Post-Covid years update: As of late 2021 I'm now using a Canon R5 mirrorless, which I got for the eye-tracking but use for Abstract, ME, & ICM work and am loving it. I was strictly a wildlife photographer until Covid began, but then I needed to find something else that really grabbed me. That turned out to be whatever you'd call the Abstract / Impressionist / Expressionist / ICM / ME images which are now in my Photostream. I attended an Abstract workshop on Gabriola Island in the Salish Sea of BC led by Chris Harris and Dennis Ducklow, and new worlds opened before me. Clearly the years of bird and mammal photography in the wild sped up my progress, and I miss the Amazon adventures and the wonders of the Maasai Mara, but this novel field has become a gripping inner adventure, and it gives me a chance to make art which is truly innovative and unique. It's the difference between being an illustrator or being a poet.

I live in Vancouver, BC, and have been a traveller and adventurer all my life. My degrees are from Harvard, but my academic career has had little to do with my travels or photography. Serious photography came later in life, but it's now nudging Southern Appalachian fiddle-playing as my leading passion. Long ago I left English literature and New York City for six years in Yellowknife, in Canada's Northwest Territories, a move motivated by canoeing the great Barren Land rivers while doing archaeological surveys. Helping to found a Pan-Arctic folk festival led me to become a rather outrageous folk performer known as "Grizzly Frank, Canada's Master of Bones," (see frankmetcalf.com) which led in turn to festival gigs all over Canada, and to a European tour with a French-Canadian folk dance troupe, during which, by pure luck, I shook hands twice with Saint John Paul II in St. Peter's Square. (In earlier years I'd been briefly jailed in London due to an off-target frisbee toss, and in Berlin I was led away for interrogation by the Stasi at Checkpoint Charlie, so I claim no personal saintliness whatsoever.) Music then brought me way down from Yellowknife to Vancouver where I became a contra dance harmonica player and banjo player for many years before the fiddle finally claimed my soul. One passion that remained from Manhattan was fine art, especially French painting and Paul Cézanne, and so my old keen interest in form and composition finally emerged in wildlife photography.

My life of travel has included walking across both France and Spain on the Chemin / Camino de Santiago de Compostela, a total of 1,600 km while stoned on languages, red wine, and oxygen; thousands of kilometres of paddling canoes through the deep wilderness taiga and the Barren Lands of far northern Canada; working as a secular schoolteacher and medical volunteer in a monastic mission and leper town in the remote hinterland of Liberia (at Bolahun, where novelist Graham Greene began his "Journey Without Maps") after crossing the ocean on a tramp freighter laden with 600 tons of dynamite and a clutch of Holy Rollers; being a rafting company naturalist on rivers as diverse as the wild Tatshenshini, the Chilcotin, and the Rio Grande; and working as an Appalachian Volunteer in Bloody Creek, Kentucky, where many had died in recent times but few had died of natural causes. Their deaths were due to collisions or suicide. Also I became an owl caller, with a palette of seven owl species which I call in by voice in the beautiful Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, where I have a cabin on a bird sanctuary lake.

In previous decades I travelled all over the map, especially in South America, Africa, and Australia, shooting photos of wonderful animals. I made bird and mammal portraits, often up very close, and had some rather interesting adventures while doing so. In those pre-Covid days I used a Canon 500mm Mk2 prime lens, hand-held for quick reaction to scenes unfolding. Otherwise a Canon 100-400 Mk2 zoom. My camera was a Canon 7D Mk2 because of its reach. I was able to make sharp shots as slow as 1/80th of a second from a dugout canoe with the 500mm plus 1.4X extender due to my long background in weight training plus my boyhood training in rifle marksmanship. For gorillas in Rwanda, however, a much wider lens is needed for that one hour you spend beside an enormous Silverback gorilla, growling at him softly as instructed, while teetering on the precarious footing of a bamboo forest. Sadly, my massive silly feet are even more clumsy than the rest of me.

Here are my "Born To Be Wild" group photos, a select bunch from an excellent and very selective Flickr photo group:

www.flickr.com/groups/borntobewild/pool/153484287@N06

Also see frankmetcalf.com for much more about the bones, wilderness canoeing, the Far North, and my rambling, sometimes rowdy musical life.