Meet The Pro: Steve Benjamin

Welcome to episode 13 of the Pangolin Podcast, hosted by Toby Jermyn. In this episode, Toby is joined by acclaimed wildlife and marine photographer and underwater cinematographer Steve Benjamin. 

Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Steve shares his extensive experience capturing the vibrant life beneath the waves, including his work with renowned organisations such as Netflix, BBC, National Geographic, and Disney. 

Here is a link to a gallery of Steve's images: https://pangolin.smugmug.com/SmugMug-Website/Website-Pages/Meet-the-Pro-Steve-Benjamin

Throughout their conversation, Steve discusses his top four personal photographs, the techniques and challenges involved in underwater photography, and the importance of ocean conservation. Additionally, the episode features a special segment in which Steve shares a photograph admired by another photographer, offering insight into the dedication and effort that go into stunning nature photography. 

Connect with Steve: https://www.stevenbenjamin.co.za/
Join Steve on The Sardine Run: https://www.animalocean.co.za/sardine-run-south-africa

Guest image by Thomas Peschak
https://www.thomaspeschak.com/
https://www.instagram.com/thomaspeschak

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The Pangolin Podcast was produced and edited by Bella Falk: https://www.passportandpixels.com

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Chapters

• 3:24 1st Image: Cape Fur Seal
• 12:34 2nd Image: Humpback Whale
• 19:44 3rd Image: Chokka Squid
• 25:34 4th Image: Bait Ball
• 33:09 Inspirational Image: Thomas Peschak

Transcript

Toby: Hello, and welcome to episode 13 of the Pangolin Podcast. I'm your host, Toby Jermyn. Thank you very much for joining me.

In each episode, I've invited a professional wildlife photographer to imagine themselves in a remote location, and along with their camera gear, they're allowed to bring five photographs to hang on the wall of their humble dwelling.

Now, four of these must be their own, and the final image is one by a photographer that they admire and wish they'd taken themselves.

If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see the images as we talk. But for audio listeners on other platforms, there is a link in the description to a gallery.

On today's show.

Steve: Often, the sardines seek shelter amongst the snorkelers because they're the only thing that's not eating them. So you arrive there wanting to get close to a bait ball, but very soon you can find yourself swimming away from that bait ball just to get the fish back to the dolphins and sharks that want to eat it.

Toby: My guest today is an acclaimed wildlife and marine photographer and underwater cinematographer based in Cape Town, South Africa. With a background in zoology and ichthyology. He has spent more than 15 years capturing the vibrant life beneath the waves, working on productions for renowned organisations like Netflix, BBC, National Geographic, and Disney.

Through his visually powerful imagery and storytelling, he inspires awareness and action around ocean conservation, highlighting both the beauty and the challenges of our marine ecosystems. His passion for the ocean is matched by his commitment to supporting scientific and conservation communities, making him a respected figure, not just in photography but also in marine advocacy.

Welcome to the show, Steve Benjamin.

Steve: Wow. That's amazing. What an incredible introduction. Thank you very much, Toby. So nice to see you again. And it's so great to be on the podcast.

I've listened and watched every episode that you've released, and I'm a huge admirer of the show, so thank you for having me.

Toby: Well, it's an absolute pleasure, and you are the first person we've had on the show who is much more marine-focused, so I'm sure that the viewers and the listeners are going to be absolutely delighted to hear the stories from below the surface as opposed to above.

So where are you? Where are you today? Are you in Cape Town?

Steve: Yeah. So right now  I'm in my home in Cliff Valley. There's a strong northwesterly blowing, so we've just got off the water this afternoon and preparing for tomorrow again. My favourite thing to do is to be on the sea and then talk about photography, animals, behaviour, and wildlife.

So it's great to be able to dive into these photos with you today.

Toby: Yeah, there we go. And I really appreciate a pun so early in on the show. That's excellent. Diving straight in. Now, I've asked you to choose four images taken by yourself and one by another photographer.

How easy or difficult was it to choose the four images from your archives?

Steve: Toby, it was a nightmare. I probably sweated over this for, like, the whole week. There's so many good photos that I feel are good, but I focus basically on South African waters. Cape Town is where I spend most of my time and where I've spent, you know, I've learnt so much. So it was tough.

Toby: Well, you've managed to whittle down to four images plus the one. So without further ado, let's start with your first image. So, would you please tell us a little bit about this lovely, lovely image?

