Photographer Igor Shpilenok. Igor Shpilenok

Returned home from the Arkhangelsk taiga. I visited two places remote from each other: on the White Sea in the Onega Pomorie national park and in the interfluve of the Northern Dvina and Pinega in the eastern part of the region. I’ll tell you about “Onega Pomorie” a little later, and today about a trip to the Dvina-Pinega taiga massif, which was not entirely ordinary, since my usual photo trips take place in nature reserves and national parks of our country, against the backdrop of protected nature, which already has a protective conservation status, there is a future. Immediately I found myself on a remote front, about which people know little and guess more.

I also guessed that the remnants of the pristine taiga in the North-West of our country were being destroyed, but I did not think that it would be so rapidly and on such a scale as was revealed to me on this expedition. Before this trip, I hoped that conservationists had some time to spare, and that Mother Nature had secluded, roadless places where the remnants of the relict taiga could remain untouched for many, many years. Now I know that we have neither spare time nor roadless “Berendey Thickets”. There is an unprecedented destruction of the northern taiga in history, based on the most modern technologies.
In the area between the Northern Dvina and Pinega rivers, the largest massif of untouched standard taiga in Europe has survived to this day. More recently, its area was about a million hectares. 18 salmon spawning rivers originate or flow here, the purity of which determines the condition of the entire salmon population - Atlantic salmon. The forests of the interfluve are one of the last refuges for wild reindeer. whose population in the region is on the verge of extinction as a result of habitat destruction and poaching. The entire territory of the Dvina-Pinega forest area is leased from large loggers; this is a resource for enterprises in the forest sector of the region. Large forest tenants (the Titan group of companies and Arkhangelsk Pulp and Paper Mill JSC) have considerable influence in the region. They declare that they are “environmentally friendly” and have even been voluntarily certified according to Russian companies is a “green pass” to foreign environmentally sensitive markets.However, forest development is proceeding along an extensive path. High-quality reforestation is not carried out in deforested areas; birches and aspens grow in place of relict coniferous forests, and timber traders continue to move deep into the pristine northern taiga, as if it were endless. Having completely destroyed it, which will happen very soon, timber merchants will be forced to change their approaches to business, but we will no longer have the pristine taiga.

For centuries, off-road conditions have saved the northern taiga from intensive economic use. Newly built roads do not lead to populated areas, but to tracts of uncut forests.

Concrete slabs were laid in clayey areas, as well as on steep slopes. The forest sector of the region spends enormous amounts of money not on high-quality reforestation in deforested areas, but on the preservation and development of the old, extensive forest management system, on the construction of more and more roads to the last tracts of intact forests, and on the expansion of logging volumes.


Since the transport distance from remote areas to processing sites is usually hundreds of kilometers, even powerful timber trucks with good roads cannot handle the removal. Along the roads you can see stacks of timber of many tens of thousands of cubic meters. Here you clearly understand the scale of forest destruction.

This is what the Arkhangelsk taiga looks like from a bird's eye view now. Rectangles of cuttings. Each individual plot can reach fifty hectares. Soon the loggers will “master” the surviving rectangles and will lose interest in the devastated places for a long time.

Trees in the north grow slowly and do not reach gigantic sizes. These spruce trees can be far over a hundred years old.

logging camp. Organizers forestry business present themselves as benefactors of the local population. In reality, a colonial scheme is visible, when the main beneficiaries live in the capitals, or even in prosperous countries, and after such forest management, local residents are left with devastated taiga and poverty. New technologies for deforestation require a minimum of people. The Siberian Barber, the work of the crazy foreign inventor in Mikhalkov's film of the same name, has been around for a long time and is destroying forests all over the world with frightening efficiency. Just one complex, consisting of two machines with the English names harvester and forwarder, can replace more than fifty people working in logging traditional technology. Mercedes and Volvo trucks are working on the removal, hauling round timber one car at a time. Now Russia is firmly among the top three countries in terms of the scale of destruction of pristine forests, and the Arkhangelsk region is the leader in the destruction of such forests in Russia.

