Frederique Olivier: The Technology Behind the Lens

Taking pictures and that’s how you got started.

Frederique: It’s interesting because it’s actually not how I got started. I started with a little audio recorder wandering around the house recording audio tapes of everything that was going on. And I only got to having a camera much, much later in the game in my teens when I started traveling to places like Cameroon and Sweden.

And so that’s where I got my first little stills camera, the old Kodak that you had to get the roll of film to develop. Seems like a technology that’s been forgotten about now. And I was not a very good photographer until then again later it, it it grew on me in my late teens rather than as a child.

Brian: What was it about photography that you got more and more interested in versus other media like audio, which you started out with?

Frederique: I guess I got to realize that I was a visual person rather than audio interested person and I react to visual clues a lot better, like color and composition, like textures.

The irony is that I still trained as a sound recordist to get myself started with ABC. In Australia, but again, I quickly moved on to doing videography because deeply in me, I didn’t actually connect with the audio medium very well. So the visual medium became mine, but at first as a scientist to acquire information rather than create something beautiful.

And I got to Antarctica and Antarctica made me a good photographer in the end, gave me the motivation. To go and try to grab images that were composed and beautiful. And we had access to photo lab back in the days, like it was black and white development of film for medical purposes. But you could not only develop your x ray, you could develop your own photographs.

And that’s what I did. So that was really my introduction to the traditional way of doing photography.

Brian: Did you grow up in France or you grew up in Australia or a combination of both or neither?

Frederique: I grew up in France and I moved to Australia in my early 20s.

Brian: Walk us through What was the process of you getting more formally into photography with your education, your experience and so forth in your late teens and early twenties?

Frederique: So I pretty much, so I came to Australia, I did a lot of work up on the Great Barrier Reef, started dealing with the old underwater cameras, like the Nikonos, again, dealing with film and the Zodiac on the, and that was actually really interesting. And yeah. Again, when I got to Antarctica, I was doing my PhD as an Antarctic ecologist, and that’s where I had more access to nice photographic subject and the way to obviously develop and work with photography.

So that’s really when I did that and towards the end of my PhD, I got the offer to work for BBC, obviously applied for the job, and help with the planet Earth pursuit, the first planet Earth, which you might remember back in 2005. And so after five years of being an experienced scientist in Antarctica, I had this incredible opportunity to winter to film emperor penguins in Antarctica.

And that was my switch to, all right, now I was a camera assistant, but I also would want to do second camera work, et cetera. So I trained for that. And that was my first formal introduction to the real world of documentary filmmaking.

Brian: Over this period this early period, are you dabbling, dabbling’s not the right word, but are you using both still photographic equipment and video?

Or are you focusing more on video? Talk about that a bit.

Frederique: I started with stills photography and obviously the little print cameras and then getting into slide photography and printing my own stills in the lab. So everything was really came from the stills background with the actual medium, developing the film and then printing the on the paper and things that have been nearly forgotten by the recent generations because we.

We don’t have even access to that technology anymore. So when the planet earth shoot was offered to us the purpose of that shoot was to film Emperor penguins in extreme cold, and we actually had to use film cameras, even though digital camera, Panasonic cameras that already. Like appeared, we had to revert back to film 35 millimeter film, which is the same film that Hollywood movies still use sometimes.

And that’s because the mechanical camera was the only one that could reliably bear the really cold conditions we were going to work in. And that was the last of film for me. And I had the stress of having to change the magazines as a camera assistant and the film would get brittle and it was all very challenging to actually manipulate film in that really cold environment.

But the old Atom camera was going to be a key. trustworthy for the whole time, the entire year in Antarctica. And as you can’t get spare parts or change, get another camera in Antarctica through the wintertime, it’s so remote, no one gets there.

Brian: Talk a little bit about that. I can imagine that in ridiculously cold temperatures down there that a mechanical camera wouldn’t work at all.

