"From Poetry to Pictures: A Journey of Discovery" with Andrew Fusek Peters (UK)

"I don't have a choice where my photos get published. What I do know is if I'm adding a positive story and there is some potential to raise awareness for species, then I can only be doing something good if not very small.

Am I making any difference? I've got no idea. It's if you're going to be a really, really, really good wildlife photographer, but you don't care about conservation, then you're not a really, really, really good wildlife photographer. And we live in a dark place and dark times, you know, I'm of the thing. I don't have much hope for humanity. I think there is amazing kindness and love and there are good people in the world. But I see that the bad people and the evil people and the politicians want to just destroy everything for their own. I don't know what it is. Wildlife is very low on the agenda.

So I try to carry a message everywhere I go. I try to raise awareness because even selfishly, I want the species to be around certain photograph and when I'm old and gray, but it's start times in it."

Tom : Good evening, Andrew there in the UK. How have been the past days there?

Andrew : They've been good, we've had an amazing late summer. We've also had late butterflies, and late aurora, which has been amazing. I've had my best ever Northern Lights experience a few nights ago, which was great fun.

Tom : Since we last talked, Andrew, a lot of things happened because now suddenly you are nominated in the British Wildlife Photography Awards. And you have that amazing picture I suddenly saw from a dragonfly against the Milky Way.

Andrew : Yes.

Tom : You shot in one single image and it got also picked up by the BBC. What gave you that idea to try this out?

Andrew : Well, it started when I was shooting Canon some years back. And I was fascinated by the problem that lenses have, that a macro lens can shoot close up, and all you see is the close up thing, but you don't see the background. And then Lauer brought up that amazing 15 mil macro lens out. And then you suddenly got habitat and landscape behind the object, the dragonfly, whatever it is, , which creates a very interesting, because it's how the human eye sees.

And I was looking at these lenses and studying this dragonfly and going out and capturing this dragonfly roosting at dusk and at night. And I was thinking, Well, I should really try and work out how I can photograph the dragonfly close and the milky way in the same shot. Because all the competitions, Wildlife Photographer of the Year, British Wildlife Photographer of the Year, you're not allowed to do double exposures. You can do in camera double exposures, but that strikes me as it's all a bit geeky. But I just thought, Okay, if we're not allowed to do that, I'm gonna do it in one photo. I'm going to work out how to do that. I'm not going to give it all away. But I will say if anybody is into filmmaking, they will know exactly what I did, in terms of pull focus. And I spent seven years working on that technique. And it's something where everything can go wrong. Your dragonfly has to be in exactly the right spot. You've got to get the focus on the dragonfly and then the focus on the Milky Way.

It's mental! But for me as a photographer, I like to do things that haven't been done before. That's the challenge. And whenever I give my talks, I don't do very much tuition because I just want to go out and take photos, but I say to people, Think out of the box, do your own thing! Don't just copy what everybody else has done. If something hasn't been done, work out why it hasn't been done and then do it.

Tom : I think we're going to hear a lot of this still in our talk tonight.
Andrew, let's walk a moment some years back. You had quite a journey from being really a poet and a children's author to now being a celebrated and published wildlife photographer. Tell me a bit how this transition happened.

Andrew : In the strangest of ways. I wrote books, children's books and books for young adults with my wife for 25 years. We were very successful. I was pushing myself very hard, and my goal was to get with the editor who signed J. K. Rowling, who wrote the Harry Potter books. Because I heard him give a talk at a conference once, and he said, When I get, when I receive a manuscript, an unpublished manuscript, I want to read the first page, and I want the hairs on the back of my hand to go up. And then I know I'm going to be publishing that book.

So I heard him say that, and I thought, I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that. And I wrote a novel called Ravenwood, and I did and I got a two book deal, and it was published in 17 countries, including in Spain and over Europe. But! There was a cost! And the cost was when you write a 100, 000 word novel, and it's 250, 000 words in the rewrites, and it's a two book deal, and you have to put on a show as well, and you've got to go and give talks all around the country and abroad. It wasn't me! And I basically broke down. I just got very, very ill. And that was almost like a door that shut and that was the end of that career. And when I got better, when I kind of came through that and I knew I didn't want to go back to doing children's books, I mean, most people would dream of getting a children's book deal and would see that as the height of creativity. So it's really interesting that I got the thing I wanted and I was very, very unhappy. It wasn't me.

So when I came through that, when I got some help and I was just starting to recover. And then I was going back to what I did as a young man, which is being in nature and we didn't call it wild swimming in the 1970s. We called it swimming. So I did a lot of swimming, and lakes and pools and rivers and I started writing nature writing. And I read a book called Debt that was very successful.

And then around about that time, I picked up a camera! And I never knew one could have a whole lifetime's obsession starting in my mid forties. But from the moment I stood on Westminster Bridge in London and I saw people with their tripods and their long exposures doing the camera, the trails of the buses and the cars and painting with light. It was like my eyes just went, Oh yeah, that's for me. But I didn't live in London and that's not the thing I was going to do eventually. But for about a year, I was at The Shard as it opened. It was called a soft opening. And I took photos at night there of London from the room we were staying in and they loved. They said, Oh, come back and photograph for us. Not everybody was a photographer then it was still a thing.

But I'm very glad that I live in the countryside because suddenly I realized that there were barn owls and dragonflies and mice and badgers and hares and that they were very difficult. And it was a level of difficulty, just like doing children's books. There's no shortcuts. You've got to put the time in.

