The BeetleCam Story

This story starts in early 2008. I was looking for ways to get photographs of wildlife that were in someway different. I started experimenting with new perspectives by crawling up to animals and using a wide-angle lens to photograph them. I found this angle resulted in a much more intimate and engaging photograph. Of course, I was only doing this with animals that weren’t going to rip me to shreds or trample me to death (for example, meerkats)! However, it wasn’t long before I started dreaming of doing this with iconic African animals such as lions and elephants.

The obvious method of achieving this would be to mount my DSLR camera on top of a remote-control buggy. In 2009 I decided to take a chance and give it a go. I built a basic camera-buggy and called it BeetleCam.

BeetleCam’s first expedition was to Tanzania. On the very first day, it proved itself in a couple of encounters with elephants. Buoyed with enthusiasm, I tried lions on day two. As soon as BeetleCam was deployed, a young lioness promptly picked it up and ran off with it. I was fortunate to be able to recover it along with an intact memory card and my first BeetleCam images of a lion.

It was another two years before I returned to Africa with a new BeetleCam. This time it had a strong protective shell that I hoped would be lion-proof. I spent two weeks photographing lions in Kenya. Fortunately BeetleCam made it to the end of the trip unscathed and I got the lion images I had been dreaming of.

In 2012 I moved to Zambia for a year with a new version of the BeetleCam. During the year I was able to focus on some of the more challenging species such as African wild dogs and leopards.

Since the start of the BeetleCam project, I had been approached by many wildlife photographers, natural history production companies and conservation organisations interested in using BeetleCams in their work. This prompted the next step in BeetleCam’s evolution…