Did you have some heating elements around them to keep them at some kind of reasonable temperature? How does that work?

Frederique: So the camera was practically winterized and I remember the viewfinder had a heating element to it to prevent condensation and fog and the fog immediately freezes. And the rest of the camera was not heated, but it had been specifically winterized, which means the parts that have a bit of lubricants, get a special lubricant that can bear with cold temperatures, et cetera.

The batteries definitely had to get preheated and kept in like a warm Esky with hot pads for, to manage, to keep them warm for the whole day. So they could release. The voltage properly. So we had, we were caring for the camera like a baby and yes, definitely keeping the important parts as warm as possible.

Brian: That’s something you never think about. When people like yourself go off into these wild, extreme temperature regions, how you have to care for your equipment. Those of us of a certain age will remember the great explorer Jacques Cousteau. He apparently was an inspiration for you. Talk a little bit about that.

Frederique: So both Cousteau and Attenborough were my childhood’s inspirations. So needless to say, even though I wasn’t a photographer as a young child, I was totally inspired by going out in the world and going exploring in those remote places and watching those documentaries, whether underwater or in Africa. And I was just going, I want to go there.

I want to do that. I didn’t really have an easy pathway in France, so that’s probably why I became an engineer and a scientist first. I have this really vivid image of the little red men on the Cousteau ship, the Calypso, which is this weird looking ship with those turbo cells on the top of it and little red men in the middle of the Southern Ocean.

And they’re all going out to some remote islands sub Antarctic island in the Southern Ocean looking for albatross. And I was like, Wow, I want to do that. I want to go. I want to be one of those little red men looking for albatross and I was so lucky to 20 years down the track, travel on an icebreaker and get to do exactly that, go and see sub Antarctic islands and see the albatross and even work for albatross conservation later on.

Brian: What are the challenges? Either in film or now in, in digital capture of photographing in a region like Antarctica, where it’s not necessarily multicolored, right? There’s a lot of white and a lot of gray. And I have to imagine sometimes the lenses have a hard time distinguishing near from far that kind of stuff.

Is that an issue?

Frederique: It’s not an issue because I’m not using autofocus most of the time. When I do videography, I’m basically the person who makes the decision as to where to. put the focus. So the near from far is not an issue. I’ll make that decision. Where am I going to place the focus and how focus pulling with gloves, by the way, it’s practically challenging at times because you haven’t got the finesse that you have in a normal.

So I just had a shoot in the tropics recently and I was like, Oh, this is really nice. I can actually finally focus on my subject. The light can be a challenge, but at the best of times, like the Antarctic hour can produce the most beautiful light, especially through the winter time, because you have four or five, six hours of what is twilight.

And like the light that we enjoy for a few minutes at sunrise and sunset here. So then you have this very soft enveloping light that lenses are basically just so greedy for, like they just love that light. So you can, thanks to that, create really beautiful images. And you still, if you don’t have clouds, you have beautiful.

Sun rays coming through and you can play with light in, in a way that you cannot in the real world because you got a whole reflection from the snow and ice surfaces that also create this reverberation of light and backlit your subject without you having to do anything, which is fantastic.

Brian: When you go out on expedition, what are you looking for? Are you going with a particular project in mind, a particular animal or scene that you want to capture, or is it more serendipitous than that?

Frederique: It depends if I’m out there when I work for myself on my holidays and I don’t always do expeditions on my holidays.

But I often go and look for stuff or stumble upon stuff by myself when it’s assigned expeditions. The project is very predefined, meaning that I’ve got like a broadcasters and that’s commissioned the program and then I get hired as a camera woman and say, Oh, we want you to film this things like for the BBC, obviously we went and I went twice filming Ample Penguins for a particular program.

Or Nat Geo filmed across Greenland to film this young lady who was the youngest person skiing across three, three ice caps. And so the assignment was, okay, document this journey. So those are assignment that I get paid for and and every now and then I have those. Indulgences like the Baffin Island trip that I took last year, where I just go with a friend and I decided, Oh, we like, let’s go to Baffin Island.