And in my mid forties, I just went for it. I just thought, Okay, this is, this is the thing. And the biggest difference I can think of between my novel Ravenwood, which was set in mile high trees with ravens with a 30 foot wingspan, was that the nature I was photographing was real and was as miraculous as the imagined worlds I was writing about. If anything more miraculous.

I've had plenty of people say, Oh, you photoshop that? You made that up! And I'm going, No! By the way, Photoshop is not an insult for God's sake. Grow up folks. I mean really Photoshop's a very useful tool. But in nature we don’t need it, nature's already doing it for us. We just need to be observant and work hard and then amazing things can happen.

Tom : Can it be that we talked before that you started out with doing like time lapses animation with your son or stop frame animations with your son?

Andrew : My son was getting into stop frame animation, and for that you need a DSLR, you need a camera. And so I bought a Canon 650D with the kit lens, and we did this really good stop frame animation. We worked on it for about three or four months. And then he moved on to other things and I had the camera. And that's when I went to London and saw all these night trails and that was when I was walking around the back of our house. I saw a dragonfly. I went, Oh wow! And then I worked out very quickly that a 16 to 55 lens is not very good for wildlife. So my wife agreed I could buy a lens for 170 pounds. That's right. The Canon 55-250, which is an awesome little lens.

And my friend pointed out a barn owl hunting by day in the snow in March because it was hungry and I got lovely photos and I was shooting raw already. I so quickly worked out that a 700 pound camera and a 170 pound lens wasn't going to do. And I had some savings. And I said to my wife, I said, I'm going to do this and I think I'd already been published in amateur photographer and I'd been shortlisted in British Wildlife Photographer. I hadn't got any further, but I used that as an excuse. I said to my wife, I’m having a midlife crisis, I'm going to go for it and I want to spend some money. And she said, How much money do you want to spend? I said, I want to spend 18, 000. She just burst out laughing.

And I bought the 1DX and I bought the 7D and I bought the 500F4. I bought the whole, you know, the 7200. I bought the Holy Grail at the time of what was available. And I suddenly had this huge camera and huge lens in my hand. I had no idea what to do with it, but I learned and I carried on. So that was a great start because I suppose it was, once you spent that money, that's a real commitment.

And so I wanted to learn and then I quickly worked out that the thing that was of interest to me was where I lived in South Shropshire was really interesting and there was a lot going on. Then when I think I took a photo of a pheasant displaying on and the bits of pay were flying everywhere. It was a nice little action shot. I can't stand pheasants. I hate the hunting industry, but a press agency saw this photo on Facebook and said, I think we can get you in the national papers, Andy.

Again another light went off in my head and I went, Ah, what people want to read in the newspapers in the morning or look at is something spectacular and colourful and beautiful and different. And then I was with that agency for four years and I got in all the national papers and I got on the cover of The Times. And it was the beginning. Each time something like that happened and someone had faith in me, it gave me the confidence to say, Right, I'm really going to go further.

And then my first major commission was the national trust. And there is a very big national trust nature reserve called the Long Mynd, that is very near us. And it's a beautiful upland. It's full of wildlife. And they said to me, they said, We haven't had a photographer. We want you, we'll pay you! And I said, Okay. I said, but what do you want me to photograph? And they said, We want you to photograph everything. And I was like, No! And they went, Yeah, yeah, we do. And I then really spent the next five years, you know, going out to photograph Curlews and the Milky Way and dragonflies. And I mean, I was just up there. And so, yeah, that was the beginning of my journey.

Tom: It's, amazing because most men in midlife crisis, they buy a zippy red sport mobile, and you buy a Cannon. Andrew, it is a wise decision, I think.

Andrew : Yeah. I think it was a wise decision. And when I found my groove, which I think I found fairly early on, probably around 2014, 10 years ago, I was flying. And in fact, the manager of the national trust on the Long Mynd, he said, When I tell you, Andy, when I tell you about a bird, like a wind chat or a hobby and I tell you where you might find it, you’re like an exocet missile. I just aim you in the right direction and you go and you get the shot. And it was a great compliment. I thought, Yeah, that's what I do. And somehow now I don't know how I think it is. Obviously, hard work is a lot to do with it, but there is grace. I do think in the universe there is grace and I have had those moments where I've been in the right place at the right time and then it happens.

And I think it's because I care deeply. I do write about conservation issues as well. But I have an artist's eye, and that's the difference between me and some. And not knocking other wildlife photographers, but most wildlife photographers just want to get the rare thing. It's the rare lesser spotted diddle iddle there, and they go to this place where nobody else knows where it is, and they get it, and they put the picture up, and you go. But that's all it is, just a picture of the rare thing.

I'm more interested in all four corners of the frame in beauty, in light, in color, in the decisive moment as our great photographer, hero of mine, whose name I've now forgotten. This is pathetic, isn't it? But I've got no memory at the age of 59. But, the decisive moment! Who was it who said the decisive moment? Oh my God, would do it.

Tom : Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Andrew : That's the one. He really understood that. And I think I can apply for a street photographer, a wildlife photographer, a wedding, doesn't matter.

I'm all about light and color. And what's very interesting is in the 1970s when I was a skateboarder and skating in California, my favourite color was orange. And I just think, Yeah, I had everything orange and orange shorts and orange t shirt. And I look at some of my photos of dragonflies at dusk or ruby tail wasp and the color just explodes. And I'm just going, Yeah, that works for me.

