! So when I saw that he was doing a talk, I knew I had to watch.

You can watch it below or on Nat Geo Education's Explorer Classroom Youtube playlist.

I really enjoyed Joel's talk for a number of reasons. Not only was it cool learning about his a career (that mosquitos photo gave me the heebee jeebees!) and how he does his work, but the respect he showed his audience was incredible. He gave frank, honest answers and some really solid advice.

Some of the things he said that stuck with me:

• "We really need to behave ourselves...Surely we don't want to do everything the same way again, do we? I don't think so." – in reference to wildlife markets and the possibilities of new pandemics

• Being a photographer is hard work. "The best part of each day is dinner, usually."

• The important work that zoos and aquariums do to help endangered populations

• "If you're in the wild and getting charged by animals, you are doing something wrong."

• His story about getting exposed to the Marburg virus after getting pooped on by bats (his scariest moment)

• Things that kids can get their parents to do to make the world a better place

One of the most meaningful comments he made was in response to a question about advice for animal lovers who also want to be photographers (it starts at about 41:00). After making a joke about living with your parents for as long as possible because it doesn't pay well, he went to say something that I found pretty valuable:

"I always tell people to become an expert. Become an expert in a part of the world or a type of species, or a single species, even. Become the go-to person for that animal or type of animal or that region. If you can become an expert and learn how to write well...your odds are pretty good.... It doesn't mean you won't have to take side jobs and do other things, but if you love it, you'll stick with it. The people who stick with it generally are successful.... There's a billion pictures a day posted to the web – how will yours be different? How will you add value? By being an expert. By being the person the world goes to to learn about that topic."

All in all, this was an outstanding session and I'm thinking about ways I could incorporate Joel's message in my classroom.

Here's a link to Joel's website and a link to National Geographic's Photo Ark website.

Oh – did you know that there's a species of parrot that licks up sheep's blood? It's called a kea. Yikes!