The photographer I’ve worked with the most, and who I love to work with, is Nick Bishop. He’s a Kiwi; he’s a native of New Zealand. And he came up to me at a conference at which I was speaking, and he was not— well, he’s kind of like me. We both — unless you’re all dressed up to speak or be on TV or something, we both kind of look like we woke up beneath piled leaves.
And so this kind of bearded, disheveled-looking guy comes up to me, and says, hey, how would you like to write children’s books. We can go around the world and I’ll take the pictures. Well, sure, that sounded good to me, but I wanted to see his photographs. What I really wanted to see in the photographs was how he behaved around the animals.
Because you can tell from the expression on the animal’s face. Even if it’s an insect. And when I looked at Nick’s extraordinary pictures, that’s when I knew. He knows how to make that creature comfortable. And bring out its good nature, its good, happy nature. And you can see even on the faces of snakes, on the faces of katydids, on the faces of crickets. And on the faces of the larger mammals that we — we’ve worked with, from tree kangaroos to snow leopards.
And he knows to wait until that animal’s comfortable, and that he’s bringing our readers what that animal is really like. And he’s not putting the animal into any kind of stress. And that’s important. A lot of photographers, it’s just like the paparazzi. And when you’re dealing with a wild animal, you don’t have the right to go striding into its habitat and steal its picture, or frighten it.
You shouldn’t be able to take a snake, pick it up, stick it in the refrigerator until its so cold it can’t move, and then take its picture. That’s wrong. I don’t wanna inconvenience these subjects. And neither does he. And that’s why he’s just the greatest, greatest person to work with.