Steve: So what we have here is a Cape fur seal. It's right up into the camera. It's actually playing with a piece of kelp, and it's in the kelp forest, and you can see a few seals in the far background with some open ocean.

So I've been diving and spending an immense amount of time with the Cape fur seals. Throughout business we were doing seal snorkelling tours for more than 15 years, and I photographed extensively.

They're just so difficult to get beautiful body positions, and the features are hard to capture because they're so fast. And this was one of the very few images that I thought really represented their personality, also represented the environment that they found in. 

Toby: And is this normal behaviour for the Cape fur seal to play with kelp or is it a juvenile behaviour exhibiting?

Steve: This only happens at a very specific time of year. It's normally February and March, and this is when the sort of the pups are starting to get into the water, and it generally makes the whole seal colony very playful. So not only do the newborn youngsters bite the kelp, but for some reason the adolescents and the females and
just the general colony changes.

So some days you get there, and it's cold, and no one wants to swim. But other days, if there's a playful nature, everyone's in the water, and this kelp biting sort of behaviour can happen, and also seals are very curious. So if you moving too much, you distract them.

So to get this photo, I had to lie on the bottom, not being an object of interest. I'm on scuba, and you have to be calm and very quiet. If you swim after them
then it's just a game of cat and mouse, and they're just playing with you, and you actually can't photograph them.

Toby: That's a top tip there. Straight off the bat, is like don't ever chase after a seal. And I mean, what makes it even more challenging? So you've got a fast-moving mammal species swimming through the water. You are trying to stay really still.

The water is not, is it very clear that better times of the year when it is clearer than other times as well?

Steve: Yeah, so water visibility is a huge problem in underwater photography. Around Duiker Island, it's variable to do with the wind. So when the southeast blows very strongly, it's freezing cold, can be 10 degrees Celsius. So we are typically wearing like a two-piece five-millimetre wetsuit with gloves and booties.

So, you know, you can last 40 minutes in the water, but you have to come up to warm up. But that's actually an interesting point you're bringing out there, not just about visibility but particulates in the water. So you'll notice in this photo that you don't see a lot of backscatter. And that's actually got to do with a lot with the lighting. So for this photo, I'm using two strobes, and they're positioned very wide.

So we never really shine light at a subject. We always use the edge lighting to minimise the backscatter and try get an even spread of light with these strobes. So you can see the twinkle in the eye of that seal, which is very close to me, and that's one of the strobes, adding the detail in the eye there.

Toby: This is obviously very close and you're shooting very wide. So what camera lens was this?

Steve: Yeah, so this is a, this is a very strange setup. It's a Sony A7 III. Then I've got a 25 mil fixed lens on it with a flat port, and then I've got a Nauticam wide-angle
wet lens adapter that brings it from a 25 mil to, like, a, I think it's a 15 mil or somewhere around there. And the reason I have that whole setup is because I really wanted the camera to be able to focus two or three centimetres from the dome port. And you do that because you want to remove the water because the more water between you and your subject, the hazier, the more particulates you get. So in underwater photography, the main rule is when you think you're close enough, then you, that's when you have to get a little bit closer.

Toby: So this is like centimetres away from the dome port or the wet lens that you have going through there. So it saw you and then veered off. Is that what happened?

Steve: So yes. This is probably five centimetres from my dome port. So it's very close to the camera. But in this particular situation, I'm probably lying in the reef. I've wedged myself in, and I always do like a massive arm extension to get my camera, you know, half a metre closer away from my body. 'Cause I know that myself as a large object is intimidating. So I need to extend my range. And then if you stay still, these animals will often come to you naturally out of curiosity and present you with a piece of kelp, like this is happening here.

Toby: It's a beautiful, beautiful image. Now, Cape Town is not really renowned as, you know, a big diving place in Africa 'cause it's so, well, it's so bladdy cold. Basically, I lived in Cape Town for a very, very long time and I didn't, I've never actually dived in Cape Town, which is something we're going to have to remedy at some point. But what came first, the photography or the diving, or was it simultaneous?