He tried to convince me to go there. It’s the most amazing place. I say yeah, I’ll come. I’ll come. And and he really wanted me to go and drone the place, but I said, yeah, okay, I’ll bring my drone and we can do some aerials of that place, which, but I’m warning you, this is such a huge place that it’s going to be really difficult with a little drone.

But I said, and then the kind of projects that are more like my personal projects that I like to take on, because I just go and let’s have a go at that, it wasn’t a cheap endeavor, but. Again, it’s the thrill of exploring a new place and seeing what we can find and and hopefully recording and creating some beautiful imagery with it.

And that’s what drives me really.

Brian: So tell us a little bit more about that adventure. What drew you to it? Describe it to us. I’ve only seen it in pictures but I can imagine it’s beauty is breathtaking.

Frederique: So the first time I got to Baffin Island, I had a chance to just sail with a cruise ship around it.

I was a guide on an expedition cruise ship and it was like a fascinating site with like glaciers towering down, not quite down to the sea now because the glaciers have retreated and it was really intriguing. Baffin is actually an enormous island west of Greenland and Very much on one side as those huge cliffs and massive heights, like some of the cliffs that I visited were over 1500 meter high, which is like walls raising out of the sea or the ice depending on the season.

Meanwhile the western side is really flat and gentle and like a such a subtle tundra. And so the island is actually really diverse, but what I found visiting there in the times that I did was it’s journey gets entirely covered with snow and ice and except for those huge cliffs that still stick out.

And it’s cut by those really deep fjords and making like the travel quite difficult unless you can travel on the sea ice and the sea ice is like a highway. So this is what you use to actually go from fjord to fjord on the east coast of Baffin Island. And so the expedition that we did consisted in skiing in some of those fjords, just looking at different locations and places to obviously film some landscape.

And Basically, generally, broadly enjoy being there because it’s such a special place, basically.

Brian: Wherever you go, whatever landscape you’re trying to capture, whatever, what makes a successful shot for you? And how do you set it up?

Frederique: It’s very varied. Often as a wildlife cinematographer, you set out to record a specific behavior and the behaviors that has not been seen before or has not been seen a certain way before.

And the key thing sometimes in some shoots is first, you got to find the animal. Once you get the animals, you’ve got the you’ve got the to have the animal doing the behavior that you’re hoping to film. So if you manage to do this you can call it successful. But then the next level is to actually get that same shot and same behavior in the light sets, especially pretty and impactful.

So the combination of all those elements happens, but not that often, really. At the end of the day, there’s like the coincidence of so many factors to actually get this key shot that’s going to be so strong that everyone’s going to love it and remember it, right?

Brian: And you have to have a lot of patience, I imagine.

Frederique: You spend a lot of time waiting for an animal to do the things that you hope it’s going to do, or it’s necessarily not necessarily static waiting, but it might be like in Antarctica, I was spending like six to eight hours on my knees waiting for penguins to do something, and you obviously have to keep your mind very occupied to bear with the cold.

In other time, you have to actually track with the animal and move with it, as you’re following it in the forest or through water. Like a reef flats into tidal zones, et cetera. So you, it’s, there’s all different types of waiting, but yeah, you often follow and wait.

Brian: What was one shot or sequence that was definitely worth the wait, that was very memorable for you?

Frederique: Like those very key behavioral parts of the emperor penguin shoot, when you wait and you. You watch 3, 000 penguins are doing chick exchange, but you think it’d be easy to get, but in fact you’re only gonna get one that is in the right spot, not obscured, in the right light, and eventually they exchange the chick, and the chick gets dropped on the ice, and they only have a few seconds, and then the female kind of scoops up the chicks and put it in her pouch, so one of those is super exciting because you’ve waited for that time, that key moment for the whole Antarctic winter, and finally it happens.