At the beginning of this century, when it became clear what a disaster was looming over the northern taiga, environmental organizations, scientists, and the public began work on creating a regional landscape reserve in the area between the Northern Dvina and Pinega rivers, which would save at least part of the relict taiga from mass deforestation. The reserve regime will allow the local population to continue to conduct traditional natural resource management - hunting, fishing, picking mushrooms and berries, but clear cutting will be prohibited. Several scientific expeditions were organized to survey the territory, and difficult negotiations began with timber traders and authorities. The creation of the reserve was postponed more than once, and its area was reduced; information wars were waged against its creation.In 2013, the project of the reserve with an area of ​​almost 500 thousand hectares received approval from the state examination. In 2017, the governor of the Arkhangelsk region confirmed that there would be a reserve. In 2018, an agreement was reached with the tenants on the boundaries of the reserve and its area; according to this document, it will be 300 thousand hectares. The tenants tried to push the territory of the reserve away from their areas of interest, so the configuration of its boundaries was far from ideal. According to the plan approved by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Timber Industry of the Arkhangelsk Region, the reserve should be created at the beginning of 2019, but there is still no document on its creation. This is worrying...

The Arkhangelsk branch of WWF Russia, having learned about the project to photograph the pristine forests of Russia, invited me to another expedition to survey the territory of the future reserve. The expedition began in the Pinega village of Kushkopala, which is located about three hundred kilometers from Arkhangelsk, then we drove for a hundred kilometers along new logging roads among endless clearings to the middle reaches of the Yula River. It was on these hundred kilometers that footage of the destruction of the Arkhangelsk taiga was filmed.

Then we went up the river in motorized wooden boats. Yula is not the most abundant river. At the riffles everyone had to get out of the boats and work as barge haulers. Therefore, we climbed slowly, about 70 kilometers in two days. Our guides were local hunters, whose lands were closely approached by massive clearings.

The bend of the Yula River from a bird's eye view. Relict spruce forests stretch for tens of kilometers. This is the middle part of the future reserve.

Lobaria lichen, an indicator of the ecological purity of the area.

Environmental organizations and local population- allies in the fight for the reserve. In the photo, those participating in the creation of the reserve from the very beginning are a professional hunter from the village of Kushkopala, Pinezhsky district, Viktor Khudyakov (on the left), his lands are located on the territory of the future reserve, and the director of the Forestry Program of WWF Russia Andrei Shchegolev (on the right).

Along the rivers flowing through the future reserve, there are about fifty such forest huts, where local hunters and fishermen, as well as vacationers, stay. Two thirds of men from neighboring settlements They cannot imagine their life without regular exposure to nature. Due to massive deforestation, many of them lost their hunting, fishing grounds and recreation areas.

Yula in the middle reaches.

The pristine taiga, which did not know the axe.

The confluence of the Yula and Ura rivers in the central part of the future reserve.

The endless expanses of wild, untouched nature are turning into a myth before our eyes. A soulless, cash-based system is robbing local people of a sustainable future; takes away home and habitat from our wild neighbors on the planet, impoverishes biological diversity. We are surprised by climate disasters recent years. Northern coniferous forests are of great importance for stabilizing the climate; they are a kind of “coat of earth” that restrains the flow of cold Arctic air masses into the continent, preserving and redistributing moisture. These are important arguments in favor of preserving at least part of the intact and pristine forest areas, including the creation of the Dvina-Pinega landscape reserve.

The history of Igor Shpilenok's passion for photography, an animal photographer, founder of the Bryansk Forest Nature Reserve, is special. It looks like a fairy tale, which is used to lull children to sleep in wonderful dreams... Children's genuine emotion served as the foundation for a constant desire to record and protect the immaculate, inexhaustible beauties of nature. Through constant interaction with nature, develop yourself, your body, feelings, mind, consciousness and soul.

- Igor, tell this story...

- We all come from childhood... The idea to start photographing nature came to me at the age of 13, when in my wanderings through the spring Bryansk forest I discovered an amazing clearing with hundreds of snowdrops. It seemed unfair to me that only I, out of several billion people living on earth, see this beauty. For two weeks I tried to persuade my grandmother to buy me a camera, but when I returned to the clearing with the brand new Smena-8M, I realized that I was too late. Tall summer grass grew in place of the flowers. For a whole year I waited for the next spring and at the same time studied photography, spending everything available to me on it. material resources. On April 25, 1974, I returned to the clearing and couldn’t believe my eyes. In place of clumps of snowdrops, the soil turned over by tractor tracks turned black, and stacks of freshly cut wood were piled up. This was one of the most powerful shocks of adolescence that determined my future life. Since then, the camera has been my strongest and most faithful ally in the fight to save the Bryansk Forest - the place where I was born, live and hope to die.

- Now photography is not only a hobby, but also a tool of influence?

