I’m watching Our Planet on Netflix right now and this one single episode has Siberian tigers, giant aerial bird fights, and underwater newt orgies. According to the doc, Siberian tigers roam a 30x30sq mile area in the winter. How do they get such high quality footage of such seemingly rare animals/events?
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Just watch their making off, should be the last episode.
They had two camera men sitting in tiny “box houses” for three years straight trying to get a good foto. In the end it was a tree-mounted camera that shot the tiger.
All the more recent (last few years) BBC David Attenborough documentaries have a section at the end that shows how they get some of the footage. Pretty impressive. It can literally take years to make a few episodes.
Lots of options, helicopters and cameras, land vehicles and long lenses, stationary cameras left behind for a period of time without people around, or a normal photographer and patience.
Wildlife photographers spend their lives learning to read animals and know how to just hang out at a distance and be non threatening until animals come closer. Wildlife photography is lots of long hours, patience, years of experience guiding your actions or approaches and lots of luck.
There are lots of examples like this, https://images.app.goo.gl/yoGgeV3kXZXsqz7y5
Years and years of monk-like focus and camera traps. I remember a National Geographic article from a few years ago about a photographer who spent a year alone in Greenland, collecting footage of polar bears. He also got to collect weather data, because he was, you know, in Greenland for a year, and somebody somewhere wanted to know what goes on in the uninhabited parts. Nature photographers are on a whole nother level of dedication and crazy.
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