Picture of layout of most of the elephant camera trap equipment. It includes the armored cases, the strobes & armor, ratchet straps & associated mounting hardware, batteries and motion sensors.

How do you photograph a wild elephant? With 1,100 pounds of gear.

For an assignment covering forest elephants in Gabon, National Geographic’s photo engineer had to think big.

It was an elephantine task to design camera traps for one of the world’s largest animals. The roughly 1,100 pounds of equipment shipped into the field included armored cases, wireless strobes, straps, mounts, batteries, and sensors.
Composite of two images

How do you protect a delicate camera while photographing a powerful yet sometimes skittish animal? That was the dilemma faced by Jasper Doest last year when he was in Gabon to cover the effects of climate change on forest elephants. (One of the resulting images also appears in our 2022 Pictures of the Year story.) He needed a way to capture the foraging pachyderms without frightening them away from their food source. For help, Doest turned to National Geographic photo engineer Tom O’Brien, who designs and builds solutions for all kinds of field assignment hurdles. In this case, that meant developing an extraordinarily strong camera trap that wouldn’t

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