Or when I get in the papers, people go, Oh my God, Andy! I want them to have a visceral feeling in the heart that's it, isn't it? And to go further with that it is now the reason I think when we live in such dark times and there's such horrible news and fake news and all that.

And in the last really year, and I check this with my agency, I am literally the most prolific wildlife publisher working in the national papers at UK. And I'm showing off, it's a bit of showing off, but it's really cool. But I've worked out why that is, and that's because the newspapers are desperate for happy moments. Because there's so much unhappy stuff. So if I send, you know, a beautiful Aurora or Ruby tailed wasp or two birds having, two bramblings having a fight, male bramblings having a fight. They're just gonna, Oh yeah, that works. That'll do. That's our slot filled. They have a slot.

Every paper has a slot, even the more downmarket papers because they need good news and people respond emotionally to that. I mean, the BBC, the one, as you said, where I got shortlisted for the British Royal Life Photography Awards. I don't even know how much it's done on the website, but I know on just on their Insta it's done 220, 000. I've beaten Beyonce. I mean, nobody can say that. That is an ego trip!

Tom : Yeah!

Andrew : I never thought I got numbers like that, but that's all irrelevant. I know it's just here today, gone tomorrow. But you know, it's really nice when you do something really beautiful and you work really hard and you get a really good response. Of course it is.

Tom : You deserve it Andrew.
Can I talk a bit a moment about changes in life for you personally? I know you've been open to your battle with cancer and how it affected your photography. How did that period change your perspective on your work and your life?

Andrew : Thank you. It's a great question. It's really good to think about that because there's so many strange things that happen in that time. I had a mountain guide and I climbed one of the big mountains in Wales. I slept there overnight. I got Milky Way panorama. But this guide was amazing, she carried all, and I was still shooting Canon. So she carried my 5D4 and the Sigma 14 1. 8. Now, I don't know if you know that lens, but it weighs over a kilo. It’s insanely heavy. But I was really tired. I was just really tired going up this mountain, really exhausted.

And I kept going to the doctor and the doctor kept saying, It's your IBS. Because I had my gallbladder out some years ago. And then finally, I think it was like August of 2018, the doctor at my surgery, one of the doctors said, You look really pale, Andy, I don't like that look and I know you're really tired. Let's do a blood test. The blood test was really bad, really bad. And then, right, let's get you on the fast track. And the fast track is the NHS where everything happens within six weeks. I didn't want to wait. I just wanted to know straight away. So I got what was called a colonoscopy and I had a tumor the size of a golf ball in my guts.

And it was life stops. It really stops. And I'm waiting for surgery and I'm sat in my garden at home. We've got a tiny garden, but it was like this late summer. Now it was even more, and there were butterflies, just nonstop everywhere in our little garden. And I couldn't go further cause I was so tired and so ill. And I'm shooting Olympus by then. As you know, Olympus has all the way back the M1 to the M1 Mark II, which is what I was shooting with. It has pro capture and pro capture is, like the TARDIS of photography. It's time travel. They did it before anybody else. 60 frames per second, full size, raw, buffering.

And I'm thinking we've got this technique. Got these butterflies. Why is nobody photographing butterflies in flight? And there was a photographer in the 1980s who'd done it. But what he'd done is he'd got a big tank in a studio and filled it full of flowers, put the butterflies in there, use triggers and lasers, all sorts of stuff , to show flight, which is amazing and flash high speeds, high speed sync flash. But it was artificial. And I suddenly thought, I think the technology is ready to get butterflies in flight and nobody's done it yet because they haven't really thought it through. And I thought it through. And then there were three, there was a small copper I got in flight. There was a painted lady. F çact, there was a painted lady flight sequence that then came second in the butterfly category of the close up photographer of the year. So these photos had an impact almost immediately.

So the difficult thing about it is you can have all this buffering and it's high speed and that's all great, but the butterfly will go in 50 different directions. How do you keep the butterfly in focus when it takes off? And the answer is brute force, not against the butterflies, but you just keep shooting over and over and over. And eventually the butterfly will take off in the right direction. So it's a war of attrition.

There had been one other photographer who'd worked with very small sensor camera, which meant he had amazing depth of field. I'm not the first, he had produced some really nice shots and that's guys called John Brackenbury and I've full respect him. But I did something different. I was really coming at it as an artist photographer. The eye has to be sharp and all got to work. And so I threw away tens of thousands of photos, but I started to get flight shots.

Bear in mind, I‘m waiting for my surgery and I don't know what's going to happen. And then I get these shots then I have my surgery and then I come around and it's just terrible. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. It's horrible recovering from that. Then I had to do chemo. By that time, I got together some of these butterfly and flight shots. I sent them to my press agency and the national papers went mad for them. I mean, mad for them, as did magazines like Amateur Photographer. So I sent something very exciting.

Tom : Mm-Hmm.

Andrew : As this happened, a publisher that I'd worked with previously a book on the Long Mynd and Sniperstones, actually approached me and said, We can see all your butterfly photos in the media. Do you want to do a butterfly book? And I said, Oh, yes. And then my wife said, Oh, you've got plenty of shots. Just do the book now. And I thought about it. I thought there's only sort of 59, 60 species in the UK. Why don't I set myself the impossible goal of getting all of them, not all of them in flight, but getting really nice book of all the UK butterflies.

