A Man Among Wolves: Photographing Yellowstone’s Iconic Predators | National Geographic

This is so cool! I was in Yellowstone for a year and a half. My job was to shed light on wolf behavior in a natural landscape. A lot of times, wolves get persecuted, and this was an opportunity for me to just show wolves for what they were; for being large, beautiful, mega-carnivores.

Being there for as long as I was, because inherently, you're going to see so many different unique wildlife events. I'm assigned to do wolves, but you know, if I see an incredible thing happening over here, it's like, of course, I'm going to photograph that. You know, you can't look away. That's not what we do.

It was a huge aspect of life and death in Yellowstone. It's always a bit hard when you're an empathetic human to see an animal suffering. You know, this little elk calf that's like fresh to the world, and look at all these animals around me. And then it's like, welcome to reality; now you're food for wolf pups.

You know, photographing wildlife is always this balance between what you can control and what you can't.

Yeah, you can't talk to animals. What do you think she's doing? Even if you could, it's like, that probably wouldn't be ethical to be like, "Oh yeah, could you just like take your whole family of wolves and go up on that ridge line? And like, oh, the moon's right there. Could you just start howling in front of the moon? That'd be great."

Setting up camera traps becomes a little monotonous, and so sometimes you like pretend to be whatever your subject is—whether it's like a wolf or a bear—and you kind of like goof around and lighten it up.

But a lot of the work that I did ended up being skiing around, shooting around in the backcountry, trying to get close to the wolves. Being out there and being by myself, you kind of worry about being a bear snack as well. But thankfully, I had a lot of training informally growing up. My brother and I had to walk a mile and a half to the bus stop.

The way back was always like this big explore adventure session where we'd walk on the frozen brook and hopefully, you wouldn't fall through. That wasn't so bad. Being self-sufficient was a big part of our childhood, and I didn't realize how much I'd use it now as an adult.

Because yeah, there's definitely some risks involved, but the whole goal is to make pictures that people haven't seen before. And inherently, that means pushing boundaries. You know, if it was easy, somebody else would have probably done it.