David Barr and Liz Parer-Cook dinner have made a life collectively doing what they love.
The Melbourne-based couple have been exploring among the wildest locations on Earth for the reason that late Nineteen Seventies – from the Galapagos Islands to Norway, and from the Australian outback to Antarctica.
They usually’ve captured these distant spots – and particularly the animals that dwell there – on movie.
With David behind the digital camera and recording Liz’s voice, they’ve produced a slew of award-winning documentaries, together with a number of collaborations with David Attenborough.
Highly effective analysis and being in the correct place on the proper time have helped them make their paycheck in nature documentary phrases.
As of their 1993 Emmy Award-winning film Sea wolveswhich for the primary time captured the weird searching methods of killer whales (orcas).
“They’re most likely our favourite animal of all time,” says Liz.
“We each love wild locations.”
Liz and David met in Melbourne in 1977 by means of a shared love of diving and filmmaking, and each labored within the ABC’s Pure Historical past Unit.
Within the early days, David made a number of journeys to Papua New Guinea on project, on one event filming David Attenborough’s improbable nature sequence, Life on Earth. Liz joined him in a few of these images.
From day one, they weren’t fairly positive in the event that they have been working or on trip. Even on their honeymoon they photographed dugongs in Shark’s Bay.
The 2 come from very completely different backgrounds: David obtained an honorary Physician of Science diploma from Monash College, and spent his early days learning cosmic rays in Antarctica. Liz has levels in sociology and schooling, and is educated in the usage of movies as an academic instrument.
“I feel the essence of a great crew … is that we perceive one another’s strengths and weaknesses,” says David.
“Liz is a tremendous researcher and excellent with individuals. I buried my head within the tools.”
Not that he is a instrument man, David is fast to level out, however he does observe technological developments from particular lenses to imaging methods for getting the very best pictures.
“It is at all times about furthering the story.”
Liz says persons are typically “a little bit shocked” by a husband and spouse crew, however for her that wasn’t an issue.
“We each love wild locations, we love being outdoors, and we each love telling tales. So I feel that is why it really works.”
“And we do not combat rather a lot,” she laughs.
Lively volcanoes and difficult terrain
whereas filming for Australia nature Within the mid-Nineteen Eighties, Liz and David start touring to their dwelling continent in earnest.
“We had an amazing feeling for Central Australia at the moment,” says David.
She started an affair that noticed many return journeys by means of central Australia and alongside the west coast.
However their past love is the ocean itselfAnd which undoubtedly performed an element within the success of The Sea Wolves, was narrated by Attenborough.
The movie featured groundbreaking scenes of killer whales in Norway tailing giant, shallow herrings to get their dinner.
Different jaw-dropping pictures have been this one in every of killer whales crusing in to choose up younger sea lions as they frolic on the seashores of Patagonia.
David Willis shot the documentary in 5 international locations, utilizing specifically developed underwater digital camera methods.
“We labored as a two-person crew with different individuals coming to completely different places,” says Liz.
Filming typically entails difficult terrain, like when David captured spaghetti penguins on the subantarctic Crozet Islands.
Within the late Nineteen Nineties, David needed to climb inside an energetic volcano to movie terrestrial iguanas laying their eggs within the heat soil of the volcano.
“I do not suppose OH&S goes to sanction flights there now,” he jokes.
This was when Liz and David spent two years within the Galapagos Islands with their 3-year-old daughter Filming three BBC packages reverse Attenborough, together with one other award-winning movie Galapagos dragons.
Since 2008, after the closure of ABC’s pure historical past unit, the pair have been working as a standalone crew.
final yr They photographed wild animals for an upcoming documentary about Ningaloo, which will likely be hosted by Tim Winton and proven on ABC in 2023.
This yr they returned to the wild Ningaloo Coast World Heritage space close to Exmouth, having fun with what’s being referred to as ‘Australia’s finest jetty dive’ from a 300m offshore pier.
Below the water they discovered a two-meter grouper, gray-nosed sharks, stunning nudibranchs, colourful sponges and a formidable faculty of little animals that “stored circling over their heads”.
There was additionally an enormous yellow sea serpent with a black face “as thick as your arm”, says Liz.
Once they went recognizing whales to see the humpbacks they noticed what they thought was a chunk of wooden floating within the water.
“We out of the blue realized that it was truly a mom whale and she or he had a child on her nostril and she or he was carrying and supporting it on the floor,” says Liz.
“In order that was nice magic.”
How issues have modified
Liz and David slowly tick off wildlife on their listing of issues to {photograph}.
They managed to shoot a film that was onerous to seize Lately numb.
“Numbats are endangered and really troublesome to identify within the wild,” says Liz.
“They’re form of sleepy,” provides David, explaining why they’re so onerous to identify within the open.
Utilizing a particular lens, David and Liz acquired their first pictures of Dawson’s burrowing bees, an insect that has an odd behavior of digging holes in the course of mud ponds and roads.
However there’s a melancholy aspect to a long time of nature images.
Through the years, David and Liz have witnessed first-hand adjustments within the panorama, from erosion to lack of species equivalent to reptiles, small birds, mammals and bugs – particularly on their well-traveled Australian continent.
“We observed as we have been driving by means of Nullarbor and into the desert… there was a large lower within the insect inhabitants,” says Liz.
“Now a bug can hardly hit your windshield.”
For Nature of Australia, again within the Nineteen Eighties David and Liz photographed kelp forests on Tasmania’s east coast, however they’re now being destroyed by world warming and different threats.
Each are involved about threats to biodiversity from growth and local weather change in locations like Exmouth Bay, referred to as the “Ningaloo Arboretum”.
How issues have modified within the final 50 yearsAnd Once we all thought wild locations and animals would stay the identical as they have been after we first filmed them,” says David.
“How fallacious we have been. The decline is accelerating.
“Once you dwell in an accelerating price of change, you do not actually acknowledge it till you look again.”
The couple is now concerned in conservation teams, and so they hope to make use of social media, together with the brand new one YouTube channelto proceed exhibiting the endangered great thing about the pure world.
“We predict except you attain out to individuals and share what you are seeing in these distant locations… it’s extremely a lot out of sight, out of thoughts,” Liz says.