And then as I came through my chemotherapy, which is worse than the surgery, I had a purpose in life again. I didn't know what my future held. But there's something about the fragility of butterflies and their very short lives that resonated with me. Because suddenly my life was uncertain, my future was uncertain. But if I could focus on these beautiful little creatures, that's a good thing.

And then followed a two year safari, which, by the way, unlike birders, oh god, I should really should be careful what I say here. There are lovely birders, I will say that. And there are some really horrible birders out there. And you ask them, You know, well, where's the thing? And they go, Oh no, no, not even if you pay, I'm not gonna tell you where the thing is.

Butterfly nerds are really lovely. They say, Oh, you go to this little spot here, here's the grid on the OS map, and you turn up at 9. 30 in the morning, and there's good numbers at the moment, and just go to that corner of the field. So I made some amazing friends during my odyssey. If anything, that was probably the best part of the book. And I got all 59! There's a butterfly called the long tail blue. And there was one nerd who said, Oh, you didn't get the long tail blue! Which I got later, but you know, just get a life folks, honestly. And I got many very rare species in flight for the first time in the world, nobody done that.

So that was again, just a thing of going out there, with my soul and all my craft and my art to do this. And as a result, when the book came out, it just had an incredible response. Cover of BBC Wildlife, cover of Country Life, cover of Amateur Photographer, a two page spreading in the Guardian Weekend Magazine. I mean, on and on and on TV, you know. And what's really interesting is literally as it came out and everyone went, Oh, this is fresh. This is new. A Bunch of people worked out, not just with OM system cameras, but other like, Oh yeah, we can do butterflies and fly. He's done it. We're going to do it now. And so now it's now it's very interesting when people put up a shot of a butterfly and fly on social media, nobody says anything anymore because it's been done.

So it's really interesting. So I just felt like I plowed a really interesting furrow there. And I would say that was one, you can't say that helped heal my cancer because you can't because you only get healed with chemo and doctors and surgeons. But emotionally and mentally and spiritually, yes. It was, it was to see my professional life go up four or five stages with that book was really exciting.

Tom : Andrew, you think when you are normally used to travel a lot to take pictures everywhere in the UK. And suddenly you cannot move so much anymore and you have to concentrate on an area closer to home. Your pictures, they change in any way, or your vision of photography changes in any way?

Andrew : Yeah, absolutely. And it's very interesting. I've been now working for two years on this book of garden wildlife. I’m coming around to the answer. Don't worry. And I have traveled quite a lot for it all around the UK. I do meet photographers who they travel the world and they do the tigers and the seals and the puffins and all the very exciting. And I don't mind them doing that. That's great. What I do mind is where they then turn around and look down their noses at me. Ah, you're just doing stuff around your garden and then up on the long men and all around, you know, like it's less than. And my journey through, if you want to say it that way, I can say it, through cancer and having to be close to home. Then chimed in with my kind of mission statement, which is what's under your nose is really interesting. If you look, I didn't know ruby tailed wasps existed. I didn't even know they were a thing. I've got them on the wall of my chapel where I live. They are multi coloured jewels that never stop moving and are very challenging to photograph.

So, I think what I do and what's around me and what's in my vicinity and in my neighbourhood and in my friends gardens is as important. To think about is to photograph, to celebrate, to try and save because we're seeing such decline in so many species. And it's easy to focus on Africa when we're losing all our curlews and we're losing all our lapwings. And when we're seeing butterflies just fall off a roof in terms of numbers. Yes, what I do is incredibly feels incredibly important and is easily good enough.

So I just get a bit bored by all that showboating. Cause there's only so many pictures of bloody zebras being mauled by a tiger that I can take over breakfast. Thank youvery much. You can win your world award with it. That's fine. I mean, let's take the example. This is so interesting.

My friend in our village just died, a close friend. We're getting ready for the funeral. I've got my setup of my garden feeders in the garden. I'm shooting through the kitchen window. I get these beautiful fight shots between bramblings golf inches. January. It's early morning. The sun has just risen, so the sun is shining straight through the bird's wings. And something happens in a split second where the angle of the sun is just right. And when their wings flare, literally rainbows. And I'm looking at the pictures on the back of my camera, the raw pictures, because I'm testing the OM1 Mark II at that time. It's not even out yet. I'm an ambassador and I'm testing it. And I'm going, Is there something wrong with the camera? What, what is going on? And then I see that there's a guy in America who's done it with hummingbirds. And I go, Ah! And then I meet a physicist tells me that this is to do with the light, the infinite light of the sun hitting the small structures of the wing called the barbules and the barbs and breaking up, which is called a diffraction grating. And it causes a rainbow effect. And so suddenly the commonest bird that people can't stand, they don't want to see a photo of a blue tit, but now it's got rainbow wings. And it goes mental on social media and on the BBC News and in the National Papers. And it's in my back garden. When is gonna be enough? When am I going to be good enough? It's crazy, isn't it?

And three of those images have been shortlisted for British Wildlife Photographer of the Year. Knowing my luck, it won't go any further. But, you know, I read all the lovely comments on social media, and of course there was someone there going, Yeah, that's not natural, you photoshopped that. And I think, how would I photoshop? How would I do that? But there's always, my wife said, don't respond to them.

