• Lakshitha Karunarathna on capturing the mammoth waste management issue affecting wildlife

Earlier this month, it was announced that Lakshitha Karunarathna had been appointed as the Sony Regional Ambassador for Wildlife Photography, the first Sri Lankan appointed to the role. While this was a moment of pride to Sri Lanka, it was also a reflection of Karunarathna’s award-winning and impactful work as a wildlife photographer.

He has big plans as the Sony Regional Ambassador for Wildlife Photography, which could be pivotal in boosting wildlife photography in the region. In addition to this, he also plans on visiting Antarctica, the only continent he is yet to visit, given that Karunarathna’s travels have taken him to 68 countries thus far.

He also plans on holding a touring wildlife photography exhibition in the US and the UK, similar to the annual exhibition by the America Sri Lankan Photography Art Society, which he is a part of and which highlights not just Sri Lankan wildlife, but also village life and culture.

In conversation with The Daily Morning, Karunarathna went into more detail about his work as a wildlife photographer, what it means to be appointed as the Sony Regional Ambassador for Wildlife Photography, and the role of conservation in his photography work.

Following are excerpts from the interview:

How did your journey in wildlife photography begin?

Photography happened as a coincidence. I had a passion for wildlife and natural history subjects right from my younger days. I am not from Colombo, but from Rathnapura, so, as any kid from those areas, nature and wildlife were a big part of my life.

After my Grade 5 scholarship exam, I got selected to Ananda College, Colombo, but even before that, I was really influenced by the works of Sir David Attenborough. I used to collect and watch his work, such as documentaries. He was a big inspiration. My mother and father pushed my brothers and I to acquire knowledge through reading, so I had a huge collection even as a schoolboy, most of it related to wildlife and natural history.

Soon after my A/Ls, I joined a leading tea company in the country as a tea taster. After about 3-4 years, I started travelling a lot, which is a very normal thing in the tea industry. Whilst travelling, I used to go to wildlife locations and take part in wildlife activities. More than in Sri Lanka, I used to experience these overseas.

I got married in 2012, and for our anniversary in 2013, we went to Dubai. It was during the Dubai Shopping Festival and there I saw a camera and lens at an unbelievably low price. After checking with a friend, I bought them just because of the price. For the first year or year and a half, I mostly photographed family outings and so on, not wildlife photography.

Slowly, I started mastering the camera. I’m self-taught with YouTube and online tutorials. Since I had a love for the subject, even by then I had studied a lot of wildlife photographers in the world, having checked their work, perspectives, and angles and the lenses and equipment they were using.

I slowly started, not with very expensive equipment, but very usual, regular lenses. I started doing some experiments and when I showed the results to friends and family, they were amazed and told me to do it seriously. So, then I slowly started investing in better lenses and equipment, and every time I went out on business trips or anything related to tea, I would start setting aside 2-3 days for wildlife photography. That was the start.

You were recently appointed the Sony Regional Ambassador for Wildlife Photography. How did this come about?

They offered this to me way back in 2018, as we work closely on an independent level. Sony’s local agent CameraLK was founded by Anushka Gunasinghe, a good, personal friend outside photography. But at the time, I was with another brand and wasn’t comfortable changing gear completely as I was worried about if it will affect my entire photography career. Anushka is someone who doesn’t give up easily, so he kept pushing and would send me equipment just to try out every time I went out.

While we went through the Covid-19 pandemic and markets were slowing down, a lot of brands started flooding the market with cheaper versions of cameras and lenses. Sony did something unconventional by investing heavily in research and development. After 2022 or 2023, they started introducing cameras and lenses with some great features, such as artificial intelligence (AI), which were far superior.

I started trying out one of their models, which is still the highest resolution camera in the retail market, in 2023 and I was completely convinced. That’s when I decided that it was time.

Sony has an office in Sri Lanka and the regional head office in Singapore. They are very friendly, helpful, and easy to work with. The community is really nice and there are some key opinion leaders appointed for the country: Wedding photographer Dimitri Crusz, photojournalist Thilina Kaluthotage, and travel and lifestyle photographer Ravi Ranasinghe.

We agreed upon certain things early this year and they said they wanted to expedite it. It took place on 3 June at Cinnamon Grand Colombo, with regional executives from Singapore in attendance. Prior to the event, we held the Sony G-Master Mega Workshop along with Kaluthotage and wedding photographer Chamodh Delpearchchi.

The ambassadorship covers South Asian and Southeast Asian countries such as Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, the Maldives, and Cambodia, and Sony is talking about pushing my work in these regions, but also educating amateur photographer and naturalists. Sony has big plans; even more than the marketing aspect of it, they want to empower visual storytellers. I’m the first to have been given such an honour in the country.

In this role, what kind of initiatives or programmes will you be involved in?

We will start with some knowledge sharing platforms across the region on the behind the scenes of why and how I did it. They want to educate people, mostly the new generation of wildlife photographers.

Sony is investing a lot in conservation, especially in Sri Lanka, and while I travel very frequently out of Sri Lanka, my work in Sri Lanka is mostly focused on conservation. I’ve been documenting the human-elephant conflict for the last four years, using different camera reels, drones, action cameras, and camera traps. I wanted to document the good and the bad both.

Can you elaborate on the focus on conservation in your work and why this is important in Sri Lanka?