Steve: So I came from a, like you said, well-pronounced ichthyo, I can't pronounce it, an ichthyology background. Ichthyology is the study of fish. Wildlife's always been my passion, and I studied at university, and we were always crayfishing, fishing, and spearfishing. So those were, that's where I sort of learnt my water skills. Learning to scuba dive from an early age, and to be honest, in the underwater world, you need to develop that first, before you can even think about picking up a camera and adding the complications of photography. So I started spearfishing and scuba diving.

And then I spent a year working on Aliwal Shoals, mostly just dealing with tiger sharks and bull sharks in the tourism industry. And there was a cameraman called Charles Maxwell, who is now retired. And in the back of his cupboard, he had a Nikon D300 in a little housing. And I begged him, please, can I just – can I have this? 'Cause I was borrowing other people's cameras when I had the chance, and I was loving it. I was loving showing people images that they couldn't see themselves.

Like, people don't go underwater, and to have the skills to get close to wildlife is difficult. And he did give me his camera after a while, and it set me off on a great career path.

Toby: Like you say, it's a whole other world that 90% of people will never see or
witness, and that's why I've got the hugest admiration for anybody who does underwater photography because there are so many things which make it double, if not triply, more challenging because you are moving, it's moving. You've got worse lighting, everything. So yeah, very lovely, lovely image.

Steve: So I chose this photo of a seal because it's a natural behaviour, and it looks like a very calm seal. And you can see its personality. And images like these has helped me develop a business, and we actually did seal snorkelling for about 15 years. So for a very long period of time, we took daily trips out to the colony to take photographers and tourists out to snorkel with them. We built a big business. But it all changed.

Rabies was discovered in the Cape fur seal population, sort of two or three years ago. And Toby, I don't know if you know much about rabies.

Toby: I know what rabies is. Yeah. But I had no idea that it could infect seals. So, so what happened?

Steve: So for a long time, we were getting these aggressive seals that we couldn't really understand why. And we were having boats bitten. We were having people bitten, and so we had to decide that we couldn't focus on seal snorkelling anymore because it just wasn't safe.

Because of this virus that had changed the behaviour of the species we were focusing on.

Toby: It's one of those things, isn't it? You know, when you work in wildlife tourism, it's one of those things you can never, you can never predict. I mean, if you look now the last two, three years down in Antarctica, there's been outbreaks of bird flu, which ironically has had a bigger impact on the elephant seal population than it has on on the penguins, for example.

But now rabies is now endemic in those in the Cape fur seal population, and there's not going to be very much we can do about that, is there?

Steve: They are busy inoculating all the harbour seals and any vagrant seals that come to the coastline. But the general wild population is still open to it. For now, we're just playing it cautious, and we go and view the seals, and we go snorkel in the kelp forest. So everyone watching you can still go snorkelling in Cape Town.

We're just going to, not going to focus on the seals. We do sunfish, we do shipwrecks, we do kelp, we do cat sharks. We do so much more, and that's really opened up a new trip for us, which is our ocean safaris. So, you're right, it has developed in a very interesting, good way, and we've pivoted to something else.

Toby: Well, yeah, you got to roll with the punches, haven't you? So anyway, we'll leave a link in the description down below. If you want to join Steve on an ocean safari. Then if you're in Cape Town, I can imagine you'll have an absolute ball.

Let's move on to your second image of the day. Tell us about this one, please.

Steve: Okay, so what you're looking at here is a feeding humpback whale. It's engulfing its food. It's at the surface. There's actually a second humpback whale in the background, and these whales form part of the supergroups. So you get 50 to a 100, sometimes 150 whales at one time.

Staying around Cape Town and up to St Helena, where they're feeding for the summer season. And I photographed this in around 2015, 2016, somewhere there. And it's a real special photo to me 'cause we were working on this sequence for Netflix, Our Planet, and we did a fantastic film shoot over two seasons, capturing the feeding behaviour of humpback whales in general.

Toby: And this was taken, obviously, part of a film shoot because normally being in the water so close to a whale is a no-no. Unless you've got a permit and you know what you're doing.

It's not something that people can come and do and jump in the water, is it?

Steve: Good point. Correct. Yes. We were under permits with the observers for a film shoot to do this, and I was taking photos, but also a safety diver for the cameraman that was busy working at the time.

Toby: So talk about the photograph itself. There's a bend, there's a line. Is that, is it some sort of fisheye lens that you've got going on? What's going on?

