A graduate in photography from Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom (UK), Mark Fernley has been a passionate wildlife photographer and naturalist from an early age. In 2007, he ranked 2nd in the prestigious Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition, as a result of which his wildlife imagery toured the world. Mark has spent several years travelling back and forth between the UK and Botswana researching elephant migrations and capturing the behaviour of many African wildlife species on his trusty Canon 7D camera. Whilst in Botswana, at the Tuli Reserve, he captured an award-winning image for the African Conservation Experience Photographic Competition. In addition, Mark finds time to indulge in underwater photography, and frequently visits the clear waters of the Red Sea, Ionian Sea, Caribbean, and Great Barrier Reef, armed with his Ikelite camera housing, pursuing shots of wildlife and seascapes around reefs and shipwrecks in his own unique style. Since 2011, Mark has taken a personal interest in the Neotropics and rainforests in particular, travelling to Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. Here he has specialised in macro photography, spending much of his time on hands and knees and peering into dark crevices between the buttresses of giant trees in an effort to get his lens as close as possible to the almost infinite variety of insects, spiders, centipedes and other creepy-crawlies that call a rainforest home. During this process the opportunities to photograph forest fauna in the macro setting have been many. A macro image of a Wandering spider overcome by a Cordyceps fungus was picked up and featured by Science Alert on Facebook, garnering 15,000 likes. In 2013, whilst assisting Fauna Forever, a non-profit research and conservation organisation based in the Peruvian Amazon, with reptile surveys and mammal counts using camera traps, he decided that one of his goals in life would be to lead avid, amateur wildlife photographers to out-of-the-way corners of the Planet to document the diversity and behaviour of wild nature and share with them some of the many skills and techniques that he has learnt over the years. It was while in Peru that he met Chris Kirkby, who invited him to take the leading role in Untamed Photography Ltd. In addition to developing and leading wildlife photography learning expeditions to the tropics with Untamed Photography, Mark is also gathering imagery and anecdotes from his travels for a book about tropical rainforest wildlife that will be published in the future.
