What inspired you to get into wildlife photography in the first place?<\/p>\n
I went to a lecture by the photographer Laurie Campbell. His first slide was a robin on a spade \u2013 a cliched shot, but on that huge screen, it blew me away.<\/p>\n
If not Scotland, where would you live?<\/p>\n
Somewhere cold and snowy. Maybe Norway.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Red squirrel or lynx?<\/p>\n
You\u2019ve got to love a red squirrel<\/a>. But we\u2019re one of just a handful of European countries refusing to live with large predators. There\u2019s an ecological, economic and moral case for bringing back the lynx.<\/p>\n What shot is most important to you?<\/p>\n A simple silhouette of a whooper swan standing on a frozen loch at dawn in winter.\u00a0<\/p>\n I can still remember the sun burning through the mist. Photography delivers both great images and lasting memories.<\/p>\n What\u2019s been your closest shave?<\/p>\n I was once charged by a musk ox<\/a> \u2013 and they can shift. Fortunately, I could shift faster than the photographer I was with.<\/p>\n What\u2019s the poorest investment of your time on a shoot?<\/p>\n I spent three months trying to capture a golden eagle<\/a> on a camera trap. It was 150km away and an hour\u2019s trek across open hill ground. I made around 40 trips only to find that rain or snow had fogged the lens, mice had chewed the cable or the light was too low. I ended up with one image.\u00a0<\/p>\n What\u2019s your most useless piece of kit?<\/p>\n Just before drones were mass produced, I paid \u00a36,000 for a bespoke rig. I flew it three times and then couldn\u2019t even give it away.<\/p>\n Have you lost much gear in the field?<\/p>\n Yes. Note to self: don\u2019t leave a camera bag on a beach when the tide is coming in.<\/p>\n Do you have any advice to budding wildlife photographers?<\/p>\n Trends come and go, but tell powerful visual stories and you will always have Pete Cairns<\/a> is a conservation photographer and founder of Scotland: The Big Picture<\/a>. <\/p>\n Main image: Getty<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What inspired you to get into wildlife photography in the first place? I went to a lecture by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":{"0":"post-211597","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
an audience.<\/p>\n