Steve: Yeah, so this was taken with a Tokina 10 mil fisheye lens on a Nikon D300. I think it had a frame rate of like two photos a second or something. But I had to wait for the right moment to click the shutter. 'Cause it. That's insulting. It's not two photos per second. It's like five.

Yes.

There we go.

Still have to think.

Toby: Well, compared to 500 images you can take in a few seconds now. I mean, it's archaic, isn't it? Isn't that amazing how fast it's moved on?

Isn't it really. Very quick.

Steve: This is my original camera. The Tokina is an incredible lens 'cause the focus is so quick, and also this is very close to this whale. I'm probably like three metres away from it. And there's no strobes, obviously, in this photo. This is all natural light and all the scatter you can see in the frame, that's a species of krill, so that's what they're feeding on. So I didn't want to remove the backscatter from this photo because that would be taking away the food, which is part of the image.

It was used by Netflix in the book. It was a big double-page spread showing these whales feeding, and I was very proud of that moment.

Toby: Very cool. And so you've worked with a loads of people, National Geographic, you've worked with Disney. How challenging is it? The pressure must be immense. These people arrive with this, right? We've got a budget. We've got a time limit. Now you've got to make the magic happen and go and find out. How do you begin to prepare for a shoot like that?

Steve: So with this one in particular, we alerted them right away to what was happening. So I was like, guys, we have a, we have these abnormal, huge aggregations. And they knew what that mean 'cause they were like, this has not been filmed before. It's new. And they were very quick to mobilise.

So we got the permissions, then we had a Cineflex up and on a helicopter, doing visuals, and they gave us a lot of time. There is pressure 'cause we do want to get the shots, but in a lot of ways, there isn't any because a lot of these guys. Like myself, we know how the ocean works, and we know how wildlife works.

So we have an ambition, we have a goal, and we control everything we can control. So you want to put the right guys with the right cameras in the right place, but then whatever happens after that, you have to deal with.

But they have time. And that's the biggest thing with what we find on the ocean with wildlife filming, is that we had two seasons. They gave us a month and a half each season. It's a huge amount of time, and that's something you need when you are looking for behaviours and waiting for, you know, top-side conditions to access these parts of the world. 

Toby: And to any budding nature and wildlife filming people who really want to get into this. What would be your tip? How do you get into this realm?

Steve: Well, I think the step one is just to get comfortable in the water. So you need to do a basic scuba diving course. You need to start snorkelling. You really need to learn how to be in the water before you even pick up a camera.

It's like a no-brainer. You got to learn how to walk if you want to go on safari.
So you need to learn how to swim if you want to be underwater. And then the cameras can be quite prohibitive because, you know, the high-end cameras are expensive themselves, but if you want to have a housing, it's twice as expensive.

But there are, I'm going to pick something up here. So this is, this is my first housing, so for everyone listening elsewhere. I took a coffee can, and I covered in fibreglass, and I cut the perspex myself, and I jammed a camcorder in there, and I hit record, and I had one hour to swim around. I took a toilet roll, and I strapped it to the top of this housing, and I swam around. And then I'd go back and edit my footage. So, you know. There you go. If I can make that, and I'm not very practical.

Toby: No, you are a ichthyologist rather than an engineer, aren't you? So, that's absolutely, that is a remarkable piece of kit that deserves to go to a museum somewhere, I think.

Steve: Exactly.

Toby: The toilet roll holder, and here's a bit of perspex I used. So you put a camcorder in there, and you thought, right, well, this is it, this is day one. Okay.

Off you go.

Steve: Luckily, afterwards, you know, the GoPros have come out. They're great for practising on. They're actually the Olympus TG-6 and TG-7. They're small little compact point-and-shoot cameras, and they're amazing. They've got macro functions. You can you put a wet lens on top of them.

They're well within the affordable range. If you're keen, there are ways to find underwater cameras to start exploring that career.

Toby: Okay. So you've got your DIY camera housing and everything. And then, when was your first big break into what you might describe as being a bigger film production?

Steve: Yeah, so the year that I spent working in Aliwal Shoal with Mark Addison was incredibly formative for me. So I got to meet Roger Horrocks, who was just at the start of his underwater cinematography career. I got to meet Thomas Peschak, who was at that time just publishing his first National Geographic article. And then Charles Maxwell and I became friends with them, and I assisted them on so many shoots. So, you know, every photographer needs assistance, logistics, a team behind them. And I love being part of a team more than anything, because together you can create something that's bigger than just yourself.