Tom : No

Andrew : But no, it's not going to work, is it? So just know that you've done that work and that moment. But here's the difference between me and someone who's just kind of hobby as a photographer. The moment I saw that effect, I thought, Right, how am I going to do that? Am I going to replicate that over and over and over and over again? And for four weeks, I did. And I got green finch and I got long tail tip and just got some amazing shots. And my goal this winter, want to get a perfect fight between two birds, but with all the wings turned to rainbows. That would do it, wouldn't it? I've got, yeah, I'm setting myself quite a high goal, but you know, you've got to think you've got a dream big, haven't you?

Tom : Yeah. I have to dream big. I think this will be the cover of your next book then, Andrew.
You touched already the subject one moment. Oh, I'm ambassador. How came that to be?

Andrew : Well, my lovely friend, Jeff, who's assistant editor, amateur photographer. I hassled him for a few years at the photography show. You need to use my photos in your magazine, beloved. And he called me a professional irritant, which I loved. I just thought it was the funniest thing. We're really good friends. I'm very persistent. I don't give up. And sometimes people respond to that. Sometimes they don't.

LM system, which was Olympus at the time, was in touch with Mark Thackeray, who's now retired, but he used to run the ambassadors. I just kept persisting. And eventually he said, Oh, let's have a conversation. And I think he saw the fact that I was getting so much media and that I talked a lot about the equipment I used and I was achieving things. And what I was doing was taking the computational assets of this OM system and saying, right, well, why has nobody done this with it? Let's do that. Let's stretch it. Let's do something new. So I came on board, I think January, two years ago.

And they've been great. And what I like about our systems, they're a bit left field and people again, it's that same thing. People are slightly snooty about them and all they're going to fail. This small sensor is rubbish. And I just think, yeah, yeah. The OM-1 and the OM-1 Mark II and even the EM-1 Mark III, I was shooting at 6, 400 ISO. Now I shoot at 12, 800 ISO. I don't matter. We've got pure role these day, deoxo and all that stuff. It's just, get a life, folks.

You know, maybe it's not pinprick, don't know what you want, but you know, I've had them printed huge. I've not had a national paper editor yet say, Oh, it's not good enough quality. If anything, what's been happening in my relationship with national papers, they started off by printing my pictures quite small. And now they're printing them bigger and bigger and bigger, and I've had half pages. I've had full pages recently. I've had double page spreads. I got a double page in the Scotsman. I got a double page in the Daily Star. I mean, it's crazy. So the quality is good enough.

Tom : Mm-Hmm.

Andrew : I love being with the great fun and you know, they're not moving as fast as the other. They might not have all the resources, but the kit is really good for what I do wildlife and also for portability. And when I'm out walking all day, I want something lightweight, the image stabilisation. And I do a lot of night stuff with it, it's great. I mean, maybe there'd be a stop or two better noise on latest Sony, but I don't care. That's fine, do that, but it works for me. The results and the papers and the media and the magazines and the book and the endless book contracts I'm doing speak for themselves.

Tom : But what made you jump from Canon to pick up the OM system, Andrew?

Andrew : It's quite funny. I was again at the photography show. I was chasing to Claire on the Claire Harvey May on the Olympus stand. But I was chasing to her in this arrogant way that as, because I was a full framer. So it's like I'm full frame. I would count on, I'll have a look at your stuff. And she said, Oh, you know what, we'll give you a pro loan 'cause it's what you do for a living. And then you just try it for a few weeks. But she said, But what I can guarantee at the end of six weeks when we take it back off you, you're not going to want to give it back. I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm really ashamed of my behaviour. But I had it for six weeks. And then I didn't understand it for the first two weeks. I just didn't get it. Then Pro Capture hit and the super fast shooting and then I just went, Oh, I get it! And I start to get all these flight shots and all the things that action moments that I really love. And I've been sold on it ever since size and weight, size and weight of the other biggies for particularly for travel for walking and being out all day.

And then they have some areas that they're really, they also specialize in a macro is one of the ones they're literally famous for. And the 90 mil macro is in a league of its own. I finally worked out with the Cygnus tech diffuser and lighting and all that stuff. I've worked out how to do that, how to do stacking and how to do single shots. And so that's opened up a whole world for me of moths and close ups and all sorts of interesting, very, very close up areas. I think I see myself with macro somewhere in the middle. I don't go that mad micro kind of, you know, get some bugs from the Natural History Museum and you spend five years just photographing one bug. I can't. I just like to take a photo. And I think I'm systems really exciting that because it will do that for you. Oh, there's a butterfly not moving. It'll give you a stack of 15 photos and give you the result in the camera. And you just go, Oh, man, that's really good because you've just done it. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm faithful to the system, I would say that now. I couldn't go back, you know, I would struggle to go back.

Tom : You talk a lot about the Pro Capture feature. Sell me this feature, Andrew. You think it's the technique that helps you get these crisp mid air shots?

Andrew : Well, yes, I would think that. And that's a very simple reason. And what's really interesting is since the OM-1's come out. And now the OM-1 Mark II, it'll do 50 frames per second with focus with autofocus that buffering thing. What I can say to you is that you've got the bird not really doing very much is going to take off. It's going to take off. Now, in the old days with Canon, you know, it takes off and you go, Oh, it's taken off. Then you press the shutter. It's too late. Yeah. Unless you're one of the top wildlife talkers in the world, then you might occasionally get it in time this way. You never missed that moment.