- With the help of photography (by publishing articles in newspapers and magazines, organizing photo exhibitions), I found allies, with whom I achieved the organization of the Bryansk Forest Nature Reserve and on September 1, 1987, I became its first director, working in this position for ten years. During this time, my colleagues and I managed to create 12 more protected natural areas in the Bryansk Forest, where logging, land reclamation and other destructive species are prohibited economic activity. Now almost 20 percent of the Bryansk forest has been withdrawn from economic use. Years have healed the wounds inflicted by people on the Bryansk Forest, and hundreds of snowdrops are blooming in my clearing again - now they are not in danger.
Later, I felt that I could leave the bureaucratic side of my work, and resigned as director of the reserve to take up photography professionally. Now my priorities are to bring to people the beauty of wild nature, to awaken them to environmental initiatives, while being in the thick of environmental events myself. And the geography of my current photo expeditions has expanded to the entire protected Russia.

When I found out that you live in a nature reserve, to be honest, I was envious. I don’t know a single person who can boast of such a registration. Tell us about the features of such habitat.
- IN modern Russia 75 percent of the population are city dwellers. It's a shame, but most of them live in a parallel world with wildlife. And the lives of many people, especially busy people involved in politics and making money, have almost no contact with wild nature. Or it comes into contact in an ugly form, for example, in the form of helicopter hunts... Most residents of giant cities simply do not have experience communicating with untouched nature. Meanwhile, all the key decisions on environmental management, on the transformation of wild nature: where and how much to cut down forests, where to block rivers; where to pump oil; where the creation of nature reserves and national parks are being prepared and accepted in megacities. Most often this is done by people who have no idea what wild nature is, who have no personal experience communication with her. True nature photography aims to be a bridge between the modern urban world and wild nature.

- I know that the Bryansk Forest is not the only nature reserve that you have chosen as your home.
- Actually, I’m currently on winter leave in the Bryansk Forest Nature Reserve, and I work in the Kronotsky Nature Reserve in Kamchatka as an inspector for the protection of the reserve. The family is with me now. But when I’m in the Kronotsky Nature Reserve, the family lives in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. In the Kronotsky Nature Reserve itself the harsh and hazardous conditions for small children.
I went to Kamchatka for two weeks to photograph the Kronotsky Nature Reserve, but for the fifth year now I can’t bring myself to return to my native Bryansk Forest. And my family has already moved here, and in the Kronotsky Nature Reserve I am no longer a visiting photographer, but a nature conservation inspector. What doesn’t let me go to a heated and equipped house in the Bryansk Forest? Here, in the Kronotsky Nature Reserve, I found myself in the pristine past of humanity, in the past for which we all yearn. Man has managed to destroy little here. Here I am surrounded by dramatic landscapes, unspoiled by electric lines and highways.
Animals here sometimes do not know that man is the king of nature and do not give way to the path, and there may be so many fish going to spawn that it is impossible to swim in the stream. Sometimes you have to live for weeks, or even months, in the most inaccessible places. And you see what is not given to others, you see what will never happen again. For example, in the spring of 2007, I came to the Valley of Geysers to film a topic about bears on volcanoes, and I had to become a chronicler of the dramatic change in the landscape of the reserve, when on June 3, the largest mudflow in historical time in Kamchatka occurred and half of the Russian geysers disappeared overnight. The giant stones stopped just half a meter from the houses where the people were.

- How did you feel when you saw with your own eyes the rarest excitement of nature?
- The stone and mud flow carried away all living things for two kilometers. When you see that the river bank, on which you recently spent many dozens happy hours with a camera on a tripod, waiting for the geysers to erupt, buried under a fifty-meter layer of rocks and hot clay, well aware of the instability human life! Now June 3rd is the second birthday for me and my colleagues. But more than 20 large and medium-sized geysers remained only in photographs, and I had to be the last one to take them.

An incredibly dramatic story, but your photographs are more likely not from a chronicler photographer, but from an illustrator of children's fairy tales. Why do you photograph only nature and its inhabitants, and if a person appears in the frame, then he is certainly related to the listed characters?
Photography is not an end in itself for me. First of all, it is a powerful tool in the main cause of my life - wildlife conservation. It is wild, which is why the main and only theme of my work is Russian specially protected natural areas: nature reserves, national parks, sanctuaries.
There are 101 state reserves, 40 national parks and thousands of wildlife sanctuaries in Russia. I am closely integrated into this life, worked in all positions from the director of the reserve to an ordinary nature conservation inspector, and spent more than half of my life directly in the wild. Therefore, a person gets into my frame when he comes into contact with pristine nature, for example, if he works to preserve a reserve or save rare species of animals or plants. It could also be a poacher or a tourist. And outside of this context, I only photograph family and friends for a home album.