And that's been one of my passions. Not only sharing the ocean with our guests on our boats, but also helping teams of people with these kinds of film shoots. 

Toby: Exactly immortalised forever. This stuff is extraordinary. Okay, we're going to take a quick break now, and then, when we return, we are going to chat to Steve about his third image. So we'll see you in a second.

Welcome back to part two of the Pangolin Podcast with my guest today, Steve Benjamin, where we are discussing all things underwater.

Now, Steve, as a qualified ichthyologist, can you please tell us what this is, and why you chose this image?

Steve: Well, I wanted to bring some colour into my photo selection. And this did the job perfectly. We've got the green water in the background, and we've got the striking orange of all of the squid eggs. So that's an egg bed of South African chokka squid or loligo vulgaris. And you can see the female, she's the one hidden by some of the eggs, and she's laying an egg case, and there's multiple eggs inside of that.

And that's the male who is busy guarding her just above, and he's looking out for any other males that might come in there and try quickly fertilise some eggs and mix up his package that he's defending.

And this is unbelievably hard to get. Cannot believe how hard this is to get.

Toby: So tell us how did this come about? First of all, how big are these squid? We can't really tell the scales.

Steve: They're probably 20 to 30 centimetres. So they're not that small, but they are so quick, and they are so sensitive. And they're so hard to find. And so to get this photo, we had to travel up the East Coast. We were off Cape St Francis. Jeffreys Bay area. They typically only lay eggs in the shallow water sort of in the second half of the year, November, December. But there's a tiny window, and you can actually get onto undisturbed egg beds because the rest of the year there's
a commercial industry catching squid. The water is normally terribly dirty. So, although this photo looks nice and clean, there's probably like three meters visibility, and if I recall, it was probably 12 degrees Celsius, and I'm sitting at, like, 25 metres. So it's deep, dark, and cold, and I'm wedged in between a rock at the bottom.

These guys are also very shy, so you have to like hold your breath even though you're on scuba, which is, you shouldn't be doing that because you get a carbon dioxide headache if you skip breathe. You have to hold your breath because otherwise, no chokka is going to come near you. And then at the last moment, try to get a photograph.

At the same time, there's ragged-tooth sharks, sometimes a great white, lots of big stingrays coming over your head, so there's a lot going on. So much going on.

Toby: What an awesome story. So I suppose you chose this to say, well, nothing is impossible if you are happy to suffer from a carbon dioxide headache and potentially being eaten by either a ragged-tooth or a great white shark circling.

Steve: Fair enough.

Toby: I'd love to know who your insurance broker is Steve. I think we need to have a quick conversation with them. You mentioned the great whites as well, because that's another thing that changed dramatically not too long ago in South Africa. A lot of the great whites disappeared from False Bay because the killer whales arrived. The orcas arrived, which is something which was totally unexpected.

Has anything changed since then? 

Steve: In around 2017, I think Port and Starboard, the two famous male orcas that
shark feeders came into the bay, and they were recorded eating sevengill sharks at first, but then quickly turned their attention to great whites. I don't know how many they ate or killed in total, but there was many carcasses washing up on the beaches.

There is a high mortality of great whites due to fishing pressure, and then orcas came along and also started feeding on them. So I think it's a case where both of those two things have just caused the great white shark population locally to crash. And we haven't seen great whites around Cape Town and any significance since about 20, I don't know, 2018, 2017, somewhere around there.

Toby: And you mentioned some of the other shark species. I mean, I've seen lots of photographs with various other sharks appearing. Do you ever have reason to be concerned? Have you had any scary moments with any of these species coming through? You can have some close calls, can't you?

Steve: The great whites have been gone for so long that, you know, we've started diving areas we weren't diving before. 'Cause we don't expect to see them. And to be honest, on scuba dives, normally, they're just if they come to view you, they're normally curious and are not particularly showing any interest in wanting to chomp you.

But the sardine run is where we do see a lot of sharks, and they're all so focused on the sardine activity that they're very honed in on the prey item, which is a small silver fish. We don't normally have problems with them, but we do make sure our hands are covered because this looks like a small silver fish underwater, and our ankles are covered. So, you know, just by managing the shark's reference to what food is, we take ourselves out of the food chain.

So we haven't had any bad problems.

