Tim Laman Biography

Tim Laman is a field biologist, wildlife photographer, filmmaker, and conservationist. Since carrying out pioneering research in Borneo’s rainforest canopy for his PhD from Harvard University, his cameras have become his tools for telling the stories of rare and endangered wildlife and revealing some of earth’s wildest places. Tim spends many months a year on expeditions to study and photograph the biodiversity of earth’s richest realms. He is most well-known for his long-term work on Birds-of-Paradise and for his collaboration with his wife, Cheryl Knott, documenting orangutans in Borneo. He has published 24 feature stories in National Geographic magazine, as well as worked on films for National Geographic, the BBC, and Netflix.

Tim’s work has garnered numerous awards, including the overall prize "Wildlife Photographer of the Year" in 2016, twenty other winning images in that competition over the years, a 1st place Nature Story from World Press Photo, and the North American Nature Photography Association’s “Nature Photographer of the Year”, among others.

Tim is a fellow of the Explorer’s Club and of the International League of Conservation Photographers and was a former Associate of the Ornithology Department at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. He is also co-founder of the Birds-of-Paradise Project at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology with Ed Scholes and continues to work regularly with the Cornell Lab's Center for Conservation Media to create media championing bird and forest conservation efforts around the world.

My logo is based on the Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise, also known as the Vogelkop Lophorina. It was a career highlight to capture the first images of this bird displaying in the wild in 2016 in Papua's Arfak Mountains. Prior to my photographs and video, this species was believed to just be a subspecies of the Superb Bird-of-Paradise, but my images helped to confirm that this was a distinct species, which Ed Scholes and I published in a scientific paper in 2018. You can view a short video about this exciting discovery here. It is always exciting to be the first one to photograph a species new to science, but documenting a new Bird-of-Paradise was especially rewarding.

To learn more about what I do, check out my Wildlife Diaries Newsletter.

National Geographic Magazine Credits:

Tim Laman has photographed 24 stories for National Geographic to date. You can view all his stories in the National Geographic Gallery.

Awards:

Tim Laman’s major awards are listed on The Artist page.

Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2016

Multi-award winning short film.

Film Credits:

Tim Laman has worked on many major natural history documentaries for the BBC, Netflix, and National Geographic and produced many short films. You can find links to his recent work on the Motion page.