So there’s like this kind of a rush of adrenaline when you get close to that. There’s other shots that remember working really hard for. There was not a wait, but there was a lot of hours of work preparing for the shot in terms of engineering the gear that would get the shots. And one example is the baby red crabs on Christmas Island.

They like the size of a pin needle and and you have to film them with macro equipment, but you in situ in the field, in the, in an intertidal zones where the sea might just It might come up really quick. So you’ve got very little amount of time to set up this really complex motion tracking equipment to follow this tiny pin needle walking on the rock.

And you do it and you do it and you do it and you do it again so many times that eventually you get it. And that’s when you feel, wow, okay, that was hard work, but we got it. It’s like this. Repetition, the repetition of trying until you get it, that’s also can be wearing, but if you finally get the shots because you know that technique you’ve employed is going to work, but it needs kind of several chances, then then it’s also quite satisfactory.

Brian: So much more complex than, we imagine you just walking out on the ice or the tundra and pulling out a camera and going at it. Back in my reporter days, I worked with a photographer and he was at a basketball game, an American college basketball game, where one of the coaches was famously, he had a famously bad temper.

And this one night in the middle of a game, he picked up a chair and he threw it onto the court and he was obviously thrown out of the game. Our competitor, the shot, our guy, didn’t catch the shot. Why? Because he was changing out film roll at that very moment. So just bad luck. Yeah.

Frederique: Yeah.

Brian: Now, have you ever had, had shots that you wished you’d caught, but were otherwise occupied or something distracted you and you missed it?

Frederique: I can’t recall of any. I’m sure there are. Yep. But generally those are erased because once we don’t want the producers to know about them. I, but on the top of my head, there’s always times where something goes wrong and you are distracted or you have to deal or you getting really too cold and you simply have to stop filming because your hands are freezing and basically you’re at stake. So there’s always things that get missed, inevitably, and you’ve got to accept that either you’ve got other chances to catch the same shot or you just go where you make the story around. But again, maybe I’ve been really lucky with relatively easy subjects as well, which I admire some camera people, especially the people who film the predations.

Like Sophie Darlington, because they just always on, on the job and you cannot let your attention go down because you got to catch this moment of hunting and predation, which is only last a few seconds. And I must say in a way I’ve had easier subjects.

Brian: So this is a good pivot point to talk about the technology because my ex colleague, you Obviously, you had different kinds of technology and you had to take out film and replace it with a fresh roll.

You don’t really have to do that today, unless you’re shooting with film. You’ve had exposure, pardon the pun, to analog film. When you were younger, all the way now into the digital age, connected devices, the whole gamut of advanced camera equipment. Talk about that transition and how it’s affected you personally as a professional photographer.

Frederique: I think it’s been a really interesting transition and I was lucky to have a technical engineering mind to be able to embrace it. Because I remember clearly when we delivered the film from the first Emperor Penguin shoot. I met Mark Linfield at the BBC and he’s the producer who gave me the clearest explanation of what a pixel was and how pixels were like little buckets and they fill up with light.

And that was my de click into understanding the whole digital technology from that on that shows could embrace how the Panasonic Varicam was working and get my head into all the, the subtleties through those sensors and really understand them quite in depth. And that’s basically set me up from my later career, like dealing with digital cameras.

There was like this transition period where you just lose this contact, the physical contact with especially developing film in photography, where suddenly you can take like. 10 times, 20, 30 times more photos and therefore improve your photography because you got more chances to do it. But I missed the time where I was a really sparse film photographer because the roll of slides was so expensive and I was really carefully Choosing the photos I was taking in a way.

So there’s this transition. Digital has been awesome for some things, but there was other traditions from film that, or habits from film that were also very good. So sometimes it’s nice to try to practice the old film behavior with with digital really

Brian: In our world, what we call Moore’s law has shrunk the size and weight and cost of electronics for the last 60 years. And presumably you have access to a lot more equipment that’s a lot lighter than it used to be and that sort of changes the nature of your profession. How do you think differently when you go out on a shoot today versus a shoot 15 years ago when you have a different set of equipment? Heavier, clunkier equipment.