Toby: And long may that last?

Steve: Long may it last,

Toby: Indeed. I've often seen people, I've seen people diving in like sort of chain mail suits and things like that, going, this is going to be fine. I'm going to protect myself. And to my mind, that just looks like a ginormous fish. Okay, going back to the squid. I mean, obviously, this is an incredibly dangerous thing.

You've got all this equipment. You are 25, 30 metres down. You've probably only got 10, 15 minutes of bottom time. Are you diving with Nitrox or are you just diving on air?

Steve: We were diving on air on this particular case, but we do use Nitrox a lot. It's just about the availability. We were actually doing a film shoot for a month focusing on that, and I was the safety support diver, and we were on air, but the cameraman, which was Roger Horrocks and PJ Kotzé, they were on rebreathers,
which means that there's no bubbles. So you, you're much more silent.

You don't disturb anything. You can just lie calmly and quietly on the bottom and get natural behaviour. This was for Netflix Animals. It was a sequence about the egg-laying behaviour for the squid. So it was wonderful.

Toby: I'm delighted that so many of the streaming services with, you know, these ginormous budgets have realised the benefit of making these sorts of films because it was always very much down to the BBC or, you know, Discovery or something like that. And there's only so much you can make, but now people are throwing money at it. It can only benefit everybody.

Right, Steve, we're going to move on to your fourth image now. Please tell us what's going on in this muddle. 

Steve: Okay, so this is a bait ball, and there are multiple Cape gannets that are pushing up the ball of sardines towards the surface while they're feeding on the panicked fish from below. There's a dolphin in the background. And what I like about the image is that it's not your typical sardine run image because it's dominated by Cape gannets, and I chose it because gannets are just so otherworldly underwater. They are by far my favourite bird species.

And it's just so weird to see birds, large birds like this, with sharks and dolphins when you on the sardine run and trying to get photos. I've been doing this for 16 years, leading expeditions to the sardine run, and it's always super exciting.

Toby: So for those, for the people who don't know about the sardine run, just give us a brief description. What is the sardine run? When does it happen, and how do you go about getting shots like this?

Steve: So the sardine run is a South African phenomenon. Basically, during June and July, cold water travels up the coastline towards Durban and the sardines, which are more at home in Cape waters. They follow the cold water and then a lot of predators, common dolphins, multiple sharks species and Cape gannets all follow these sardines up the coastline and feast on them. And a lot of species time their life cycles to this huge abundance of new food. 

Toby: And everything is, and so the circle of life is complete. Now you run these tours up there. Talk us about how you do this. I mean, this is obviously boat-based. You're not near the land. So how does that work?

Steve: So basically, we lead week-long expeditions. We go from a place called in Mdumbi, which is near Coffee Bay in the Wild Coast. It's largely photographers. But also very passionate wildlife, sort of free divers and snorkelers that want to see something unique. So a lot of our guests are very well-travelled. They've been everywhere else, and now they want to find, like, the next immersive wildlife experience where they don't know what's going to happen. But what can happen is bigger than your imagination. 

Toby: And you go out on a boat and you're looking for, I presume, gannets, which are flocking towards a large shoal of sardines, and then it's just go, go, go in the water.

Steve: That sounds like the perfect first day. It's like you drive up, the lion eats the zebra, and it's all good, and you go home, and you have a gin and tonic. There you go.

Toby: Surely that's how it works. Surely. In wildlife photography.

Surely.

Steve: Sometimes that does happen for people. It's amazing. It can happen. So, normally what happens is we arrive, we get set up, we wake up really early. For us, that's like six o'clock. By seven o'clock it's just at sunrise, we are launching the boat. It's a surf launch, so we're in our life jackets, holding on tightly. All the cameras are in pelican cases. Probably got a jacket on. You're in your wetsuit. At least the bottoms. So, first thing in the morning, we are looking for bird activity, like you say. I'm calling all the other boats up and down the coastline, understanding who's got what and what's happening. And then it's a matter of, are the gannets feeding on sardines today? So you have to assess each situation.

