Tim Laman

| Wildlife Photojournalist

Wildlife Diaries

The Wildlife Diaries newsletter is the best way to keep up to date with Tim Laman’s latest work and travels, and to learn about photography and natural history as well. Read through his recent posts here or sign up to receive the posts via email using the form on the right.

News

Announcing my new book: BIRD PLANET

by

I’m excited to announce that I have just completed checking the proofs, and can now share that my new book “BIRD PLANET” will be published by Abrams in October, 2022.  As most of you know by now, bird photography has been a special passion of mine for a long time.  I have now pulled together my best bird images from my extensive assignments and travels around the world over the last 25 years into one volume celebrating the beauty and wonder of birds, and their importance as ambassadors for conservation of wild places. 

Below is a little teaser – an example of an image from the book that has never been published before, and the story behind it.  Hope you enjoy it.  And further down is a link to pre-order a special signed edition of the book that I’m offering to subscribers first, which is bundled with a 12-inch print. 

An adult roseate spoonbill preens in front of a group of lighter pink juvenile birds at the Alafia Bank Bird Sanctuary in Tampa Bay, Florida, USA. Bird bills come in all shapes and sizes, but the spoonbill’s bill is certainly one of the most unusual, and is used for catching prey by touch as the bird sweeps it back and forth in the water. We didn’t want to approach the birds too closely with our boat at the sanctuary, so I stepped into the water with my big lens on my tripod and started slowly wading towards them. This worked well, and I got close enough for this shot without disturbing the birds, but I was in over my waist in saltwater by the end, and taking a bit of risk with my equipment.
[Read more…] about Announcing my new book: BIRD PLANET

by

Dear Friends,

I’d like to wish you all belated greetings for the New Year.  It’s been a rather rocky start here in the USA to say the least, but I’m optimistic that better times are ahead, and that by some time later this year, we will be able to resume international travel, gathering in groups, and many other things that we have had to put on hold in 2020.

[Read more…] about

https://www.timlaman.com/wildlife-diaries/2021/01/3056/

by

 New Book and Discovering My Backyard Birds

Dear Friends,

I hope this finds you all well in these extraordinary times.  I’ve been keeping very busy despite all my international photo and filming projects being postponed.  In this Wildlife Diaries, I’d like to share two things.  First is the publication of a major book with Princeton University Press.  Second, I will share what you might call my “discovery of my backyard birds” – a glimpse of the local Massachusetts bird coverage I’ve been working on these past couple months.  I’m usually off chasing exotic birds-of-paradise and the like, but now due to Covid-19, I found that my local birds are pretty spectacular and fascinating in their own right.
Did you know that New Guinea is the second largest island in the world (after Greenland), with habitats ranging from mangroves and lowland rainforest to alpine peaks reaching 4800 meters?  That it is surrounded by the world’s richest coral reefs, and also home to more than one thousand traditional human societies with unique languages and culture!  You can learn about this and a lot more in a new book now out from Princeton University Press, by Bruce Beehler with photographs by yours truley.  Bruce has made over 50 trips to New Guinea, and I have made over 30, and we are pleased to have the chance to share our experience of this amazing part of the world with readers everywhere.  It’s available right now from my website: Tim Laman Fine Art.

Ornate Fruit Doves
One exciting thing about creating this illustrated book about New Guinea is it gave me a chance to dive into my photo archives from all those trips to New Guinea (usually concentrating on photographing birds-of-paradise) and find images that illustrated the full range of New Guinea’s amazing biodiversity, which of course also includes many other spectacular birds.  This shot of a group of Ornate Fruit Doves is one example.  I was staking out this fruiting fig tree early one morning deep in the forests of the Arfak Mountains in West Papua, hoping to photograph several of the bird-of-paradise species that might come to feed there, but other birds of course also showed up for this bounty, and these fruit doves were among them.  New Guinea’s forests, being rich in food for fruit-eating birds, harbor a great variety of dove and pigeon species, fruit specialists that are often very beautifully patterned.  So it was a real pleasure to seek out unpublished images like this, and nearly 200 others to illustrate this book, knowing that through this project, I now had a chance to share more of the wonders of New Guinea’s biodiversity that have just been hiding in my archives with those who may not get a chance to travel to that amazing island.
If you’d like to listen to a podcast of Bruce and I talking about the book on “Bird Calls Radio”, you can check it out here: BirdCallsRadio.com

