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 Four years in the making, Planet Earth is the first natural history series to be filmed completely in high definition.A group of experienced wildlife cameramen have spent the past fours years in a variety of remote locations capturing images never been seen before on camera.
Experienced long-lenser freelance cameraman Mark Smith, a Scot from Argyll, is working on five shoots for the series and it is the first time he has shot in hi-def. “I was unsure of the durability of a hi-def camera as we were filming in extreme conditions of high humidity and sub-zero temperatures. But they proved to be very reliable,” says Smith of the HD Panasonic VariCam he was using. A shoot in Pakistan proved to be an unexpected success. Smith went there on a six week trip to film the markhaur, a mountain goat, but was also hoping to capture on film a rare glimpse of a snow leopard. Three weeks into filming a local guide reported a snow leopard sighting ten miles from their location. “The HD camera had a black and white view finder which is not the easiest for filming a snow leopard in the middle of a blizzard,” Smith comments. Still, despite this, he managed to capture the first close-up images of the snow leopard in the wild using a long lense as well as footage of mother and cub. Previous snow leopard footage was captured using remote cameras, Desperate to capture more of the rare images, Smith risked being trapped on the mountain by bad weather. “We were filming the very last hour of the very last day but managed to get the first images on film of the snow leopard hunting. Luckily the weather cleared and we were able to get a flight out a few days later,” he adds. Planet Earth airs from Sunday at 9.00 pm on BBC1.
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