Okay, is this a bait ball or is this more of a topside activity? You know, is the water clean? Can we even get in? Which way is the wind blowing? And what's really fascinating about the sardine run is it's timed with two other migrations. One is the humpback whale migration. So we get continually distracted by hundreds of humpbacks, which is a pleasure. And they're breaching, and they're flapping and doing all their whaley business. And on the inshore, we have a bottlenose dolphin migration. So they're often surfing and jumping out of the waves. So between those three, sort of main wildlife activities, we have a lot to see. So all of our guests normally have a topside camera ready to go and an underwater camera ready to get in the water if needed.

And sometimes they don't know what to do. It's a bit of a tussle.

Toby: Well, it all sounds very easy. I don't know what you're complaining about. It's so much to photograph. And this particular moment, I mean, you mentioned now lots of people getting in the way. Is there an accepted code of conduct when you have two or three boats at a sighting, like you would do, you know, with a game viewer or something like that? How do you control this? That everyone has an equal opportunity?

Steve: So there is a bit of an etiquette. So each boat. If you arrive at the scene first, then it's considered your spot. And generally, boats, well, other boats will hang back. I mean, I try to avoid all other boats, so if I see all the boats going that way, I just head the other way and find other activity. 'Cause I prefer to be by myself. And then on your own boat, the groups are around eight people in total. Sometimes they know each other. But it's important that the group acts like a team. And we tell everyone that you can't get close to a feeding activity. You need to stay a few metres back just to give space for the animals to keep feeding naturally.

And they still have a fantastic photographic opportunities because often the sardines seek shelter amongst the snorkelers because they're the only thing that's not eating them. So you arrive there wanting to get close to a bait ball, but very soon you can find yourself swimming away from a bait ball just to get the fish back to the dolphins and sharks that want to eat it.

Toby: Yeah. Nobody wants to be part of the herd when you're watching Predation. That's not good. That's never a good idea. Just quickly, before we move on, people will be interested in camera settings as well. This is a very, very fast-moving situation, and obviously, you've got to try and get your shutter speed up as high as possible to freeze the action, but you are limited with light as well. So, have you got artificial lighting when you're doing this? Have you got strobes?

Steve: I love strobes. This photo has no strobes. Basically, the strobes really slow
you down in the water, so it's very hard to keep up with the activity, and there's so many bubbles and fish scales, the backscatter is crazy. So, often in these situations, I'll choose not to have any strobes. So this photo I shot it was about 1/320, so it's fairly fast, but not super high speed. And I'm at f/16 and at
15 mils and ISO 800. So I really wanted to make sure that the camera didn't overexpose the gannets, and I'm always shooting in full manual mode because there's so much happening so quickly, the camera can never understand what I'm trying to capture here. And those gannets are glowing white. The feathers are capturing those air bubbles. And every time I've tried to photograph them, I always overexpose the feathers and the shots ruined.

So I was relatively close to this whole situation. I'm, in this case, I'm probably five
metres away on a 16 mil lens. I think this is the 16-35 on the Sony, so it's a rectilinear lens, not a fisheye lens. And this photo has helped advertise the sardine run a lot because this is the dream to have blue water full of gannets underwater. And this is what we, we do see this regularly. Every day, apparently. 

Toby: Every day, guaranteed. According to this podcast. You're going to get this 24 all day long, no problems at all. Stick with Steve.

Okay. On that note, before he can retract that promise, we're going to take another
ad break, and then when we return, Steve's going to reveal an image by another photographer that he admires that maybe he wished he had taken himself.

So we'll see you in a second.

Thank you.

Welcome back to the final part of the Pangolin Podcast with my guest today, Steve Benjamin. We've reached the part of the episode where I've asked Steve to share an image by another photographer that he admires, that he wished he maybe took himself. So, Steve, will you please introduce this photograph and tell us who took it and maybe describe it as well, because it's pretty indescribable.

It is.

It's a masterpiece.

Steve: So this is by Thomas Peschak. A National Geographic photographer, and
it's of four giant Galapagos tortoises. They're sitting in a mud pool, and they're inside the crater of a volcano. And in the background, you can see a sulphur vent, which is erupting from the volcano wall, and the stars are in the background with wisps of clouds, which are also flowing over the rim of the crater. 

Toby: It is a remarkable photograph. Okay, tell us the history about you say you've worked a lot with Thomas Peschak Were you there when this photograph was taken?

Steve: Yeah, so I'm, I was one of the assistants that worked on taking this photo. But I chose this photo because it represents a very wild location. Sort of a life highlights of mine to be able to be in this place with Tom and Otto, another assistant. And it was just wonderful to share it with them, and also to help make Tom's vision reality because this photo took an unbelievable amount of effort and planning, and really just sheer tenacity to even dream that this photo was
possible and then to go create it.

