Like many people I have recently been watching and enjoying Apple TV’s latest offering “The Wild Ones”
It’s a fresh take on Wildlife documentaries, combining a bit of the Survivor type show with a conservation and wildlife doco. The cast made up Vianet Djenguet, Declan Burley and Aldo Kane an ex British commando sniper who is tasked to “look after” Vianet and Declan.
The rapport between the guys is great and they’re obviously very passionate and knowledgable about what they do, their emotions displayed raw on the screen and one can’t help feeling emotional when you see a Tiger with one paw missing, struggling along because he’s most likely been caught in a snare set by poachers. I found myself wanting to scream at the TV and ask why someone can’t capture the poor animal and help it out in some way.
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Look at that lens….. I can only dream.
Gear
So obviously one of the things that I was also interested in was the gear, and there’s a lot of gear!
These guys deploy a huge amount of camera traps and I spent longer than is probably healthy trying to figure out which camera traps they were using. I actually reached out to Declan but assumed I probably wouldn’t hear back. After some internet detective work I came across Cambush a UK based bespoke camera maker and the creator of some of the Camera traps they’re using, and they ain’t cheap!
A bit of further detective work showed that the cameras inside the box are Sony RX0 II cameras which use the very nice ZEISS® Tessar T* lenses, but seemed a strange choice given these cameras don’t have night vision and by all accounts have some Autofocus “quirks”.
In the show they also seem to be using Browning Camera traps which at the time of writing were all sold out on the official Browning website, which is no wonder if you consider that these guys were using in excess of 80 cameras at each location and leaving them for months on end
The quality of the footage seemed really good, and I would love to get my hands on some of these cameras to test and review them, but sadly Cambush is unlikely to send me one from the UK and given that I’m not exactly an influencer it’s doubtful Browning or Sony would bother either.
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A few days later I did hear back from Declan, what a great bloke to take the time to actually get back to me! He confirmed the Browning side of things and also mentioned Cognisys camera traps and beams.
The opinion? Yes there is one…. well kind of
I really enjoyed the show but I felt guilty if I’m honest. As a consumer of many, many Apple products along with more tech than I care to think about I couldn’t help thinking that I was in some way contributing to the demise of some of these species.
In one scene the boys are trying to film Bears in Mongolia whose way of life is being threatened because of a road that was going to be built. They included a drone shot of back to back trucks full of coal heading South to China, probably to fuel the very factories where a lot of the tech is made.
Later while filming the Northern right Whales, it became clear that many of these Whales are maimed or killed by the huge container and tanker ships that traverse that piece of water most likely carrying the very goods that we all consume and that in effect are destroying our planet.
Of course Apple is not the only company making computers and the eventual e-waste that results, and I would argue that at least with these films they are showing what’s going on and attempting to help in some way, furthermore I have no idea what Apple or any of the other big tech companies do behind the scenes, I can only hope that there is a certain amount of philanthropy happening that I just don’t know about.
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So as I write this article on my Macbook you could ask if am I attempting to take the moral high ground here? The answer? No absolutely not.
I thought it was an excellent show with high production value and it highlighted the plight of just a few of the many species on Earth that we Humans are destroying, I enjoyed the banter among the guys presenting it and their passion was palatable throughout, but nonetheless I do think that big tech companies really should and could do more to help save our planet and the animals that reside alongside us by reducing their e-waste Globally in some meaningful way before it’s too late.
