What are the secrets to funny wildlife photography?
ASKED BY · Paul Walhus · AUSTIN, TEXAS · 10 OCT 2026 · ▶ 00:41:56
Success requires both skill and luck; must be positioned correctly with proper equipment and settings to capture the moment, but the funny moment itself is largely luck.
Wildlife photography requires huge time investment sleeping in blinds for days or weeks; example of shooting Roar with five Panavision cameras at 40,000 feet film per day to get one usable moment; Disney staged many wildlife encounters in their 1950s-60s shorts.
Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.
From the transcript.
Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.
41:55well i'm i feel i feel offended now i'm not a good photographer i don't know are you a photographer i don't know yes yes okay um uh so here's the thing right the secret is luck and that's like now don't get me wrong like you need to be a good photographer to to execute the the image capture and you need to know what you're doing to put yourself in the place to be there but this is
42:25not a case of like um i know this thing is happening i need to put myself in a place and kind of wait for it to happen like some of these photos like this is just goofy like it is just pure luck that you know that an elephant takes his trunk and is like you know whatever like Like there's there is a huge component of luck to photos like these.
42:48You need to be a skilled photographer to capture the image when it happens, to be there, to have the right equipment, to have your cameras in the correct settings, to capture that image when it happens. But this is one of those things where it's where there is a there's a huge component of luck. And this is no different than, you know, I'm not a huge wildlife photographer.
43:07It's mainly sports. And it's a similar thing. Like you need to have the skills and the framing and to do all the stuff to capture the image. But that thing that actually happens, that's luck. And Corny. Yeah, it's luck and lots of time invested. You know, there's wildlife photographers that will sleep out in a blind with a camera for days or weeks,
43:35weeks capturing endless, endless rolls of footage of mundane stuff happening to get that one little funny or exciting piece of footage that happens. I know on Roar, and on Roar we had, we were shooting in Panavision film, we had five Panavision cameras that would roll on scenes with, you know, untrained animals doing stuff. And to get one scene where there was a cub pushing itself along
44:01on a skateboard, you know, a lion cub, you know, that was just a fluke. And that happened because we had four cameras rolling 35 millimeter footage at a huge amount of cost through the camera. Every day, we had some days where we'd shoot 40,000 feet of film and maybe print, you know, a thousand. So at a 40 to one ratio, sometimes you'll get lucky. Now, unless you're Disney,
44:26Now, Disney would stage a lot of their funny antics that happened in their wildlife photography. They had a whole series of wildlife shorts and things back in the 50s and 60s. And all those encounters of strange animals in the field, some of them happened to have been set up. Strange thing how that happens. Let's go to the next question. from uh chris uh zance in san antonio texas what's the best way to give multiple crew
45:03members independently switchable vmix program multi-view camera and teleprompter feeds using sdi or ndi can nux and stream decks control each monitor independently without affecting other other outputs? Go ahead, Chris. It depends. How many of these do you want to do? Like this, in order to do this in vMix, you would need to use an output for each one of these. The current version of vMix has four outputs. The upcoming version, I think, bumps it to eight.