And also people go, it's just way too many frames per second. It's not. Yes, you've got to wade through 5, 000 photos, maybe at the end of a photo shoot. Is it worth it for that one moment, which is the gem? Because you know, it's also does 120 frames per second with fixed focus. Which is very useful if the bird or the butterfly takes off in the plane of focus. So, and they're full size RAW. Now, other cam, every camera system's now come in on the ride. Oh, we're going to do that. And yet, they do a very limited version. They're really the top of their game with that. And yes, for me and my type of shooting, that's a game changer because it's the moment of action. And like any wildlife photography, yes, I can pan when a bird is doing it.

And I'm just doing normal shots of catching it as I'm planning. I have that skill. But a moment of takeoff is a very old moment of landing. It's very interesting. And you're going to catch moments that the human eye wouldn't see. So when the goldfinch was feeding on this log in my garden, there was some seeds hidden in the logs. You can't see the seeds, a little bit of magic. Yeah. Oh, it's just looks pretty pleasant. Blackbird comes in, a fight, but you can't see the fight because it's a blur. Because you use pro capture, when you look at the one shot, which it is, you can see that the blackbird with its beak is plucking the wing of the goldfinch. Nobody's ever seen that in the world. That's never been recorded before. I live for moments like that. Or when two bramblings, male bramblings came in at the end of this last winter and I've got my little branch and I've hidden all the seeds and they're both wings up and they're both fighting. You know, you don't want to miss that, do you? And if you're just trying to do that with your finger shutter button, you're not going to get it. So high speed shooting is ease. You know, you do get these nerds, these snobs who go, Why do you need 50 frames a second? Why do you need 120 frames a second? I use those features all the time. Works for me.

Tom : I'm just imagining now sitting behind your computer with the 5000 files. And you know, you talked about your book publisher that the hair goes up on your hand. You have the same when you see this image? I suppose if you see this image out of the 5000.

Andrew : So that's where Lightroom's very good, you preview the whole lot. And I'll probably import 30 or 40 photos before I've even imported them. And if I've been on a good shoot in my heart and my mind, I know that which was the shot, because I've had a quick look on the back of the screen. And even though I import 30 or 40 images, I'm always going to go straight to that shot. And then every once in a while, which isn't every shoot, obviously, but it's maybe once every two weeks or something like that. It's not a bad hit rate. I just go, Oh yeah!

But I'm never happy so I will say that. The Aurora shot that went in all the papers, I couldn't get the Starry AF that is really good at for. And my stars looked a little bit bigger I just thought, Oh, I'm a failure. It's rubbish. And that's the one that went three national papers. So I'm sure there was some nerdy photographers out there that went, Ooh, we didn't get the stars quite sharp. I'm my own worst enemy. The problem is that's a gift, 'cause it means I push myself very hard. But it's also a curse because it means I'm never, my wife says, you just got to be content. I don't know, stop worrying.

Tom : And let's talk a bit about books. You already mentioned you wrote some books and I want to come back a moment on the Butterfly Safari book. It got a lot of great reviews. I was reading through them. It says, It's a book that light the eyes and feet the soul. Each page reveals magnificent images of these amazing creatures, as well as some fascinating facts.
I mean, taking pictures from butterflies in your garden and then getting the idea of going all around the UK to shoot and to find every butterfly that there is. When you, came up with this idea?

Andrew : So, I didn't, my publisher did. I had no idea of it at all. Then because I'd worked with this publisher for and they said, Well, why don't you do, we'll do you a big book because they do do some big books, which is you can see the size of the book. So every time I've had a commission or a contract, not only has it been good for my confidence but it's been good for my photography. Because I go, Oh, they believe in me, I can now go and do whatever I need to do to make this the best book I can make it. At that point of getting the contract, they weren't bothered whether I had all 59. But I just knew because I was getting involved in the butterfly world that to get that 59 was doable. I didn't know if I could do it because it's actually quite hard. Because there's some very rare ones there. But I'll just share one of my little safaris because it was one of the most magic ones.

Somehow I found out about a private estate in Scotland on the Scottish borders that was having an open day and they have a butterfly called the Scotch Argus. So I got in touch with them. I booked the accommodation. And I booked to come up the day before. And the it's a huge estate. So it's very wealthy landowner. And he says, you can just want, you can do what you want, wander around the estate, whatever. And I met the local conservationist. And she took me in and I saw this butterfly for the first time in my life, the Scotch Argus. And then she stayed for half an hour. She said, I'll leave you now. And I was alone in the middle of a landed estate in Scotland with this rare butterfly and the midges biting me, obviously getting these. One of the photos then made the cover of BBC wildlife magazine. This for me was the height. And even better on, as I drove off the estate, it was the river Tweed ran alongside it and I jumped in the water and had a swim. I was really happy. So, it's very interesting when you get a commission or a contract, it really has given me confidence.

And so working on this garden book, I knew I was very low in mammals and I put the word out on Facebook and I said, Oh, red squirrels, red squirrels. And a friend got in touch, said, Oh, I've got red squirrels in my garden on the Isle of Wight. And I went, Hey! So I went to the Isle of Wight for red squirrels.

I got to really travel and I got to kind people inviting me to show me their wildlife. I went on a farm in North Shropshire where they have breeding little owls, little owls and magical owls, gorgeous creatures. And I got to hang out in this guy's hide next to where the baby owls were and just photograph. On a good day, it's a thing of wonder because you're always seeing something new. You're always seeing, always having adventures. I've just long may it continue. So after this garden book comes out, I'm doing a book on dragonflies. So I'm busy for the next two or three years. It's good.

