Nate Dappen

Day's Edge on the Radio

Posted by Nate Dappen at 5:31 am on December 4, 2012
Dec 042012

Nate, talking on-air. Click this image to listen to the interview.

A few weeks ago, Neil and I found out that we won the first ever Stay Thirsty Grant. The grant, funded by Dos XX will give us $25K to travel to Uganda to make a film about the disappearing glaciers on top of the Rwenzori Mountains. We’ve been hard at work preparing for this trip. It’s going to be a physical challenge to actually climb the mountains, and perhaps an even bigger challenge to get all of our film gear up there. So, we’re both training hard to get into shape and trying to get our hands on some specialized film equipment that will allow us to make an awesome film in such a remote place.

I recently had a live radio interview about the grant and the upcoming trip. Check it out!

Nathan Dappen Radio Interview Nov 29

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The Most Interesting Men on the Moon?

Posted by Nate Dappen at 12:00 pm on October 11, 2012
Oct 112012

The Rwenzori Mountains—also called the Mountains of the Moon—rest between Uganda’s Nile basin and the immense tropical jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo. With their peaks at 5,109m above sea level, the Rwenzori range is one of the rare tropical locations where glaciers occur. But not for long; climate change is altering every environment on the planet, and these ice-covered mountain tops are thawing fast. The glaciers may be gone in less than 20 years.

We need your help to tell the story of this vanishing world.  to help us win the Dos Equis Stay Thirty Grant – a $25,000 prize that will fund our expedition to Africa. You can vote once a day, every day, from today, October 9th until October 30th. Please vote for us, and share this link with as many people as you can via Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and carrier pigeon… This is an important story about climate change that needs to be told.

To vote for us, click on the above image to go the voting page. Once you put in your age, click the red “grant worthy” button in the bottom right corner of our submission: Men on the Moon: Journey to a Vanishing World.

Please vote! Please share! Then, please do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, until October 30th! Thank you for your support!

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The Symbol - Final Photo Gallery and Videos!

Posted by Nate Dappen 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:

from on .

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:

from on .

from on .

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!

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Thank you Bill Burdette!

Posted by Nate Dappen 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:

from on .

 

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“The Symbol” Video update #4: Our last days in the islands

Posted by Nate Dappen at 8:42 am on August 20, 2012
Aug 202012

Our expedition to photograph the Ibiza wall lizard in Spain is over. Neil and I are back in the states. We’re sorting through our images and selecting the very best ones for our book. Soon, we’ll finish the writing and begin the layout process. We can’t wait to show you what we’ll create!

from on .

Earlier in our expedition, we visited an island called Esparte, where we found a very dark blue, almost black population of lizards. This came as a big surprise to me, because not less than 10m away was the island of Espartar – home to a population of light teal-colored lizards. Lizards on these two islands are incredibly distinct. What accounts for this dramatic difference in color expression? No one knows.

The Ibiza Wall Lizard (Podarcis pityusensis frailensis [top] & kamerianus [bottem])
Even neighboring islands can have strikingly divergent lizard populations. Pictured are two typical male lizards from the islands of Esparte (top) and Espartar (bottom), which are separated by a channel less than 10 meters wide. Why their coloration differs so dramatically, no one yet knows.

As evolutionary biologists, it fascinates us that these lizard populations are so close, yet look so different. The situation on Esparte and Espartar exemplifies the mysteriously high color diversity among island populations of this species, which has some of the highest color diversity observed among all reptiles. Our understanding of how these uniquely color populations evolved to be so different is poor. Nonetheless, one of our goals on this expedition was to capture, photographically, the color diversity of these lizards among island populations. To do this, we used a technique called

“Meet Your Neighbours (MYN)” is a worldwide photographic initiative created by Niall Benvie and Clay Bolt. The MYN photography style is to photograph organisms on a plain white background. This approach removes the subject from its environment and allows viewers to focus on the organisms details as an individual. I encourage you to check out the . It has some absolutely stunning images and is making a big splash in the conservation photography scene. For our purposes, we think that this photographic approach really allows us to demonstrate the color differences of these lizards from one island to the next.

Lizards photographed “Meet Your Neighbours” style.

