Grizzlies, Wolves, and Koalas: Conservation Photography | Nat Geo Live

( intro music ) I got started just taking pictures, just taking pictures I wanted to take. And I just took pictures I thought were weird or different or interesting or funny. A cowboy roping a cat. ( audience laughter ) Could be a lady walking her dog. Bad dogs make excellent pictures, it turns out. Some dogs are a little worse than others. But it was these types of pictures that got me noticed by Geographic. And that was 25 years ago now, hard to believe. As I've gone forward through my career I started to do more and more stories on conservation, and to me, good pictures should come from the conservation side. They could be funny or humorous, entertaining. They better be entertaining. So, for a story on grizzly bears I was given eight weeks of assignment time This is day two. Notice those are my boots up the tree. The tops of those boots are wet, don't ask why, exactly. ( audience laughter ) Of course, reality is these are bears at basically a Hollywood facility. They train bears to fake roar and fake maul for the movies. And that bear is actually not making sound he's just opening wide to get donut holes tossed into his mouth from a trainer off to the side, so that's all there is to it. So, I loaded up as much as I could for that week, anything I could think up. And when I did go to Alaska finally. I went to the most visually loaded place that I could find where I knew the bears were. So, what's the story here? Well, bears actually tolerate us just fine. We can't stand bears. Bears love our garbage, full of food and good smells, but... they get a little aggressive, get into our dumpsters, they get into our bird-feeders next and our dog food. They break into our cabins and-- A fed bear is a dead bear. They end up getting shot and sold at the state of Alaska surplus sale, twice a year in Alaska. So, with bears it's fairly straight forward, you know keep them out of the garbage, everything is gonna be okay. They're, you know, they don't-- they kill one person a year on the North American continent so they tend to get a very bad rap even though we lose many times that to domestic dog fatalities every year in this country. What about the more quiet species? What about wolves? They're more of an enigma and this is the problem with wolves because people want to view them either as something cute, like a pet or a blood thirsty killer. What are wolves? We want to know, don't we? We're cued every minute of every day how to think about everything, from our news to who's good and who's bad in any reality show. But with most wildlife, including predators there ain't no such thing. Wolves are just wolves. That's it. Story on koalas. Shoot the weird, the different, the idiotic. Photograph the cute and cuddly in the hopes that people will see this and say "Why does that human mother have a baby koala?" Well, because this is the truth for northern koalas. I was shocked when I went over there. Really. I mean, they're confined to golf courses in the suburbs and when they come off the golf course, they're trapped. They get hit by cars and they get attacked by domestic dogs and it's something awful. And still the government of Australia would not grant the koala in the northern part of the country protection. The nurses at one koala hospital, I went to who would've all gotten fired had they known we were-- that their management know we were gonna make this picture. They saved back one week's worth of koalas in a freezer all killed by dogs, including that mother and baby. We ran that picture around the world and the government of Australia changed the law and offered protection to those koalas a few months after the story came out. Can I say that picture did it? Sure didn't hurt, sure didn't hurt. So that's why we do this. ( applause )