Tom : I think you're always busy with something, Andrew. I think it's something your wife also tells you every day.

Andrew : Yeah.

Tom : Andrew, if you decide for people that maybe want to bring out a book. From the moment you decide, I want to bring out this book or from the moment a publisher tells, Maybe do this, until it's finished. How long a time span we are talking here?

Andrew : I can only speak about the books that I've done. So, I would say there was a process with the butterfly book. Also bear in mind through COVID and through my cancer surgery. So that was probably five years. But that was interrupted by all the events in the world. Obviously, you could say that I'm going to be doing this garden book within a two year frame. But that's actually wrong because I've been photographing garden wildlife since 2014. And so I'm able to go back through my portfolio of 120, 000 photos and go, Story's really interesting. Oh, that's really good. And pull out the best of those shots to put in and then find gaps and then work on those. So I don't think one can give a timeframe because every book is different also. And some books are more writing, less photos.

So now with this garden book, I do little chapters of 300, 400 words. Because I've got to the point, I hate the way people call themselves visual storytellers on the social media. It drives me mental. But I now know that my pictures tell the story and therefore all I need to do with my words is just a little nudge. Look at this. This is very interesting. Here's the conservation thing. I went there. Maybe a little couple of poetic images, but then you're using as a gateway to the pictures. So in that sense, I've become a visual storyteller. My main conduit, my main road out into the world is through images which suits me fine.

Tom : And Andrew, you would say your words, they come inside your head before the picture when you take it or? Or when you see them on the screen?

Andrew : I'd say a bit of everything, but with these chapters, I am writing in response to the pictures and then I'm looking stuff up. And there might be bits of writing from other books from a long time ago. So yeah, it's an interesting way around considering for 25 years, me and my wife, we wrote over a hundred books. That was the words all the way. And now less is more. So I just tell little short stories. But you have to frame the pictures. You have to give them a backdrop or a background. So that it's a complete package so people can thumb through and go, Oh, I didn't know that about bank vaults. That's very interesting. So you're hoping that people will learn something and they'll think about conservation as well. Yeah.

Tom : Let's jump a bit from books to magazines, Andrew. Because you've been published in countless magazines, national newspapers, inside, on the covers. For people or for photographers, maybe starting out, how do I get my image in a magazine?

Andrew : So I got my first images in a magazine in Amateur Photographer do something called reader portfolio, and I think they still accept submissions for that. And that's when someone's starting out or starting to get somewhere. So they were the first to kind of publish my images. And then, I'm talking about the UK obviously, the photography show is really, really important because you can go out and chat to people in the magazines. Sometimes they're friendly, sometimes they're not.

But I did chat to people in Amateuer Photography. I then chatted to people at Digital Camera World, a guy called Ben Brain, who's a big, big cheese in the photography world now, and started doing work for them. So, I would say, bring an iPad or something that shows what you're doing and shows that you're doing something really well or really different. If you're just showing something that everybody else has done before, no one's going to be interested.

I would say persistence, I would say people are always looking for stories, but it's not as easy as that. For a magazine like BBC Wildlife, which is pretty much the National Geographic for the UK, I would say it's a really important magazine. I kept approaching them over and over again. In fact, one of my very early images of the dragonfly against the milky way, they did a double page spread. But I kept pitching nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. And so eventually the butterfly book was ready with a PDF. We sent them the PDF and they went, okay, we're going to go for this. And then they got back to me and said, It's going to be a 13 page story and it's going to be a cover and I'm like, Oh, it doesn't get better than that.

I've tried National Geographic. I haven't got anywhere. There used to be National Geographic UK, but I think that's gone. So I think there's been huge cuts at National Geographic. And I think maybe my work is too domestic for them. I don't know. They just want something on a much grander scale and the UK is not grand. But I do think the rainbow birds are very interesting. You know, I'm always pushing. But I’m sorry to say to people starting out persistence, but do something different.

I would say also in terms of newspapers, the agencies are always looking for new photographers. But if you're going to send in a photo, which you have to explain to them, it never got published . Literally they have to look at that photo and say, Ah, I get it! Oh, wow. They have to go, Oh, wow. It has to be spectacular. And that's not me being arrogant. It's just because I work really, really hard.

It's actually about work and there's no shortcuts. You can't think your way into it. You can't affirm yourself into it, you know, but you can hassle and you can contact magazines. R. S. P. B. ask for reader photos. I mean, I've never even submitted to that. I ought there's all sorts of ways in, but go to the photography shows as well and talk to people. Talk to the brands and you're doing amazing things with that brand, talk to the brand. If you've got an incredible following on insta, talk to the brand that they'll be interested in you. I’ve got like 4, 700 on Insta and I know the macros become a thing, isn't it? There's a ambassador. He's got 187, 000 follow. I just don't get it. So I'm crap, but I do reach of thousands, if not millions of people through the BBC and through all my media work. So I have a very large audience.

Tom : I'm pretty sure Beyonce is now even following you, Andrew.
Let's talk a bit about creative processes. I was going to ask you, Andrew, what's the most difficult wildlife picture you ever took, but maybe it's the one from the dragonfly with the Milky Way?