- At what moments is nature especially grateful to the lens?
- I observe the most interesting moments at the boundaries of the states of nature. At the junction of night and morning. At the change of season. When the weather changes.
For example, twilight, morning or evening, is my favorite time of day. This is not only a wonderful light, it is the time of greatest animal activity.
It used to be difficult to shoot at dusk. After the appearance of the Nikon D3, it was like... new stage in creativity. This camera produces excellent images at extreme sensitivity levels. Combined with my two favorites fast lenses AF-S NIKKOR 50mm 1:1.4G and AF-S NIKKOR 300mm 1:2.8G ED manage to take pictures that were completely impossible before.

- By the way, do you have any technical or other tricks to give character to a photograph?
- There is only one secret - to spend as much time as possible next to the subject of photography, to know as much as possible about them - then you manage to see more than others.
Endure separation from family, bad weather, and sometimes hunger. This is only possible when you have emotions, an attitude towards what you are filming, when you are motivated.

People preen themselves before being photographed and generally act as if a loved one is looking at them. Have you tried to film mating seasons in animals? How much of their coquetry does the photograph convey?
- The mating season in nature is the peak of life! Flowers in plants, mating games of animals. Nature does not skimp on reproduction and you can capture the most emotional moments. I photographed the love games of storks, cranes, waders, foxes, bears and was always surprised how similar they are to people in their manifestations of passion!

- I know that you have come up with your own know-how for photographing animals.
- I don’t go to filming for one or two days. My approach is to live in a forest cabin (or tent) for several weeks, and sometimes months. Become part of the landscape. I lived in the Bryansk forest on a forest cordon for 10 years, and now I live in the abandoned village of Chukhrai, where, besides my family, there are 6 residents left. During the first days, all living things run away from the stranger. Gradually the animals stop being afraid of you. I once spent five months in a hut on the shores of the Pacific Ocean in the Kronotsky Nature Reserve. Settled in in October. For the first two weeks I saw animals only at a great distance. Local foxes and bears were the first to stop being afraid of me, then wolverines and sables. There were opportunities to film their interactions with each other.

In the mornings I would often fry bacon and eggs or bake pancakes. This smell was narcotic for all the foxes in the area. They came close to the snow-covered kitchen window and lustfully inhaled the fragrant streams. There were fights over the right to stand at the window and smell. You could shoot directly from the window.
But many animal species do not trust humans. Such people have to be removed from stealth. This is a special topic.

- What is her special character?
- For many thousands of years, the human hunter has been pursuing wild animals in order to take their lives. And now the fear of four-legged people of two-legged people lives on an instinctive level. Animals in which the instinct of fear did not develop disappeared from the face of the planet.
Any photographer starting to photograph wild animals faces many difficulties and disappointments. Any hare, duck or sandpiper tries not to let a person get closer than the distance of a gun shot, that is, 70 - 100 meters. The animals appear too small in the photo, most often running away in mortal fear.

To photograph the same duck or hare in full frame, even with a long lens, you need to be three to five meters away from it. Unreal? If it were not real, there would not be many wonderful photographs showing the most intimate moments in the lives of animals. A well-designed hide is what can help you get closer to wary animals and birds at any distance.

- What could serve as such a hiding place?
- Anything that can hide a person’s figure and its movements can serve as a concealment: a small tent, a hut, a hole, a large hollow, a blockage of trees, even a pile of brushwood - it all depends on the specific situation.
Skradok can be made from any local material familiar to animals: straw, hay, grass, branches, old boards. An excellent hiding place can be a hole dug in hard ground and lined around the perimeter with a turf parapet and covered on top with any available material: boards, tarpaulins, branches. IN winter time in places with a lot of snow, it is good to build snow shelters, like an Eskimo igloo. Sometimes it is enough to dig a hole in deep snow and cover it with an arch of snow plates. From such shelters I photographed Steller's sea eagles and swans, foxes and wolverines in Kamchatka. This is my favorite type of stealth. Snow bricks and plates have excellent heat and sound insulation. I had to make hides from ice cut with a chainsaw (for shooting otters), but they are not as convenient as from snow.

If you show your imagination, you can turn many familiar things into hidden items. For example, a car. Animals quickly get used to being motionless standing car. Several years ago I equipped a comfortable hide on wheels - a military van based on a GAZ-66 all-terrain vehicle. From this hide I filmed the fishing of black storks in the Bryansk region, bison and deer in the Oryol Polesie national park, wary saigas and demoiselle cranes and birds of prey in the steppes of Kalmykia. There was even a refrigerator in this hideaway, where a fair supply of beer and more was stored.