Frederique: Interestingly, my work has been specifically on expedition. Like I have not really shot much documentary 15 years ago, at least in local areas, like local Tassie or for local television. So most of my work throughout my career has been geared towards expedition filming. And therefore, at every generation of camera that I’ve been having to use, I’ve chosen the smallest possible model, generally, that I could carry with me that would be portable and not use too much power and still deliver the right quality footage.

Like the HDV, the mini, midi DV cams, and then the little handy cams, all of those were much smaller than the standard television cameras that you would have on your shoulders. Shooting news back home, but I couldn’t certainly not take those on expedition. I had to use smaller tools and that kind of went on and on until a GoPro appeared, you had this next level of miniaturization.

Of course you can’t, you don’t have much control, especially in the early days with a GoPro compared to a handy cam, but. They’re the types of camera that were always the convenient and the tools that I wanted to go to because they were small and therefore they were there with me and I could record more content with them than if I was carrying a larger model camera.

Brian: What’s your favorite piece of equipment right now?

Frederique: Dare I say would be my phone, but because it’s always there with me, so as a camera, it’s going to be recording. But when you blow up phone images, they’re still even from the best iPhone 15 pros et cetera. They’re still not great when they’re blown up.

At the moment, my Sony mirrorless cameras are really doing a really good all around the job, is a decent mic with them. Like they’ve been perfect. Very compact and super versatile tools as well.

Brian: The phone is so many things, it’s like a Swiss army knife. It’s not just a camera.

And so when you’re out in difficult conditions, it tells you where you are. It’s a communication device. If you have a smartwatch on, it tells you’re about to freeze to death or you’re hungry or whatever. I could see how that’d be your favorite device. What do you want to see? Out of technology in the coming years.

In other words, what’s limiting what you do now that you can imagine will get better. People in the technology world will solve pretty soon?

Frederique: That’s an interesting question. Like the kind of technologies that’s really helping us at the moment is AI and obviously processor driven AI. I think any kind of processor powers that helps us analyze data more in depth is going to help us in the future.

And I’m talking whether it’s scientific data. Ecological data, for example, or camera data is going to help the filmmaking process, for example, because you can actually analyze a lot of raw footage very fast, much faster than a human can do with AI. And therefore you could have used a lot more hidden cameras, which are, remotely controlled or self controlled and they’re not disturbing the animals and then they just keep rolling or they roll on selection of moments like that AI can also determine like we’ve just seen an animal roll on the animal kind of thing.

They can even focus on the animal. So and then all that footage can be also analyze and run through with AI and they can just select the shots that actually had something in them and then the human can come in and look at what’s usable. And get informed in terms of animal behavior, or is it a shot that’s useful for the film?

Therefore maybe deploy a different types of camera or then deploy a man operated camera, for example. So there’s all this acceleration and availability of data processing for much larger volume of data in the post processing side that I think is going to be really useful. Does that make sense?

Brian: Oh yeah, absolutely. We’ve done stories on other partners who are using arm-powered devices with AI to identify species, identify certain types of bears and they harvest that data to figure out mating patterns, migratory patterns, all that sort of stuff. And that’s only going to get more sophisticated going forward as we build out the large language models, the small language models, the hardware that supports them.

And your own experience and your own insights are going to dictate how we exploit that data. So it’s a pretty exciting time, I think.

Frederique: It’s really exciting to see where it all could go, but and I’m lucky to have a background in science and just see how both science and cinematography can merge together because the acquisition of visual media was not very easy.

Common for science purposes because there wasn’t the processing power, but nowadays basically the use of cameras to acquire scientific data and fit that into various models and understand behaviors or conduct population analysis, et cetera. Is become, so they’re basically a back and forth from the video, the image world to the science world, which has become much more flowing because of this capacity for data processing.