Andrew : Yeah, I would definitely say that. Just technically, there's so many things to do with lighting and the behavior of a roosting dragonfly and nighttime and the weather and the wind focusing both on the dragonfly and also on the stars, just got to be the most difficult. I've started doing some camera trap photography and I hate it. I hate it. So I got myself a collaborator. So, I find that immensely difficult. Anything that can go wrong, you know, you've got the extra batteries and you've got everything waterproof and you've got the motion sensor and you put the food out for the badgers or the, you hope to get the otter in the garden.

And I got all my shots this year, but it's, Oh my God, it's no fun you're not there. You know, but if you want really, really shy creatures, so my next goal is to get the pine Martin, which has been now know is resident in Shropshire and get a decent shot of that. So yeah, we'll see.

Tom : Tell me the most amazing place in the UK you've been to shoot pictures, Andrew.

Andrew : Well, I'll say it's where I was on the Sniper stones three nights ago to get the Aurora diamond rock. It's magical. It's high up. It's beautiful formation. There was nobody there. That would do it for me. Or my back garden where today I've had Ruby tailed wasps. So I just say, yeah, so really my favorite places at the moment is our front patio. The end of the summer is on the wall and the wall is warm and so all the butterflies and the bees and everything they're just going, Oh, that's nice. And I'm getting some lovely I got an amazing flight shot of a small tortoiseshell butterfly today. So, yeah.

Tom : Andrew, how important is for you nature conservation? You think as photographers taking pictures, we can change anything in a certain way that?

Andrew : I don't know. I mean, people say to me, Oh, you allow your photos to be in all the right wing papers. And the problem is every single paper in the UK is right wing apart from the Guardian and the Mirror. I don't have a choice where my photos get published. What I do know is if I'm adding a positive story and there is some potential to raise awareness for species, then I can only be doing something good if not very small.

So I try to carry a message everywhere I go. I try to raise awareness because even selfishly, I want the species to be around certain photograph and when I'm old and gray, but it's start times in it.

Tom : You also, if I remember well, you like to play squash and you like cooking Andrew, right?

Andrew : Yeah.

Tom : How you manage your time to do those, because you seem like somebody who is 24 hours a day with a camera walking around.

Andrew : No, cause the good thing is that the light is rubbish in the UK and think about it. You know, we don't get much sun. So when things are happening, not much of the time. I would say that I'm a bit like the seasons. It's up and down. Yeah. So I like to stay fit. So I play squash two or three times a week. I'm the cook at home. So I do all my wife will do the odd meal if I've been away, but I do all the cooking. I love cooking. I love food. So yeah, those are kind of joyful things to do. And I love the fact that 59, I'm still getting faster as a squash player.

So, you know, I think it helps. But today we went on a five hour walk up on the Long Mynd me and my wife. I didn't take a camera with me! I'm getting better at that! Because I thought there's not birds around, I don't care. I've done all lLong Mynd. I saw one kestrel and I thought I've got a lot of shots of a hovering kestrel. Do I care? No. Just walk and enjoy and be spiritual.

So yeah, there's a time and a place. As we now get into the autumn, that time and place will be less and less and less, but everything has a season. Then there's a salmon season or the deer season or the winter bird season coming up. I'm about to set up the feeders in my garden.

But now I'm writing the books. So I've pretty much finished shooting the photos. So I'm not rushing around anymore, rushing around the country. I've pretty much got everything. I didn't get any weasels. That would have been nice, but you can't have every mammal in the world. So, I got an otter on a camera trap in a garden in the middle of the night. So I've got some amazing moments. In our village we have one of the rarest birds in the UK called a firecrest. I got that. So I'm still the exorcist myself who aimed me at the species and off I go. So yeah, it's going to be a great book hopefully.

Tom : And what's your most famous dish to cook?

Andrew : Breaded chicken, really hammered flat, nice and thin, cook it fast with panko breadcrumbs. Because I'm Czech and refuse at pieces. So, that was one of the dishes my mom used to cook. And every, every good Czech person knows about the industry. So every Austrian, but also I think in Spain, you know it, don't you? Breaded chicken know how to do that. So that's mine, I'm going to be doing that later this week for my son. So, yeah, I'm not a fancy cook, but I'm a good cook.

Tom : So if we meet up one day, you'll make this for me, Andrew?

Andrew : I will, I will make you Viennese schnitzel. Yeah.

Tom : That's a promise. Okay.
To round this interview off, Andrew, anything new and exciting we can await from you in the next year?

Andrew : Well, in the spring, if all goes well, the 208 page book, the same size as Butterfly Safari called Garden Safari will be published. I've got a terrible fear that the media will go, Oh, we did a butterfly, but we don't want to do anything with this one. Hopefully they won't. Cause it's really special. There's some really special photos in there.

And then I start my dragonfly and damselfly book. And then, because our son is leaving home, me and my wife, hopefully we can do a bit of travel, so I might not do too much photography for a couple of years. I don't know. We'll see. Watch this space.

I'd like to win Wildlife Photographer of the Year, but I wish I hadn't said that now. Because, you know, just, that's a difficult one, isn't it?

Tom : It's difficult, but you might get it. Maybe if you get the lion with the zebra.

Andrew Fusek: The lion with the zebra. They'll all love that. Or you know, the lion playing piano, that, that would do it, wouldn't it?

Tom : Andrew, thanks a lot for this talk. I had a really enjoyable time. I love your energy. I love your pictures. They are amazing. They are an inspiration. I might try it one day, but I think I have not enough time to try everything what I want to do. So I just watch yours. So they are amazing.

Andrew : Marvellous. Thank you.