Working With Van Lawick's Techniques in Modern Practice
Hugo Eric Louis Van Lawick was a Tanzanian-born photographer and filmmaker who spent decades documenting wildlife in East Africa, particularly through his partnership with Jane Goodall and his extensive work in the Gombe Stream National Park area. His images, especially the black and white work, are known for a certain directness — you're not looking at posed animals in a controlled setting, you're looking at behavior that happened the way it happened, captured without artificial intervention. The gear he used throughout the 1960s and 70s was relatively simple by today's standards: Hasselblad and Leica bodies, prime lenses, mostly working with available light and whatever proximity he could manage with a long telephoto. That limitation is actually what gives the work its character. I spent years trying to replicate the look of that era's wildlife photography, and the honest answer is that it comes down to three things most people overlook: patience, mechanical cameras, and understanding that grain is not the enemy. When I first started shooting film in the style of these classic animal photographers, I kept trying to minimize grain and chase sharpness across the entire frame. What I learned the hard way is that the most striking images from that period often have softness in the corners, visible grain structure, and a slight motion blur that actually conveys movement better than any tack-sharp digital capture ever could. The specific workflow I settled on involves shooting medium format black and white film — Kodak Tri-X or Ilford HP5 are the obvious choices — loaded into a Hasselblad 500C or similar camera if you want to be historically accurate, though any mechanical SLR works. The real secret isn't the camera. It's the processing. I developed Tri-X at push settings one stop in Rodinal at 20 degrees Celsius for about eleven minutes with continuous agitation for the first thirty seconds, then every minute after that. That gives you the contrast curve those vintage photographs are known for without turning everything into mud. The silver halide crystals break down differently depending on your development time and temperature, and pushing film like this emphasizes the mid-tone separation that makes primate faces and large mammal coats read with such clarity.
One thing nobody tells you about shooting wildlife in black and white is how much the monochrome medium simplifies chaotic backgrounds. Color photographs from Gombe often get cluttered with green foliage and red soil competing for attention. Black and white strips that away immediately. I found this out practically when I was tracking a group of baboons near a waterhole with extremely busy vegetation behind them. In color, the image was a mess. Switched to monochrome and the subjects popped out naturally. You don't need a wider aperture or longer lens to isolate your subject. The lack of color information does the separating for you. Lighting is where most people fail, regardless of whether they're working with film or digital. Van Lawick's photographs almost never feature harsh midday sun. He understood that diffuse light over open water or through cloud cover produces the kind of even illumination that translates beautifully to grayscale. I've lost count of the hours I've wasted chasing good light in savanna environments during the golden hour only to end up with blown highlights and crushed shadows that look terrible when stripped of color. The workaround I use now is straightforward: I shoot between ten in the morning and three in the afternoon when the sky is overcast, or I position myself so that the animal is in open shade while the background catches whatever scattered light is available. It eliminates dramatic shadows but it also eliminates the high-contrast problems that ruin black and white conversions. Another practical detail involves the actual printing process if you want to get close to the original aesthetic. When I started doing darkroom work, I was spending roughly forty-five minutes per print on standard fiber-based paper using a contact printer and an enlarger with a warm-toned fixer. The trick is using a grade 3 or 4 filter on your enlarger to control contrast, and dodging the highlight areas of primates and large cats for about two to three seconds during the exposure. These animals have lighter fur around the face and chest, and if you don't dodge them, those areas turn into featureless white blobs in the final print. I learned this after burning through three rolls of test strips trying to get a gorilla portrait that actually showed facial expression instead of a ghost shape.
The limitations of this approach are real and worth being honest about. Shooting on film in these conditions means you're working with maybe twelve to twenty-four exposures per roll depending on the format. You cannot review your shots immediately. You cannot adjust ISO on the fly. Weather in field conditions will degrade unprocessed film if you're not careful about humidity and heat. I've had two rolls of Tri-X fogged in the heat of a Tanzanian field station where temperatures regularly exceeded thirty-five degrees Celsius, and the resulting negatives were completely unusable for any serious work. The workaround is basic but essential: store your exposed film in a sealed bag with desiccant packs inside a insulated container, and get it to a lab or refrigerator within forty-eight hours of the last exposure. Digital practitioners who want to achieve a similar result can approximate the look through careful post-processing, but there's a ceiling to how convincing it becomes. The chemical structure of silver gelatin prints has a tonal range that digital sensors, no matter how expensive, simply cannot reproduce in the same way. What you're really chasing with digital is the aesthetic impression rather than the actual physical quality. I recommend shooting in RAW and converting through a dedicated film simulation profile like VSCO or Darktable's Agfa print profiles, then applying a subtle grain structure at around fifteen percent opacity. But the original work stands on its own merit because it was created under circumstances that required the photographer to be present in a way that no amount of post-processing can simulate. If you're starting out with this approach, the most realistic path is to commit to shooting one complete roll before reviewing a single frame. That discipline forces you to slow down, observe your subject more carefully, and understand the light before you commit to an exposure. It takes about three weeks of consistent practice before the habit sticks. After that, the mechanical process becomes second nature and you start noticing patterns in animal behavior that directly affect your composition — when a primate turns its head, when wind moves through foliage in a predictable direction, when the light shifts enough to change the entire mood of a scene. These are the moments Van Lawick's photographs capture without appearing to do anything deliberate at all.
Get the Full Details
You can find extensive archives of his work through the Jane Goodall Institute's publication materials and various museum collections holding Gombe expedition photography. The photographic prints themselves are sometimes available through specialized wildlife art dealers, though prices run steep for original contact sheets. Most of the accessible material is reproduction quality, which is fine for study purposes if you're primarily interested in understanding the compositional decisions rather than the physical qualities of the original medium.