Even my big house in the Bryansk village of Chukhrai is hidden. Several years ago, I dragged a gnarled oak tree trunk from the cutting area, dug it next to the house and installed a nesting platform for white storks on it. Beautiful birds built a large nest on it. Now I can shoot birds at very close range from the attic of my house without disturbing them in any way.
But the best-quality hide will remain useless if you don’t have the patience to sit in it motionless for long hours, sometimes for days.

- I think the equipment is also part of your secrets.
- With the equipment, I went through the typical path of people of my generation: Smena-8M, Zenit-E. During my student years, I managed to buy a Photosniper - who remembers - with a 300mm Tair-3 lens. In the early eighties, I worked as a forester with a salary of 75 rubles, and in order to buy my first Nikon, I had to start breeding bulls. Currently I have Nikon D3 and Nikon D300 in my arsenal. I've never had as much freedom as I do with these cameras that can handle the lifestyle I lead. They bear marks not only from abrasions, falls, but even from bites from curious bear cubs.

08/01/2016 Texts / Interview

​Igor Shpilenok: “I live in bearish places”

Interviewed Alena Bondareva

Photos: Igor Shpilenok / shpilenok.livejournal.com

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Nanny for bears or about documentary filming

- Igor, in 2016 the film “Bears of Kamchatka. Beginning of life". Is this your first experience with a video camera? Are you no longer interested in photography?

The film has been a long-standing dream. I have been living for more than ten years in the most bearish places in Russia, and perhaps in the world. I have days when I meet more than 100 bears in a day. In Kamchatka there are camping huts where 30-40 individuals can be seen from the roof at the same time. Naturally, I have accumulated a lot of impressions. You realize how interesting and intelligent this animal is, how behaviorally similar it is to a human. And you understand why the bear became a deity for many primitive peoples.

But before, I talked about bears with the help of photography; I was always afraid of cinema, because film is a collective art, where you need to unite the interests of many people, and in the places where I work, it’s better, of course, to be alone. But some time ago I realized that not everything can be conveyed with photography. And sooner or later you have to take on the film. And, I’ll tell you, I had to start almost from scratch, because in Russia we practically don’t make animal documentary films. I saw how Western teams do this when they come to Kamchatka to make films about our bears. I know that this is a big and serious, and most importantly, expensive job. But nevertheless, I decided to unite interested people (there were many of them). And last spring we started filming. I drove to the very south of Kamchatka, settled in a hut on the shore of Lake Kambalnoye a month before the bears begin to emerge from their dens. I found about 10 dens from which newly born cubs emerged. And among these 10, there are only two where the bears agreed to be followed by people with cameras.

Photo: Igor Shpilenok / shpilenok.livejournal.com

- How do you generally photograph wild animals? Are you disguised? Are you tracking?

When you live among bears for years, you begin to feel them, you know a lot about them. Naturally, if you just come to Kamchatka for a month, when mother bears come out of their dens, without knowing the area, you can walk around the area for years and not find a single den. But I have good preparation. The fact is that Kamchatka animals do not have such fear of people as, for example, in Siberia. The year before last I drove all over Russia, including through Siberia by car, and did not see a single bear near the road, and those that I came across in the distance ran away.

- This is not surprising; they are still hunted in Siberia.

Yes, a bear is an enviable hunting trophy. And Siberian people are built this way, I mean the residents rural areas If you are going somewhere in a UAZ or a motor boat, be sure to take a carbine. Therefore, the animals in those places are “whipped” and afraid of humans. In Kamchatka the situation is different, there is a large Kronotsky Nature Reserve and the South Kamchatka Nature Reserve, where effective protection has been established. Therefore, almost all bear filming that is done in Russia takes place there. But even in Kamchatka, not every bear will agree to be filmed. Only 9-10% of the bear population knows that humans are not dangerous. These bears even try to benefit from their proximity to people.

Photo: Igor Shpilenok / shpilenok.livejournal.com

For example, when I filmed in one place for a long time (and I go on an expedition for at least six months), there were cases when animals simply got used to me. This opens great opportunities for photographing intimate moments that a stranger who came to Kamchatka for two or three days would never take.

The same with bears, after 10 years of working in the Kronotsky Nature Reserve and the South Kamchatka Nature Reserve, many of them became my acquaintances and even neighbors. I understand how they will behave. And they know that neither I nor the people who came with me are dangerous. I even had cases when she-bears made me their nanny. Bears' family structure is different from that of humans. The male is only the carrier of the gene pool, he meets with the female for conception, and then family matters not interested. Moreover, on occasion, it can eat a bear cub. The larger the male, the more often he is a cannibal. That is, it eats individuals of its own species and often its own children. And that’s why females with small cubs are afraid of males. And old bears, especially those who have negative experience in relationships with humans, avoid people. And the females know this. That’s why bear cubs are brought to me every year. After all, I sit with a camera and a tripod in one place for a week or two. They are used to the fact that I am part of the landscape for them and do not offend anyone. They leave the cubs near me, and they themselves go 100–200 meters away to fish. This is how a special relationship develops with bears. Actually, I do photography, and now also cinema, only because I see a lot of things that I can’t keep to myself, I definitely want to talk about them.

