Then film…
Because of my true-to-nature approach, it was a logical progression to try out filming, which I was a bit familiar with already, having spent many hours on every summer holiday making Super-8 “feature films” with my children - spoofs of James Bond, and the Monty Python films.
So I started to work at the butterflies with a clockwork Bolex 16mm movie camera, with several fixed lenses on its turret, and this served as a good introduction to getting closer-up and framing the butterfly through the reflex lens of a movie camera. More encouragement, and the loss of that Bolex to a car-thief in 1968, meant that I moved on to an electric Bolex and trips to faraway places on holidays. I even started to edit the results into primitive 16mm films at home. “Butterflies of Mevagissey” was an early product. You can guess where we spent our family holidays!
But the tropics were the main attraction from early on. Headed off Columbia by a friend on the grounds it was both dangerous and difficult, I twice visited the Tambopata Reserve in the Amazon basin in eastern Peru, calling in also at Iquitos and Tingo Maria, - despite the presence nearby of the Shining Path guerrillas. Then Costa Rica, and a little later my first visit to Malaysia, as well as two return trips to India, and another to Bhutan.
But things changed in earnest in the 1990s. My wife, Pat, believed strongly that many more people than just ourselves would be glad to see the pictures, and urged me to get into production. Then by chance we paid a Christmas-time visit to Cuba, just after the collapse of the Russian Empire (so to speak) and at the beginning of Fidel Castro’s “situacion especial” (crisis period, we might as well call it). We made a good friend in the Coordinator for science in the Natural History Museum in Havana, Luis Roberto Hernandez, and through him and the filming in Cuba, met David Spencer Smith, then the Hope Professor at the University Museum in Oxford, author of the lovely handbook on the “Butterflies of the West Indies and South Florida”. He provided more encouragement as well as plenty of advice on scientific points, and started me off on an interest in the biogeography and evolution of butterflies, which runs now all through the films I have made.