About the Photographer

Hi, welcome to my web site. My passion is taking pictures of wild animals, in their natural environment, not just to record them, but to understand them, and hopefully communicate some of the essence of the animal via the picture. It is a passion that involves time and travel, and there must be many easier passions in life, but this is mine, and I hope you will enjoy sharing a little of it through my pictures.

This web site demonstrates some of my recent work, and especially from trips this year to Argentina, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe and South Africa

The trip to Argentina was in an attempt to capture the unique feeding behavior of Orcas on the coast of the Valdes Peninsula. Uniquely at this one spot for a few short weeks in spring, Orcas deliberately strand themselves on the beach, as they attempt to capture young baby seals. The timing of these attacks is driven by the pups reaching around 3 months old, at this age they are not yet old enough to swim away with their parents, but are old enough to be testing themselves in the shallow water off the beach.

It is then that on this one stretch of beach at the very tip of the peninsula one can witness this unique attack behavior. Why this beach rather than others is unclear, but may be linked to the particularly large number of pups born here each year, and a number of relatively deep channels that run into the beach, allowing access for the Orcas.

It is unique and exciting behavior that happens only near high tide, and only on calm days, for it is only at high tide the Orcas have the depth of eater required to get to the beach, and it is only in calm weather that their sonar can locate the pups. If you want to catch this, one needs a special license to be allowed on the beach, patience and a little bit of luck. It is many hours of contemplation, followed by explosive seconds of action – I hope you enjoy the pictures

In June this year I was back in Africa, primarily to take pictures of Mountain Gorillas, in both Uganda and Rwanda. The 600 remaining animals, so fiercely protected by the famous Diana Fossey, until her untimely death, live in a triangle on the border of Uganda, Rwanda and the Congo, and not surprisingly considering their name, they live up mountains.

The Congo continues to be plagued by civil unrest and is a no go area, even for me, however Uganda and Rwanda are relatively safe, although both countries send an army patrol with you whenever you venture on to the mountains. I could never decide if the army presence made me feel safer, or just reminded me that their were people out there in the mountains who might want to kill me.

Access to these animals is restricted to one hour a day, and then in groups of 6 to 8, and accompanied by park rangers, who are a helpful, cheerful, knowledgeable, and very fit, walking up an down mountains all day every day at altitude is the ultimate treadmill! The first challenge is to find the Gorillas, even aided by professional trackers sent out at dawn, with radio links to the main group, this can still be a long and arduous search. The habitat the Mountain Gorillas live in is steep rain forest, and not the easiest area to travel across, unless you are a gorilla or a local tracker

My personal record is 5 hours searching, and when we found them they were a few hundred yards from where we had started. To add to my pain it rained, and the animals took refuge under some trees in poor light making photography impractical. 400lb nervous Gorillas are not something you want to point a flash gun at! But a tranquil hour was spent watching and being watched by the group, and especially the dominant Silverback, whom I am sure wondered why we were late that day. The fact that this massive animal would happily allow us within a few feet of himself and his family was a privilege, and one can not help but wonder how they got the King Kong image, Hollywood at its best perhaps

It is to the immeasurable credit of these countries with so many other priorities for resources, they continue to defend and protect these endangered animals

The passion is to capture the essence of an animal in it's home, not just an image of an animal. Please enjoy the pictures - Thank you.

Mark Hamilton

PS - My little friend is a five month old lion