Call of the Wildman

Monday December 19th, 2011

Baltimore-based photographer Jonathan Hanson loves to tell stories. Whether it’s a commercial project or editorial assignment, his focus is on being the narrator of the storyline. “My biggest influences are photojournalists and street photographers, but there are few portrait photographers that have pushed my vision.” Jonathan embraces the documentary approach on all of his projects, “sitting on the fine line between editorial and commercial.” It was this approach, and the fact that he shies away from overly produced images, that landed Jonathan a commercial assignment for the television channel Animal Planet.

This was Jonathan’s first time working for Animal Planet. The assignment was to shoot portraits and documentary style images of the cast of their new show, Call of the Wildman (which airs Sundays at 10 pm). The show follows Kentucky’s “legendary woodsman” Ernie Brown Jr (aka Turtleman) as he removes/rescues critters from homes and farms. Jonathan would be shooting alongside the video crew as they filmed an episode. According to Jonathan, the assignment was pretty straightforward,

Most of my clients don’t give me a lot of direction. I’m usually given a topic or storyline and then told to, “Go do what you do.” I have to admit, I love hearing that. It’s really freeing. For the Turtleman, I was given the show’s general outline along with a trailer and a shot list of “must haves.”  The list was mainly names of people they wanted portraits of. I shot around the filming of the show so I worked in tandem with a video crew. I documented the production of the show, shot portraits of the cast as well as headed into the water to shoot the Turtleman in action. I would hang around the video crew and wait for them to stop filming so my camera wouldn’t be heard. At certain points during the show, I was allowed to shoot while they were filming but a lot of depended on what was happening at the moment.

One of the only complications of the shoot for Jonathan was the water. It was a challenge for him to shoot in an extremely muddy pond,

The mud was almost knee deep in some parts, so moving freely and keeping my balance was tough. I did not have a water housing for my camera so I was a little worried about dropping them into the water or falling over. By the end of the day, I had mud caked onto everything.

Even with a straightforward shoot, there were still a few surprises. Jonathan explains,

The whole day was spent shooting near a pond out on a farm in Kentucky. Next to the pond was a deep hole, about 3 ft wide. It was so dark you couldn’t really see into it. I was shooting some portraits of the Turtleman ten feet or so away when Lolly, his sidekick and k9 pal, heard something in the hole and started hanging around it. The Turtleman, curious to what Lolly was up to, went over and looked down. Through a small shaft of light, the Turtleman spotted something looking back up. After a few moments, he realized what he was looking at: a young cow!  Turtleman quickly acted and set the wheels in motion for its rescue.

Lolly

It was a long, muddy and action packed day for Jonathan. After all was said and done, Animal Planet used Jonathan’s Turtleman images for promotion of Call of the Wildman—on their website, ads, press, etc.

View more of Jonathan’s work on his website, jhansonphoto.com.

- Maria Luci