The Symbol – Final Photo Gallery and Videos!

 Posted by at 1:39 pm on September 14, 2012
Sep 142012
 

During the summer of 2012, we traveled to Ibiza and Formentera to photograph the Ibiza Wall Lizard and create the first-ever book about this amazing species. Our trip was funded by 290 generous donors, who contributed to our project through the crowd-sourced fundraising website Kickstarter.com. We spent four intense weeks visiting Ibiza, Formentera and about two dozen remote islands and taking tens of thousands of photographs.

Our expedition is over, we’ve reviewed our photographs and we’re thrilled with the results. We feel we’ve successfully captured the amazing diversity of this species’ color variation and behaviors. We’re confident that we have all the photos we need to put together a beautiful photographic book about this species’ natural history, evolution and conservation. We’ve put together a photo gallery with highlights from the expedition. To check out that gallery, click the thumbnail above or here.

We also produced one short film for each week were there about our adventures in the field. Those “Video Updates” are posted in chonological order below.

Video Update 1:

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Video Update 2:

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Video Update 3:

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Video Update 4:

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In addition to those four video updates from 2012, we produced two award-winning films in 2011 about this species’ color evolution and dietary adaptations. You can see those below:

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Over the next few months, we are going to make the final image selection for our book, design the layout, and complete the text. We should be ready to print in early 2013 and our book will be on the book shelves in the islands before next year’s tourist season!

Thank you Bill Burdette!

 Posted by at 6:14 am on September 14, 2012
Sep 142012
 

Neil and I spent summer 2012 in the Spanish Mediterranean photographing the Ibiza wall lizard for a book. We funded that project on a crowd-sourced fundraising platform called Kickstarter.com. Here’s how Kickstarter.com works: you propose a project and a minimum budget needed to complete the project. People check out your proposal on the Kickstarter website and can donate any amount to funding your project. If those donations add up to more than your minimum budget, you’re funded. If not, no one who pledged their support has to pay anything.

It’s hard to convince people that they should give you money to spend a summer in an island paradise. From the start, Neil and I knew that raising the money to fund our expedition to Spain would be tough. Incredibly, 290 generous individuals supported our project and helped us raise the $20,000 we needed to fund our expedition and, eventually, to print our book.

The success of our project depended on hundreds of small donations and a few big ones.  Every donation counted, but a few big ones were especially helpful. One person, William Burdette, was particularly generous, donating $1000 to two people he had never met. For those who donated to our project, you know that at every different level of monetary contribution, backers receive different incentives or “rewards” for their pledge. For our biggest donors, we promised to send them personalized thank-you videos from the field.

This video is dedicated to Bill Burdette. Thank you Bill, for contributing to the creation of the first-ever book about the Ibiza wall lizard and for helping us have the experience of a lifetime:

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