On the last few days of our trip, we realized that we were missing an important image that we needed to complete our book. During the last month, we photographed lizards on the majority of small islands surrounding Ibiza and Formentera, but we still didn’t have a single photo of Ibiza wall lizards on the island of Ibiza! So, we spent the last day of our expedition photographing the Ibiza wall lizard on the island where it got its name.

An Ibiza wall lizard basking on a stone wall on the island of Ibiza.

Our work is far from done. We still have to select and edit the best images for our book. We also have to finish writing the text. Finally, we’ll need to layout the text and images for printing. Shortly, we’ll publish a master photo gallery with many imaged from our expedition. If you were one of our backers who donated $50 or more, you’ll be able to select one of these images to be printed and signed by Neil and I. We’ll keep you posted.

Thank you again to everyone who contributed to this project. We couldn’t have done it without you!

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The Symbol 7/21/2012: Photo Gallery 4

Posted by Nate Dappen at 5:20 am on July 21, 2012
Jul 212012

Click this image to check out our fourth photo gallery!

Our expedition to photograph the Ibiza Wall Lizard has come to an end! None of us can believe how quickly it flew by. We are sad to be leaving this place, but we feel confident that we’ve taken all the photos we need to put together a beautiful and engaging book about this incredible lizard species. Click here, or on the thumbnail image, to view a fourth photo gallery from our trip.

Since our last gallery, we’ve visited seven new island populations. The first was Isla Malvin Nord, which hosted brilliant green lizards with bright orange bellies.  Next we checked out the lizards on Dau Gran, a truck-sized rock off the cost of Ibiza Town. The population of lizards on Dau Gran are the result of intentional mixing; before the 20th century, there were no lizards on this tiny island. In 1930, the German biologist Eisentraut brought 20 green female lizards from Ibiza (Podarcis pityusensis pityusensis) and 8 black male lizards from Escull Vermell (Podarcis pityusensis maluquerorum) to this small rock to see what would happen if these populations mixed. Over the last 80 years, these two subspecies have interbred and produced an amazingly unique population of lizards that show clear characteristics from both original populations. Check out the photo gallery to see some images of this experimental population.

We left Formentera on Saturday the 14th. Over the next five days we visited populations in and around the west coast of Ibiza. The first island we visited during this trip was also the hardest island to reach. On Sunday the 15th, we set out to visit the majestic island of es Vedra. Es Vedra, an island off the southwest coast of Ibiza, is off-limits to the general public. It is an iconic location in the islands and has inspired legends for centuries. Many people say that es Vedra, which stands almost 400 meter out the sea, is the tip of the lost city of Atlantis. Others say it is the location where Odysseus was seduced by the Sirens. There are even legends, both recent and centuries old, that the island is a UFO landing site. There is something about the island that draws you in. From the moment we arrived in Ibiza and Formentera, we’ve wanted to visit this island.

A watch tower overlooks the islands of Vedranell (in the front) and es Vedra (the larger island).

We are producing a short film about our adventure to es Vedra, so I wont give away too many details. I will say this, though: our trip to Vedra was the most epic day of our expedition. To get there and back, we swam four miles, hiked for seven hours and managed to take some photos in between. We can’t wait to share our film about this trip, so stay tuned.

The next two days after es Vedra, the National Parks had a boat available to take us out to some new islands. During that time, we visited Espartar and Esparte – two islands that are separated from one another by less than 10 meters, yet have astonishingly divergent lizard populations. The last island we visited was Conillera, a large island near the Ibizan town of San Antonio, with a great view of all the western islands.

After over a month of photographing lizards on dozens of islands, we realized that we had forgotten something important – we didn’t have any photographs of the Ibiza Wall Lizard in Ibiza! And so, we spent the last day of our expedition capturing images of the Ibiza Wall Lizard on the island where they got their name.

While our photographic journey may be over, our work has just begun. We have countless photos that need editing and several videos about our expedition that we’ll to share with you over the next several weeks. As soon as these are ready, we’ll let you know!

To see our first three photo galleries go here:

Gallery 1

Gallery 2

Gallery 3

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The Symbol 7/17/2012: In search of The Symbol

Posted by Nate Dappen at 8:07 am on July 17, 2012
Jul 172012

Nate photographs a store in es Pujols that is actually called "The Simbol."