Toby: And this is, you mentioned earlier on these are Galapagos tortoises, so obviously this is the Galapagos Islands as well. So whose idea was the photograph
and is it as you intended?

Steve: Obviously, I can't speak for Thomas. But he asked me to join him for a month and a half or so to cover a story about Galapagos Islands and climate change. And one of the photos that he really wanted to show was a large number of Galapagos tortoises. And it's quite hard to do that because a lot of the islands are very overgrown or bushy, and you don't naturally find aggregation points of wild Galapagos tortoises. So this is inside a volcano called Alcedo, which is one of the six volcanoes on Isabella, which is one of the very large islands.

And he teamed up with the rangers and the tortoise researchers, and we joined them on an expedition where they were going to tag and monitor the tortoise population inside the crater. And to do this, of course, we had to hike up all of the photographic equipment, multiple cameras, studio flashes, food, tents, everything you can imagine. We got there, and we wanted these pool to be full of water, and they were dry. But during our week that we were living on the crater rim, it rained and luckily it filled up and Tom said, well, let's go. Let's go give it a crack. So we hiked all the equipment down a few kilometres through the sulphur vents, set up camp. It was so hot; obviously we just took a sleeping mattress and we didn't really have enough equipment to keep everyone comfortable, but it didn't matter because you're in a place, and you zoom out and think about where you are in the
world, and then to help Thomas capture an image like this is worth it.

I'm sure it's won all kinds of awards, but you can see the details. I mean, we were filling in the tortoises' faces with head torches and timing the studio flash to get that little glint on the shell. So it's like a long exposure with multiple light sources and then the sulphur vent and the clouds all coming together. 

Toby: And is the sulphur vent. That's not an eruption, is it? Or is it a constant stream of sulphur dioxide?

Steve: I think it's sulphur dioxide. But that one was pretty constant. It's not an eruption, although we did hear rumblings, so yeah, it's still active in that way, but it's benign. It's not expected to explode. We weren't expecting to; we were expecting to go home basically.

Toby: Nobody expects a volcanic eruption when they're in the volcanic crater. I mean, this is rule number one.

Nobody.

Nobody is in there going, well, I had no idea this might happen. There we go. Well, you know, Tom, Mr Peschak, so maybe you can have a word. Let's get him on the podcast as well, and then he can share some more of his images.

Very talented, very talented photographer.

Steve, we have reached the limit of allowable time, but before I go, I'm going to ask you the one question we ask all of our guests, and you've watched the podcast, so you probably know what's coming. You are allowed to place your humble dwelling wherever you like in the world where you're going to
be photographing in perpetuity. So where would you like to place
your humble dwelling? 

Steve: Ah, in Cape Town, easy. No, no brainer.

Toby: You're already in it.

Steve: Absolutely. The right place. Yeah. In fact, I'm in my humble dwelling, eh, look at my, it's a cave. It's a cave.

Toby: Sorry, I didn't mean to infer that your house was a humble dwelling. I've never been there, but I'm sure it's lovely.

Steve: It's so easy, my reasoning is we have so many large creatures, multiple habitats. We have great facilities. There's no one really tackling the underwater world here. And I love Cape Town. It's so dynamic. It's so wonderful.

Toby: And you've got vineyards and some of the best restaurants in the world, so what more do you need?

Steve: Exactly. Very happy.

Toby: Steve, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been an absolute joy, and I'll see you soon.

Steve: Thank you so much. It's been an honour. Love the work. Please keep going.

Cheers.

Toby: Thank you for listening to episode 13 of the Pangolin Podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, we'd love to hear your comments and feedback, so please leave them in the comments down below. If you don't want to miss the next
episode or any of the other wildlife photography videos, then make
sure you subscribe to the channel.

Finally, don't forget to sign up to the Pangolin Photo Safaris Friday Focus newsletter. You can do that by heading over to pangolinphoto.com, or you can scan the QR code on your screen now. I look forward to seeing you on a Pangolin
Photo Safari soon, and all that's left for me to say is that the Pangolin podcast was hosted by me, Toby Jermyn, and produced and edited by Bella Falk.

Thank you.