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"Seeing the wildlife of the Galapagos at first hand, I knew I wanted to be a wildlife photographer."
I first became aware of photography around the time I entered elementary school. My father was a photographer, so there were always camera books and magazines lying around the house. They fascinated me, but I found myself drawn to the photos rather than the cameras themselves. I was particularly fond of artistic photos like the works of Edward Weston and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Despite the fact that my father was a wildlife photographer, I wasn't really interested in wildlife at the time.
The first time I actually took any pictures was on an elementary school trip, when I shot some souvenir photos using an Olympus Pen EE. I remember our teacher liked them a lot, and some were displayed at the school arts festival, marked with a gold or silver star. Later, when I was in high school, I became interested in photographers like Richard Avedon, and in commercial photography and female portraiture. By the time I entered university, I was beginning to consider a career as a photographer.
I had been delivering my father's photos to camera magazine publishers since was in junior high school, and had gotten to know a number of quite famous photographers there. So I felt at home in the world of professional photography. But I believed that to become a good photographer, one needed wide-ranging knowledge and a broad outlook. So when I started at university, I initially studied economics. Meanwhile, I was also working as my father's assistant, carrying equipment and traveling all over Japan in pursuit of wildlife.
I saw all kinds of wildlife and began to develop an interest in animals, but I really didn't intend to be a wildlife photographer. What changed my mind was a trip to the place made famous by Darwin's theory of evolution - the Galapagos Islands.
I was in my second year of university when I accompanied my father there as his assistant. Unlike in Japan, where I only got to see wildlife through a telescopic lens, the animals on the Galapagos Islands were right there in front of me. With my own eyes I witnessed the moment a bird fed its chick a small fish it had just caught. And I felt a sea lion tap me on the back as I swam in the ocean. I'd never seen any of these animals before - a deeply moving experience in itself - and to be able to get so close to them was truly amazing.
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