Fauna Felicity

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Sunday, October 17, 2010 | 5 photos

I first developed a love for wildlife photography on misty days in Bilsa, Ecuador, waking up at 5am to join Martin, a South American photographer, on a quest to shoot the Long-wattled Umbrella Bird. I was in the rainforest on a Yale grant, learning about sustainability; by summer’s end, photography was my passion. With Martin’s direction, my techniques burgeoned, and, combined with a little elbow grease--I helped lasso an anaconda onshore, crawled to a blue-footed Booby feeding ground, and stood in the middle of a pond at night, waiting for a Hyla frog to jump down--I created a story, one whose pictures say that animals are more like us than we think. Beetles copulate, Boobies kiss, and leaf-cutter ants get flustered too. While they might seem a world apart, there are more intrinsic, emotional similarities between humans and animals than we can initially see.

I want to work with Jason Edwards because I have barely scratched the surface of wildlife photography. Simply put, this development opportunity will help me unleash my potential as an artist and open a window into the photography profession as a potential career. As a wilderness trip leader, I am seasoned in bush-whacking and prepared to get my hands dirty with Bhutan (especially because I will be doing research there after graduation). As a lifelong student, I salivate (to put it mildly) to pick the brain of a seasoned photo-journalist, especially given my rapid growth while I was informally learning under Martin in Ecuador. Most importantly, I want to make a difference with my experience: I have travelled and photographed, in China and Ecuador and the Dominican Republic, to raise awareness of country-specific issues, running a photography contest at Yale that uses photographs to highlight the challenges each nation faces in the coming century.