Wildlife photographers today, amateurs like me and professionals, don’t know how easy we have it – well, maybe not easy because wildlife photography is a demanding discipline, but certainly much easier than George Shiras III and his fellow pioneers of the art had it. I have long been impressed at the large format cameras that early landscape photographers had to carry around along with wet plates and all of that paraphernalia, but I never thought about the challenges early wildlife photographers must have faced. Their subjects would not be still like landscapes. How, in the beginning, did they get wildlife shots?

James McCommons’ answer to that question is this biography of George Shiras III. Shiras, born in Pittsburgh to a wealthy and influential family in 1859, became an avid outdoorsman and hunter at an early age. He was 11 when he and his brother ventured to Michigan’s wild Upper Peninsula on a hunting, fishing, and camping trip. The Shiras men were avid “sportsmen,” as well-to-do outdoorsmen were called in those days, and George III caught the bug. His family made the Upper Peninsula their summer home and established a “camp” on Whitefish Lake where the young George had many youthful adventures that McCommons describes in some detail.

George III was “a city boy, educated by tutors, prep schools, and elite colleges in the company of other bluebloods” and throughout his long life lived comfortably among the wealthy and powerful. He graduated from Cornell, earned a law degree from Yale as was the family tradition, practiced law, and served one term in Congress. A rare politician, he said he would term limit himself to a single congressional term and kept his word.

From the age of 11 until his death in 1942, George III shuttled between comfortable urban life and the wilds, though in the wilds he was usually accompanied by professional guides as was the custom for “sportsmen” of the time. McCommons describes many of George III’s outdoor “shooting” adventures, both with firearms and especially with cameras, shining a light on a bygone era of privileged outdoorsmen.

One accepted hunting practice in the 1880s by both sport and market hunters was jacklighting deer. In the dark of night, the bright light of a lantern would reveal and mesmerize deer, which were then easily dispatched. In the mid-1880s, Shiras took up the hobby of photography and in 1886 took to camp at Whitefish Lake a five-by-seven landscape camera with a single lens and slow film plate, which required the photographer to open and close the lens by hand. McCommons describes this instrument with understatement as “a simple but clumsy mechanism.” Shiras mounted the camera on the front of a boat and attempted unsuccessfully that first year to sneak up on deer and capture their image.

He upgraded his equipment in 1887 to a camera with a shutter, but the Schmid Detective Camera he used had a short focal length and he couldn’t get close enough to get a good shot.

"A camera hunter had to get close,” he realized, so he experimented with various lines to the shutter that he could trip from a blind which, he said, was tedious but ultimately successful.

Eventually, in 1891, he came up with what he called the “camera set” or “camera trap.” This involved running a black silk thread between a camera and an anchor like a tree, and a “passing animal could take its own picture.” Still, natural light had its limitations, so he came up with the idea of jacklighting deer to photograph them. Eventually he discovered a flashlight apparatus designed for lighting interior spaces.

“It consisted of a candelabra of alcohol lamps in which the operator squeezed a pneumatic rubber ball or blew through a tube to send a stream of magnesium power over the open flames of the alcohol lamps to create instant, complete ignition.” He tried this and nearly blew himself up.

Undaunted, Shiras continued to experiment and finally, in 1893, he found a way to capture an image that posed less threat of bodily harm, a device he called a “pistol flashlight.”

Success for Shiras the nighttime photographer came that summer not far from Old Jack’s Landing, where the Shiras boys had first shot deer while fire hunting. The coincidence was not lost on the photographer. Hammer [the guide] navigated the boat up on a yearling buck standing in the water, and Shiras leaned forward in the bow and fired the camera and flashlight pistol on synchronicity.

He had not learned to close one eye before setting off the explosion of light; several seconds passed before the men could see. They heard the buck bolting away through the woods. Back at camp developing the plate, Shiras watched the image of the deer emerge in the center of the plate, standing on a raft of floating duckweed. Against a deep, black background, the animal stood out sharply focused, beautifully illuminated.

He had his first outstanding wildlife photo, the result of years of experimentation, patience, and considerable risk to himself and his helpers. These stories confirm that we don’t know how good we have it in our wildlife photography these days, thanks in part of Shiras.

Adventures camera hunting are only part of the story of Shiras’ life. He was a hunter and as he began to “shoot” more adeptly as a camera hunter, as he saw the consequences of unregulated killing of wild game, and as he came to know prominent progressive conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt, Frank Chapman, George Bird Grinnell, and E. W. Nelson, he became a conservationist. He continued to shoot with firearms, but with restraint, and he counseled restraint by his fellow sportsmen.

Shiras’ most important contribution to conservation was his work for migratory birds. During his brief congressional career, he drafted legislation in 1904 titled A Bill to Protect Migratory Game Birds of the United States. It did not pass. It raised issues of states' rights and flew in the face of the profligate hunting ethics of the time.

Shiras had seen the demise of the passenger pigeon among other species, and he understood that piecemeal state-by-state regulation of migratory birds would not work. They needed national and even international protection. The Weeks-McLean Act, incorporating many of Shiras’ ideas, was approved by Congress in 1913, a treaty on migratory birds was signed with Canada in 1916, and a Supreme Court case settled the states' rights issues involved in 1920. McCommons writes that, “The bird law first envisioned by George Shiras proved to be an exceptionally powerful and effective federal environmental statute.”

Forest and Stream editorialized the treaty as “the biggest accomplishment in wildlife conservation ever achieved on the continent.” It was not hyperbole – then and now. With the exception of the Endangered Species Act passed by Congress decades later, no other law had a more profound effect on the conservation of wildlife.

This was the culmination of decades of effort by many progressive conservationists, and McCommons tells the story giving credit to all major players and detailing Shiras’ role in the campaign.

Camera Hunter describes change in the ethics of hunting and the perception and treatment of wildlife, especially game animals. We follow this evolution in Shiras, who remained a hunter throughout his life and subscribed to the “good animal-bad animal” sense of his time - deer good, wolf bad – but tempered his love of hunting with firearms by hunting with his cameras, and advocating this approach to outdoor enjoyment. He was involved in many conservation issues involving, among others, “nature fakers,” nature writers who were distorting descriptions of wildlife and its behaviors to the detriment of growing knowledge of natural history, creation of national parks, and advocacy of wildlife refuges. He is given credit for significantly boosting the National Geographic Society by publishing many of his wildlife photographs in its magazine and writing popular articles about his travels.

After his death in 1942 the Milwaukee Journal memorialized him as follows:

Conservation lost a good friend Thursday when the scholarly George Shiras III died at Marquette Michigan. Not so widely known to outdoorsmen of the last decades, Shiras nevertheless was big enough to deserve a place among most of the national conservation leaders of this generation. Shiras was of an old school and a good school….

In an era when fast camera lenses were not obtainable, when synchronized speed guns and easily handled flash bulbs were unknown, Shiras went into the woods of the Midwest and made flashlight pictures at night that have never been better.

The tall, scholarly Shiras was easily one of the greatest outdoorsmen of his time, fully qualified by his many contributions to wildlife knowledge to have a place in posterity with Burroughs, Muir and others.

This biography of a pioneer of photography and a dedicated outdoorsman and conservationist is an important contribution, especially to the history of progressive conservation. It fills in some gaps in my knowledge of the history of this phase of conservation.

Camera Hunter is appropriately illustrated with some of Shiras’ pathbreaking black and white photos, though I wish there were more of them. Shiras was not the writer the two Johns (Burroughs and Muir) were, nor a politician of the stature of his good friend Teddy Roosevelt. But he was a complex and dedicated man whose contributions need to be recognized, and James McCommons has done that for him and for us.