- Are the bears that get used to you engaged in robbery?

This problem is related to bear conservation. People sometimes behave shortsightedly. They teach wild animals to become dependent. And in Kamchatka, the most dangerous killer bears are those that enter dachas and cities, attracted by waste and the smells of garbage dumps. You cannot feed wild animals. A fed bear is always an animal whose fate ends with shooting. Because, once he has tasted human food, he very quickly realizes that it is easy prey, and will definitely come for more. Bear dumping is a problem for the Kamchatka capital and villages. Almost every fish farm has its own landfill. People do not drown waste in water or dispose of it. Therefore, sometimes in Kamchatka several dozen to hundreds of bears are shot per year. But in the same Kronotsky Nature Reserve there are cordons where inspectors live who do not leave food waste where bears can get it. And therefore, animals have no conflicts with people on this basis.

- Do you live only in huts in nature reserves?

These are the cordons of the reserve. Living in Kamchatka in a tent is inconvenient. You've probably heard about the Japanese Michio Hoshino, who was killed by a bear.

A fake photo is circulating on the Internet. Supposedly the last shot of Michio Hoshino is of a bear tearing apart a tent. In fact, Michio died in the dead of night and there is no photograph of his death.

RA Help:

But a hut in Kamchatka is a big word. It's about about a small shed made of boards. There is no timber in Kamchatka, mostly crooked stone birches. And materials can only be delivered by helicopter. Construction here is insanely expensive. Therefore, the huts are very simple. But I feel pretty good in them. Although life here is difficult. Sometimes in the morning you want to make yourself coffee, you lift a bucket of water, and there is ice. Therefore, you first need to heat the hut, melt the ice, and only then make coffee.

In general, physically photographing wildlife is not an easy task. Often you have to endure hardships, including cold. In this sense, it is easier for animals. The bear crawls into the den and sleeps.

- When you shoot in winter, how many hours do you usually spend in the cold?

One day I wanted to photograph a wolverine, since we don’t have many good pictures of wolverines. I dug a snow cave and sat in it at a temperature of −15-20 degrees for four days. During these nights, my sleeping bag absorbed so much moisture that it stopped warming me, and I had to go into the hut to dry. Of course, to achieve the desired result, you have to sit in the cold for hours, and sometimes even days, sometimes even the equipment refuses to work.

Photo: Igor Shpilenok / shpilenok.livejournal.com

- I just wanted to ask how you solve this problem? Do you have a special technique?

I use professional Nikon cameras, which I use to photograph sports, people, and landscapes.

- What do you do so that the camera does not fail when low temperatures?

Photo: Igor Shpilenok / shpilenok.livejournal.com

Unfortunately, the camera can always fail; often the battery simply freezes. So what are you doing? You warm the camera on your chest. And it happens that you can’t cook food, the smoke from the fire or even the burner scares away the animals. That's why you usually put the grains in plastic bag, fill it with water and place it on your chest at night. While you sleep, they will swell; in the morning, eat this porridge, “cooked” in your warmth. And with equipment, too, you store the batteries on your chest so that they do not cool down; You take the camera in your sleeping bag at night. There are other tricks too. The most important thing is that the camera remains dry, the frost is not so bad. And each next generation of cameras is more resistant to the external environment.

Shpilenok I. My Kamchatka neighbors. 370 days in the Kronotsky Nature Reserve. Photobook. - M.: Samokat, 2013. - 192 p.

- There are a lot of foxes in the book “My Kamchatka Neighbors”. But now you only talk about bears, are you no longer interested in foxes?

For the last two years I have been working in a reserve in the very south of Kamchatka and there really are fewer foxes there. The album “My Kamchatka Neighbors” describes life in the middle part of Kamchatka, the Kronotsky Nature Reserve. I don’t see many foxes these days, which is why I talk less about them. But in parallel with the film “Bears of Kamchatka. The beginning of life”, I want to make a book. So that people learn as much as possible about bears, their conservation, and how to safely share the same territory with them.

Photo: Igor Shpilenok / shpilenok.livejournal.com

- How do you feel about Charles Darwin and James Herriot?

