When the much anticipated follow-up to the 1999 series Big Cat Diary aired on the Discovery Channel, fans were treated to a whole new perspective on lions, leopards and cheetahs. The original crew, Jonathan Scott and Angela Scott, used their Cinema EOS cameras and Canon DSLRs to film and photograph faster, get closer and show the world of big cats like we’ve never seen it before in the Big Cat Tales.
"I have always loved adventure – and been adventurous," says Jonathan Scott, "so Africa was exactly what I was looking for and offered me the chance to live a wild life." Together with his wife, fellow photographer Angela Scott, he has carved out a unique career as a zoologist, conservationist, television wildlife documentary presenter and award-winning wildlife photographer.
Jonathan was born and educated in the UK, but Africa has been his adopted home for the past 44 years. He began presenting wildlife documentaries in the early 1980s, and has gone on to front programmes including Flamingo Watch (1995) and Big Cat Diary (1996-2008). Together with Angela, he has also produced 35 books on wildlife. Yet both Jonathan and Angela started out primarily as photographers and remain so today. Both, uniquely, have separately won the coveted Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.
In this interview, Jonathan talks about his fascination for African wildlife and the Cinema EOS cameras, DSLRs, CN-E lenses and L-series lenses that allow him to work long days, shoot in low light and capture moving cheetahs at 70mph.