Discovering my “Backyard” Birds
One of the highlights of my local bird photography this spring during the Covid-19 lockdown has been discovering a nest of Piliated Woodpeckers during a bike ride from my home in Lexington, Massachusetts.  I think it’s one of our most spectacular local birds here in the Northeast, and I spent a fun few mornings getting some shots of the chicks being fed before they fledged.  I’ve been working on my own, and now with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to document breeding birds in the Northeast this spring, so stay tuned for more coverage of my “backyard” birds.

Piliated Woodpecker chicks stick their heads out of their nest cavity in anticipation of a parent arriving with food.

Gallery Update:  

During these Covid-19 times, we have continued to work on expanding the offerings in my online print gallery, Tim Laman Fine Art.  Here are a couple updates:

1)  WALDEN POND COLLECTION – Now available as standard open edition prints.  On the “Close to Home” theme, we have now made available my collection of Walden images, one of my long-term “backyard” projects, as standard open editions on paper.  You can check out the gallery HERE.

2)  LIMITED EDITIONS: COMING SOON!  – Another major project we are currently working on is choosing a small selection of my very best images from twenty-five years of wildlife photography to offer as LIMITED EDITION collector’s prints.  These will be very large, printed on archival aluminum, framed and signed, and have an edition of only 10 or 20 prints.  Right now are having test prints made, and fine tuning this unique product.  Let us know if you are interested, and stay tuned for the release in the coming weeks.

Thanks for reading, and keep your eyes out for my further updates, as I continue to share my bird photography adventures from the Northeast US over the coming weeks.  Hope to see you in the wilds again soon!

Stay safe everyone!
Tim

https://www.timlaman.com/wildlife-diaries/2020/08/2922/

International Photo Festival at Montier en Der

by

Dear Friends,

I have just returned from a great experience in France, where I was a special guest of honor at the International Photo Festival at Montier en Der.  It’s a unique festival with a hundred photographers exhibiting, and over 40,000 visitors over four days.  I selected twenty of my best rain forest bird images for my exhibition at the festival, in keeping with their forest theme.  I thought I’d share the story behind one of my new favorite images, that was also one of the crowd favorites.  See below.

Feathers of the Forest: Rainforest Birds

Rhinoceros Hornbill perched among ripe figs, Hala Bala Wildlife Sanctuary, Thailand.
[Read more…] about International Photo Festival at Montier en Der

Back from Indonesia

by

Dear Friends,

I’m finally back home after an exciting two months of photography and filming in Indonesia. Its time to share a few highlights with you, and I’m going to start with some exciting news from Gunung Palung in Borneo, where I’ve been documenting my wife Cheryl Knott’s orangutan research for 25 years. Her project studies the entire population of wild orangutans in “GP” as we call it, but we get to know some individuals especially well, and none is more familiar to our team than a female named Walimah.

Featured Photos: Walimah – Then and Now

The first image was taken twenty years ago in 1999, when Walimah was a newborn infant. Walimah’s mother had a home range close to the research camp, and so we encountered her often and Walimah grew up seeing researchers on the ground below her as a normal part of her environment. So she has never been afraid of humans, and has been a great subject for my photography.

Baby Walimah – 1999

Some of you may be familiar, however, with the tragic turn of events in Walimah’s life in 2015. After the highlight of having her first baby in April that year, she was the apparent victim of an infanticidal attack by a rogue male orangutan (our best guess of what happened), and her first baby was lost. This story is documented in our 2016 film on NatGeo Wild Channel called “Mission Critical: Orangutan on the Edge” (and in a scientific paper by Cheryl and her team: Possible Male Infanticide in Wild Orangutans and a Re-evaluation of Infanticide Risk).

[Read more…] about Back from Indonesia