How can you treat bright people? Without them, our life would be boring. In general, I am often asked which photographers influenced me. But, I will tell you that I was shaped by nature writers (and there were no photo books in the places where I grew up). Among foreign authors - these are Harriot, Darrell. Among the Russians are Konstantin Paustovsky and Mikhail Prishvin. And also Vasily Mikhailovich Peskov, photographer, journalist, who wrote about nature in Komsomolskaya Pravda for half a century. And, of course, I was very lucky - I know Peskov personally. And we talked a lot about wildlife and its conservation.

About animal photographers and wildlife documentary photography

- Why do you think such animalistic documentary films have not emerged in Russia as in the West?

There are several reasons. The main thing is that we do not have a market. There are some big fanatics of video filming wild animals, but these people are not in demand in today's conditions; almost everyone has a second profession that allows them to earn money. I know many of them personally. Our TV channels show foreign films, perhaps because it is easier to purchase them than to organize and finance the filming themselves. Cinemas also don’t show documentaries about bears. But it is possible that the situation will soon change.

10-15 years ago we didn’t even have animal photography. But when they arrived digital technologies, and interest in wildlife began to rapidly develop, photography was revived in our country.

- Maybe you can name some names?

There are many Russian photographers whose names are well known in the West. These people regularly win the most prestigious international competitions. Take the same Sergei Gorshkov, who films bears in Kamchatka. He is a laureate of many British, French and German competitions and, in general, a very sought-after photographer. Now a new galaxy of young guys, 20-30 years old, are growing up, breaking into animal photography.

Today the situation as a whole is changing for the better. Magazines have become more willing to take such photographs. Plus, there's the Internet, which makes it very easy to showcase your work. But it’s easier for photographers. Photography is an individual art; very rarely projects are shot in teams. And photographic equipment is much cheaper. There is no need to bring a team to Kamchatka: a sound engineer, an assistant, and so on. But there is less and less wildlife today. People can only see it on computer monitors, TV screens, and in books. She is getting further and further away from us. And the craving for it grows. And now there are quite objective prerequisites for documentary animal cinema to be revived in Russia.

Photo: Igor Shpilenok / shpilenok.livejournal.com

- Are there any photographers you look up to, or at least those whose work you follow with interest?

There are photographers whose work I admire. And I'm familiar with them. For example, French

“My goal is to show the beauty of the wild nature of Russian nature reserves and national parks and awaken people’s desire to preserve these places.” “I wish to convey the beauty of wild nature in Russia’s protected areas to people around the world and evoke in them the desire to conserve those areas." (Igor Shpilenok)

Igor Shpilenok was born on February 28, 1960, in the Trubchevsky district of the Bryansk region. He graduated from the Bryansk Pedagogical Institute, worked as a teacher in a school in the forest village of Novenkoe, then settled with his wife and two small sons in an abandoned forest cordon near the Nerussa River. He began to write (his favorite style of those years was letters to friends or diary entries).

I got serious about photographing animals and studied the behavior of “Red Book” black storks. With his active participation, the Bryansk Forest nature reserve was created, and Igor Shpilenok became the first director of this reserve.

Photographs wildlife (landscape photography) and wild animals. Author of photo books about wildlife. Member of the International League of Conservation Photographers.

In 2006 and 2009, Igor Shpilenok won the “Urban and Garden Wildlife” category of the BBC “Wildlife Photographer of the Year” competition. Winner of the photo competition Golden turtle"in the nomination "Harmony of Life" in 2006 for the photograph "Dawn on the Kronotskaya River"

Dawn on the Kronotskaya River

He says about himself: “The idea to start taking photographs came to me at the age of 13, when, in my wanderings through the spring Bryansk forest, I discovered an amazing clearing with hundreds of snowdrops. It seemed unfair to me that only I, out of several billion people living on earth, see this beauty.

...For two weeks I tried to persuade my grandmother to buy me a camera, but when I returned to the clearing with a brand new camera, I realized that I was too late. Tall summer grass grew in place of the flowers. For a whole year I waited for the next spring and studied photography techniques, spending on it all the material resources available to me. On April 25, 1974, I returned to the clearing and couldn’t believe my eyes. In place of clumps of snowdrops, the soil turned over by tractor tracks turned black, and stacks of freshly cut wood were piled up...

...This was one of the most powerful shocks of adolescence that determined my future life. Since then, the camera has been my strongest ally in the work to save the Bryansk Forest - the place where I was born, live and hope to die. With the help of photography (by publishing articles in newspapers and magazines, organizing photo exhibitions), I found allies, with whom I achieved the organization of the Bryansk Forest Nature Reserve and became its first director, working in this position for ten years...

