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Wildlife DP Steve Lumpkin on the road and looking for speed

For more than a decade, Steve Lumpkin has been traveling to the Republic of Botswana to capture and celebrate the country’s diverse and protected wildlife population. As a cinematographer and still photographer, Under Prairies Skies Photography‘s Lumpkin will spend a total of 65 days this year filming in the bush for his current project, Endless Treasures of Botswana.

Steve Lumpkin

It’s a labor of love that comes through in his stunning photographs, whether they depict a proud and healthy lioness washed with early-morning sunlight, an indolent leopard draped over a tree branch or a herd of elephants traversing a brilliant green meadow. The big cats hold a special place in Lumpkin’s heart, and documenting Botswana’s largest pride of lions is central to the project’s mission.

“Our team stands witness to the greatest conservation of the natural world on the planet. Botswana has the will and the courage to protect all things wild,” he explains. “I wanted to fund a not-for-profit effort to create both still images and films that would showcase The Republic of Botswana’s success in protecting these vulnerable species. In return, the government granted me a two-year filming permit to bring back emotional, true tales from the bush.”

Lumpkin recently graduated to shooting 4K video in the bush in Apple ProRes Raw, using a Sony FS5 camera and an Atomos Inferno recorder. He brings the raw footage back to his US studio for post, working in Apple Final Cut Pro on an iMac 5K and employing a variety of tools, including Color Grading Central and Neat Video.

Leopard

Until recently, Lumpkin was hitting a performance snag when transferring files from his QNAP TBS 882T NAS storage system to his iMac Pro. “I was only getting read times of about 100 Mb/sec from Thunderbolt, so editing 4K footage was painful,” he says. “At the time, I was transitioning to ProRes RAW, and I knew I needed a big performance kick.”

On the recommendation of Bob Zelin, video engineering consultant and owner of Rescue 1, Lumpkin installed Sonnet’s Solo10G Thunderbolt 3 adapter. The Solo10G uses the 10GbE standard to connect computers via Ethernet cables to high-speed infrastructure and storage systems. “Instantly, I jumped to a transfer rate of more than 880MB per second, a nearly tenfold throughput increase,” he says. “The system just screams now – the Solo10G has accelerated every piece of my workflow, from ingest to 4K editing to rendering and output.”

“So many colleagues I know are struggling with this exact problem — they need to work with huge files and they’ve got these big storage arrays, but their Thunderbolt 2 or 3 connections alone just aren’t cutting it.”

With Lumpkin, everything comes down to the wildlife. He appreciates any tools that help streamline his ability to tell the story of the country and its tremendous success in protecting threatened species. “The work we’re doing on behalf of Botswana is really what it’s all about — in 10 or 15 years, that country might be the only place on the planet where some of these animals still exist.

“Botswana has the largest herd of elephants in Africa and the largest group of wild dogs, of which there are only about 6,000 left,” says Lumpkin. “Products like Sonnet’s Solo10G, Final Cut, the Sony FS5 camera and Atomos Inferno, among others, help our team celebrate Botswana’s recognition as the conservation leader of Africa.”


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