There’s more than one way to shoot a cat, as Will and Matt Burrard-Lucas proved when they went on safari to Tanzania. Instead of loading up on giant lenses to project their eyes artificially into the middle of the animal action, the brothers chose to get their cameras up close to the African wildlife. But how to do this without a Siegfried and Roy style disaster? The BeetleCam.
The brothers wanted to shoot close up with wide-angle lenses, but waiting for animals to approach hidden cameras is slow, boring and requires luck. So instead they built a tough, off-road remote control buggy to carry a camera and couple of flashes to help fill the shadows of the harsh African sun.
If you are loading up a remote control buggy with a DSLR, a heavy lens and a couple of strobes, you can’t just pick something up from Walmart. Instead, the boys built their own, and from the start it was designed to last:
We […] ordered the most powerful motors we could find and large off-road tires. BeetleCam had to be able to operate for long periods without being charged, so we stuffed the vehicle with the biggest batteries we could squeeze in.
Once built, the brothers figured out how to trigger the camera remotely using the same controller that drives the BeetleCam, and they loaded it up, covered it in protective camouflage gear to keep the dust out, and headed off to track down some big game.
The rig worked great. There were some surprises: Elephants, for instance, were “impossible to sneak up on” due to their super-sensitive hearing. Parking up in front and then waiting for the giants to walk by proved to be the solution.
Some things were less surprising. Lions attacked and mauled the BeetleCam, completely trashing the on-board Canon EOS 400D, although miraculously they managed to “retrieve an intact memory card from the mangled Canon 400D body”. They got the shot. Try that with film.
A quick MacGyvering later with string and wood and the BeetleCam was back in action, this time with the second (much more expensive) expensive body, an EOS 1D MkIII. The bigger camera managed to survive the rest of the trip.
The guys have gotten some fantastic shots, photos which would be impossible any other way, at least without putting themselves in the same lion-bait position as their poor 400D. And this project also points to the new ways we can take photos with digital, not least because you can destroy a camera without exposing the film inside, and that you’re not limited to just 36 shots.
In fact, a BeetleCam-Lite could make a great weekend project, using that cheap Walmart car we mentioned earlier and a cheap old compact rigged for remote-shooting. It might not survive the Veldt, but it would certainly be a lot of fun.
The Adventures of BeetleCam [Burrard-Lucas via Flickr]
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