...During this time, my colleagues and I managed to create 12 more protected natural areas in the Bryansk Forest, where logging, land reclamation and other destructive types of economic activity are prohibited. Now almost 20 percent of the Bryansk Forest has been withdrawn from economic use, and its central part has been declared an international biosphere reserve under the auspices of UNESCO. Years have healed the wounds inflicted by people on the Bryansk Forest, and hundreds of snowdrops are blooming in my clearing again—nothing threatens them now.

In the second half of my life, when I was pretty tired of the bureaucratic side managerial work, I decided to devote myself completely to photography. Now I have a dream job: to bring to people the beauty of wild nature, to awaken them to environmental initiatives, while being in the thick of environmental events myself. I dreamed that the geography of my photo expeditions would expand to the entire protected Russia.

And so it was until I discovered the Kronotsky Nature Reserve in Kamchatka and fell in love with this harsh land. Now I have a second homeland, and I am torn between the Bryansk Forest and Kamchatka, between which a country the size of nine time zones fits!

I am the happy father of four sons: Tikhon, Peter, Andrey and Makar. Tikhon and Petya continue the work of my life with their routes. The two youngest are still dreaming about it. I'm a happy husband. My wife Laura and I are united not only by love, but also by common life values. She was born and raised in the USA, but lives in Russia eleven months a year.

Like me, she has been involved in nature conservation all her adult life. In addition, she manages to write her books and translate mine. I owe all my victories at international and Russian photo competitions to Laura: she is the one who selects and sends the pictures.”

Igor Shpilenok currently lives in the village of Chukhrai, which is located in the Bryansk Forest nature reserve, sometimes leaving his native places, which he talks about in his blog on LiveJournal, about the places where he is located. and also talks in detail about the nature of the animals he photographs. In 2012, Igor’s blog received the “Rynda of the Year” award in the “Image of the Year” category.

The photo history of Igor Shpilenok began in adolescence with, surprisingly, a burning resentment towards the surrounding injustice. In 1973, when he was 13 years old, in the forest in his native Bryansk region, he saw a field of snowdrops that struck him with its beauty. And Igor wanted to show this unearthly beauty to other people so much that he begged his grandmother for a camera for two weeks. And when he returned to his original place, he was saddened to see only summer grass.

I had to wait a whole year. And so, when the next spring, with a sinking heart, he came to the same place, he was dumbfounded.

Instead of the familiar landscape and such long-awaited snowdrops, fresh traces of a caterpillar tractor ran across the entire clearing, and felled trees lay around. The emotions he experienced then predetermined his entire future life.

Now Igor is one of the best Russian animal photographers and a popularizer of the idea of ​​wildlife conservation, actively involved in the creation and functioning of nature reserves.

The first, back in 1987, was Bryansk Forest, then there were others. Today Igor is torn between his beloved Bryansk forests and the Kronotsky Nature Reserve in Kamchatka, where the ecosystem has been preserved almost in its original state, and animals do not at all consider humans the king of nature.

His photographs are amazing. This is a contact with a completely different world, where there is not a single supermarket for hundreds of kilometers around.

In his photographs, animals, as a rule, live their lives. Hunting, mating games, training the young - all this happens in front of Igor’s lens.

How does he manage to achieve such a degree of involvement in the ordinary life of wild animals?

It’s simple: you need to become a familiar and safe element of the world around them.

He himself talks about it this way: “Once I spent five months in a hut on the shores of the Pacific Ocean in the Kronotsky Nature Reserve. Settled in in October.

For two weeks I saw animals only at a great distance. Local foxes and bears were the first to stop being afraid of me, then wolverines and sables. It became possible to film their interactions with each other.”

But, of course, to photograph the most cautious animals you have to use carefully prepared concealments and long-focus lenses.

By the way, Igor has exclusively preferred Nikon for many years and has even infected his entire family with this preference, right down to his young sons, who are actively following in their father’s footsteps.

The main thing for Igor is not just to take a beautiful shot that will make hereditary townspeople groan at the exhibition.

“Photography for me is not an end in itself. First of all, it is a powerful tool in the main cause of my life - wildlife conservation. It’s wild, which is why the main and only theme of my work is Russian specially protected natural areas: nature reserves, national parks, sanctuaries.”

But still, Igor Shpilenok’s photographs are professionally and soulfully taken photographs that can not only arouse the momentary interest of a bored viewer, but touch the soul.

After all, in each of us, although somewhere very deep, sits primitive, with his reverence for wild nature. And sometimes he still raises his voice.