ZOOF 02/2020

Ralph Lear, who grew up in Oregon, came to Germany in 1975 as a young man with the U.S. Army. He stayed and has been living in Frankfurt for decades—his American-Hessian accent is quite noticeable. Here, his family and his job in the IT sector long ensured that he put his great childhood and youth hobby on the back burner: he had discovered photography early on.

However, since he's been in pre-retirement, he has turned back to it. He's active in various photography groups, meeting weekly and taking photo trips into nature, because landscape shots are what Ralph Lear loves to do most. Landscapes and "wildlife." He photographs wild animals at the Opel Zoo, in the Alte Fasanerie near Hanau, and especially at the Frankfurt Zoo. The challenge, he finds, is that "since I want to bring out the beauty of the animals, you shouldn't notice that the picture was taken in a zoo."

He reduces what's visible to the essentials: the animal. He mostly takes portrait or detail shots and blurs backgrounds, darkens them, or obscures them. To share his experience, he published the English-language book "Zoo Photography" a few years ago. His central tip: Before pressing the shutter, you should clarify the entire setting: What is the background like? What color and pattern does the animal have? Where is the light coming from? And when everything is just right, the result is pictures that look as if they weren't taken in Hessian zoos, but in the South American Andes, the African savanna, or elsewhere in true "wildlife."