Sri Lanka is a small space, but it is the one place in the world where you can see a leopard, a blue whale, and an elephant within a day. We have almost 500 species of birds and 200 species of mammals. The numbers are staggering. It’s a biodiversity hotspot; one of the 33 most diverse spots in the world. If you take the Asian elephant population in the world, we hold more than 10%. With those numbers, protecting the environment and the wildlife is important to Sri Lanka.

At the moment, we have so many different issues. Some get the spotlight, like the human-elephant conflict. But while the direct conflict gets the spotlight, other issues don’t, such as the erratic waste disposal practices in the country. This is something I’ve been extensively working on. If you go to some parts of the North Central Province and especially the Eastern Province, waste disposal issues are a mammoth issue.

There are large waste dumping sites, one in Ampara city itself, which attracts a lot of elephants daily. Every day, you will see 30-40 elephants at that site. There’s one in Pallakadu as well, which is much bigger than the one in Ampara town. There’s a herd that’s there full-time, leaving sometimes only in the night.

Once the elephants get used to this sort of thing, there’s no going back. And then there is a lot of microplastic and polythene digestion, which reduces their lifespan. I have been documenting this for 2-3 years, and some of my work has been internationally recognised by the most respected photography awards across the globe.

Luckily, the site in Ampara has been shut down for the past few months due to pressure from photographers, activists, villagers, and journalists, but the Pallakadu site isn’t easy to move, so we have presented a few proposals to the Department of Wildlife Conservation and the government.

It’s located close to a fragmented forest block, and there are lots of paddy fields. It’s kind of a mountain, so water runs from it all the way down, polluting not only the paddy fields, but also the water sources. There are so many other problems around this larger problem. When the elephants visit the site, there is crop destruction, which applies to the toque macaque as well.

What’s Sri Lanka’s wildlife photography community like? Do they realise the importance of conservation?

I must tell you, in the last 7-8 years, there have been a bunch of really talented photographers who are all below 35 years who have been working on conservation. They have been trying new things and winning awards.

Wildlife photography is becoming really popular. I don’t know why, but maybe because of the pandemic when we were stuck in one place for a long time and people wanted to go out and do something new, different, or adventurous. But I see a new generation of wildlife photographers.

I conduct a lot of workshops and I see that the enthusiasm is really high. After a presentation, they tend to show you their work and some of it is out of this world. And the best part is that they achieve all that using very ordinary equipment.

In wildlife photography, the general perception is that you have to invest a lot. Lenses are expensive, at Rs. 3-4 million a lens. A camera can cost Rs. 2-2.5 million. But these photographers are doing some experiments with very inexpensive, entry-level cameras. That’s a very good thing.

The other thing is award shows. There are 25-30 award programmes in the world which are considered the highest ranking. At each of these programmes, you will see about 80-100 countries participating. But at the end, there will be less than 20 countries winning awards. The winners are usually from the US, UK, Germany, and more recently, India. But in the last 3-4 years, Sri Lanka is always there.

I want to mention one competition in Monaco. The ruler, Prince Albert II of Monaco, has a foundation, through which they present the Environmental Photography Award every year. In 2022, it was won by Easa Lebbe Muhammed Jamsith, a 21-year-old from Batticaloa that no one had heard of in wildlife photography circles. He won the grand prize defeating some top-class photographers. So, there is a lot of inspirational work and achievements you can see among the new generation of wildlife photographers.

Actually, it is through him that I got to know about all the problems in the Eastern Province. He sent me all these photographs saying I should try photographing the issue as I had a bigger reach.

You mentioned that the perception is that wildlife photography requires a lot of investment. How would you encourage photographers who may be discouraged by this?

Some of my award-winning work came from action cameras attached to my car, which captured a completely different perspective. So it’s absolutely not necessary to buy expensive equipment. Every camera brand has entry-level cameras and lenses. You can start there.

Just to prove this point, during my last two trips to Maasai Mara, Kenya, I took some of the entry-level equipment which was not expensive. And I did some good shots.

You need to master your camera. And then you have to come up with something creative. If you have the patience and if you plan your shots properly, you can, even from a very basic camera, get good shots.

Your photography leans towards the artistic as well as monochrome. Is there a particular reason behind this?

David Lloyd, in my opinion, is the best fine art wildlife photographer in the world. Somewhere down the line, in 2010-11, I started following his work, especially the monochrome and black and white work, because I too, had an interest towards monochrome and black and white photography.

However, I was a bit worried and didn’t know if the reception would be good or not. When I saw Llyod’s work, I found them to be phenomenal. My belief is that rather than in colour, in black and white or monochrome, you can capture the feelings and emotions of animals. It will get highlighted more and the punch will be more. So, David Lloyd has been the biggest inspiration in the photography work.

You’ve received several awards for your work. What can you tell us about these achievements?

Among the top ones are the two grand prizes I received. One is Nature’s Best Photography 2017, which is the biggest competition in the American continent. They have now changed the venue, but at the time of me winning the grand prize, the winning image was displayed at the Smithsonian National Museum, which gets about seven million visitors every year.

I also won the grand prize at Africa’s Photographer of the Year 2018, which is limited to shots taken in Africa. The Oscars for us is the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, awarded by the Natural History Museum. I won a special prize in 2018 and they are still using my photograph for merchandise representing the Natural History Museum. Last year, my photograph won an Editor’s Choice Award at the Sanctuary Asia Wildlife Photography Awards, and in the same competition, I was an overall runner-up in 2018.

I’m also a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, which is very difficult to achieve as your work is heavily scrutinised. I received the fellowship in 2020.