Are the photographs in the book high definition stills or are they taken separately onsite?
I would guess about 95% of them are stills taken on location—usually by the directors or the cameramen themselves. Sometimes we’ve taken grabs from the footage because we deliberately wanted to show a piece of behavior or a sequence of events. For example, the Bulldog bat that swoops down and captures the fish, that’s a series of grabs from the footage. That high-speed camera is taking a series of stills, actually. Sort of a super, über stills camera, but instead of taking them with a motor drive that can take four shots per second, it can take a thousand shots per second. It’s not quite the resolution of a full HD still, but it’s close. You’re currently producing a new BBC One series on African wildlife. Would you mind speaking a bit about that? The BBC and Discovery will together produce some big shows in the interim, but the next one I’m doing is about the natural history of Africa. This time it’s important that it’s the whole continent. What we’re trying to do is effectively take t