When our last day in Formentera arrived, we still had one important task ahead of us: we needed to capture the sargantanas not as living organisms in nature, but as the omnipresent cultural icon of the island. So we each packed a camera and we set off on bicycles to visit each of the major towns on the island.

Starting from Es Calo, where we were based for our last week in Formentera, we biked to the island’s capital, San Francisco, followed by La Savina, Es Pujols and finally San Ferran. In total, we biked about 27km and took over 700 photos of lizards as motifs on towels, shirts, jewelry and much, much more.

Before our project on the Ibiza Wall Lizard even started, I tried to convince Neil that the lizards showed up as a popular motif everywhere on the islands, and that because of the lizards’ status as the symbol of these islands, our book would have a market in Ibiza and Formentera. I’m what you might call a pathological exaggerator. As a result, Neil was a little skeptical about how prevalent the lizards would actually be as a popular icon. Our bike trip surprised us both. It was unbelievable how much lizard paraphernalia we found. We found t-shirts, sandals, belt buckles, earrings, key chains, shot glasses, and every other object imaginable, all adorned with images of lizards or made in the shape of lizards.

Despite the abundance of lizard-themed items, we didn’t find a single item with actual information about the lizards. With our expedition coming to an end, we look forward to adding our book to the list of lizard-themed items that people can buy on these islands – and hope the book will fill a conspicuous gap in the islands’ lizard offerings!

Six of the hundreds of lizard-themed items that we photographed last Friday.

Neil and Amanda on the road to photograph the symbol of these islands.

A giant lizard sculpture created by a local artist eats Amanda's head.

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The Symbol 7/14/2012: Video Update #2

Posted by Nate Dappen at 7:54 am on July 16, 2012
Jul 162012

from on .

About a week ago, our friend Joris van Alphen flew from Holland to visit us in Formentera. Together, we spent the last week intensively creating media. To say that Joris is a talented photographer is an understatement. This year, he received the National Geographic Emerging Nature Photographer Award, a new prize for “seriously talented photographers.” Last year, he also earned a , a prestigious grant award from the North American Nature Photography Association (this is where we met, in fact, as both Neil and I were given the same award). Last year, Joris visited me in Formentera and together we created the award-winning film “.”

Neil and I always joke with one another about the differences between our photographic styles – Neil is technical, precise and patient, and I’m, well… less patient. The fun thing about having Joris photographing alongside us is that he has a style that’s unique to us and we all really learn a lot when were working together.

We all get a lot of questions about our photography, so while Joris was here in Formentera, we decided to create a short film to answer some of those questions. We hope you enjoy it! And of course, use the comments section if you want to ask us anything else about our photography, our book project, or life in general!

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The Symbol - Photo Gallery 3

Posted by Nate Dappen at 1:52 pm on July 12, 2012
Jul 122012

Click this image to check out our third photo gallery!

Time is flying by here on the islands. None of us can believe that we only have one more week of our expedition to photograph the Ibiza Wall Lizard. We got back to Formentera from Ibiza on July 1st. Since then, we’ve photographed lizards on a handful of small islands. The natural reserve kindly boated us to Isla Negra Nord, Penjats, Malvin Nord and Dau Grand. We also waded out to the island of Espalmador. The lizards on each of these islands were all different colors. No matter how many uniquely colored lizards I see, its always a wonderful surprise to arrive on a small island and find a population of lizards that is totally different from any others that we’ve visited.

In addition to documenting some of the color diversity among islands, we made a serious attempt to photograph some of the hard-to-capture behaviors of these lizards. We still haven’t gotten all the images we want, but we’re happy with a lot the photos we’ve captured so far. To see a gallery with some of our favorite images from the last week and a half, click here or on the photo above. We hope you enjoy our photos!

In addition to taking pictures, we’ve been working hard to create another video updated. That should be done in another day or two. So stay tuned!

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The Symbol 7/6/12: We made the paper!

Posted by Nate Dappen at 12:00 pm on July 6, 2012
Jul 062012

Hi all! Good news. The local television channel aired a short special about our project today! We’ll share that with you as soon as they send us a copy. In addition a local newspaper, La Ultima Hora, printed an article about our book project yesterday and included a few of our images. The article is printed in Spanish, but its not very complicated. So for those of you with limited Spanish skills, I think you can still get the gist of whats being said. Check it out below!

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