Brian: Your work, the work of wildlife photographers all over the world, how do you see it affecting people’s perceptions of the global environment around them? Is it pushing the needle in any particular direction, having an impact? How, where do you see that happening?

Frederique: Look, I’ve been wondering about that because I’m, I’ve been questioning my role in the wildlife filmmaking for a while and whether I even wanted to continue this career because for a little while there until like maybe five years ago, I felt Oh, I’m creating beautiful images for entertainment purposes, especially like during COVID.

And it just lost its soul. It lost its purpose in a way. And. Luckily, back in 2022, Wildscreen they started openly saying, all right like 15 years ago, there was no conservation message associated with documentary, at least no explicit conservation messages conveyed in wildlife documentary except a little half hour part at the end of a six part series, nowadays the commissioners have actually reverted that and decided We can’t just blow the dust under the carpet now we need to address the problems we need to address climate change and all the environmental emergencies that are human related and now there is this the opportunity to make stories create stories that actually are going to inform people about the state of the environment and the need for conservation and gives them a better understanding of why all those animals around us actually have a desperate need for a habitat that’s as healthy for them as it has to be for us, basically. I think the trends are changing.

And we having more opportunities to tell valuable stories that will have a conservation impact in the next few years, in the coming years, basically.

Brian: That’s good to hear because it’s really important work and it’s not easy work. I know you enjoy doing it and it can be a lot of fun. But when you’re out in subzero temperatures for hours and hours, that’s not particularly easy.

What’s the most dangerous moment you’ve had?

Frederique: Dangerous. How many have they been? I, but it hasn’t been like, that’s the thing you operate in a really remote area. You actually carefully consider your risk because you cannot afford to injure yourself or because you haven’t, you can’t even be extracted, there’s no hospital.

So the risk taking is done completely differently compared to go mountain biking. It. Go mountain biking around the corner from home, it’s but I guess there hasn’t been like dangerous moments. There’s been a few near misses. Like for example filming a bunch of Emperor penguin chicks and they all weigh like 15 plus kilo each.

And there was about like, like 25 of them on the bit of ice. And I was on the same bit of ice as where they were. And I was belayed because I knew something could happen, but suddenly like a half a ton of ampere chicks plus me just collapsed as the ice broke. And I just go, could have ended up in the really freezing water if I wasn’t belayed. So there’s all those things, but again, you prepare for those eventualities, you, we knew that the ice was likely to break, therefore I could be belayed, therefore, and it was still worthwhile taking those chances because the shots in the end was really worth it of chicks swimming jumping off the water edge and swimming in the water, for example.

You just weigh your risk, and then things happen, you minimize the consequences,

Brian: So at the end of the day, you’ve filmed all day long, you’ve packed up your stuff, you have a moment, just stand there and look all around you and take a deep breath. What comes to mind? It’s got to be just an incredible place to work and an incredible feeling.

Frederique: I’m talking generally here, I’m talking about a particular place because every place I’ve been, whether tropical jungle or an Antarctic or an Arctic place, they’re all different. So the feeling that they render on, she put down the cameras is very different for each of them. So maybe I can, I could just maybe describe Baffin.

And at the end of the day, like The thing that was striking about that place is that when it was not windy, it was absolutely, but absolutely silence. And there’s a deeper silence that just gets you where nowhere else on earth that’s inhabited, you would get that kind of silence. And it’s really calming.

Yeah. There’s this kind of aura of the entire landscape around you and the energy, and you can basically finally just rest your mind and be there and just enjoy the silence really.

Brian: Sounds awesome. Awesome. Frederique, you’ve been very generous with your time. I know you got really important things to do, but thanks for spending it with us and showing us so much of what you’re doing with technology to capture the world around us.

Frederique: Thank you, Brian.