Cameras

The equipment, which is half the story of why these films look the way they do. From the Bolex and 16mm reversal stock through to image-stabilised long lenses, thermal and starlight cameras, macro probes, submersibles, camera traps and drones. Much of the technique did not exist before a series needed it, and the behind-the-scenes strands where the crews explain what they built are among the most substantial documentary material in the whole archive.

Part of David Attenborough

89 moments in this segment.

1. 1975 - An early remotely operated vehicle. Deep water ROVs were developed for naval salvage and offshore work long before natural history used them. The RRS Sir David Attenborough carries equipment of this class for British Antarctic Survey science, including the autonomous submersible named Boaty McBoatface.
2. 2002 - Filming at Launch Pad 39A, Kennedy Space Center. A film crew works with him on Launch Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in February 2002, with Space Shuttle Columbia on the pad. The people operating the equipment around him are the invisible half of the record: he narrates and presents, and does not shoot or cut.
3. 2007 - The Bolex clockwork spring. The spring motor that drives the camera. Attenborough wanted lightweight 16mm for the Zoo Quest expeditions; the BBC preferred 35mm and made colour stock the condition of allowing 16mm, because colour negative gave the best black and white picture when converted. The colour was a byproduct of a format argument, not foresight.
4. 2007 - Paillard Bolex lens turret. The rotating turret carried three lenses so an operator could change focal length without unloading. Charles Lagus shot Zoo Quest on equipment of this class, carried by hand through Sierra Leone, British Guiana, Indonesia, New Guinea, Paraguay and Madagascar.
5. 2007 - Bolex H16 Reflex. The reflex model let the operator see through the taking lens rather than through a separate finder. Attenborough has always been explicit that he presents and narrates; the technical decisions and the shots belong to the people holding cameras like this one.
6. 2007 - Infrared imaging camera. The Natural History Unit's publicity makes a great many first ever claims about imaging technology. Most cannot be independently verified and the phrase is best avoided; what is clear is that low light and thermal sensitivity improved sharply through the 2000s and 2010s.
7. 2008 - Helicopter-mounted infrared camera. Forward looking infrared slung under an aircraft. Aerial and thermal work entered wildlife filming from military and police procurement, which is the usual route by which expensive imaging technology reaches natural history budgets.
8. 2009 - Fastest animals on Earth in slow motion - Animal Camera - BBC. Ultra high speed cameras render fast animal movement as slow motion. High frame rate capture is what makes hummingbird and insect flight legible on screen.
9. 2010 - Bolex H16, clockwork 16mm camera. The BBC Natural History Unit's first film camera was a clockwork Bolex, bought from a Bristol camera shop out of petty cash by Desmond Hawkins's assistant Tony Soper. A spring wound Bolex runs about thirty seconds on a full wind and needs no power at all, which is why it went everywhere before batteries were portable.
10. 2010 - Camera trap on a tree. A camera trap fires on a passive infrared trigger and waits unattended for weeks. Higher resolution traps were cited as one of the enabling technologies for Planet Earth II in 2016, and they are how animals that will not tolerate a human presence get filmed at all.
11. 2010 - Thermal imaging camera. Thermal cameras read emitted heat rather than reflected light and can work in total darkness without illuminating the subject. Together with starlight and infrared sensors they are what made nocturnal sequences on Planet Earth II and after possible without disturbing the animals.
12. 2010 - Phantom high-speed camera. Ultra high speed cameras of this class shoot thousands of frames a second and turn a hummingbird's wingbeat or a chameleon's tongue into a legible sequence. They generate enormous data for a few seconds of usable material, which is why they arrived late.
13. 2011 - Filming with a Bolex H16 and Angenieux lens. The Bolex held at eye level with a zoom lens fitted. This is the working posture of a 1950s expedition cameraman: no sync sound, no video assist, thirty seconds of run time and a viewfinder that shows you nothing once the shot is going.
14. 2012 - The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs in HQ Part 1 | BBC Earth. The making of Walking with Dinosaurs. The BBC's computer generated palaeontology strand preceded Apple's Prehistoric Planet, which Attenborough narrated in 2022.
15. 2012 - Arriflex 16SR-3. The professional 16mm workhorse that succeeded the clockwork generation, with a coaxial magazine and quiet running for sync sound. Sixteen millimetre remained the natural history gauge long after drama moved to 35mm, because it could be carried.
16. 2012 - A reel of 16mm film. The physical stock the Zoo Quest expeditions shot on. Colour negative was imposed by the BBC as the condition of allowing 16mm at all, because it gave the best black and white picture on conversion, and the colour sat unused in the vaults for nearly sixty years.
17. 2012 - 16mm colour negative. Negative rather than reversal stock, the format the 1954 to 1956 Zoo Quest material was shot on. An archivist identified those negatives as colour in 2015 and Zoo Quest in Colour aired on BBC Four on 17 May 2016.
18. 2012 - A 16mm film can. Cans like this held the exposed stock that came back from Sierra Leone, British Guiana and Indonesia to be processed in London. Nobody was preserving colour for the future; the colour was a byproduct of a format argument about camera weight.
19. 2012 - Boxed 16mm stock. Film that sat in the BBC Natural History Unit vaults for six decades. The rediscovery surfaced as ninetieth birthday programming, so the institution telling the story is also the institution that owned and forgot the material.
20. 2012 - A 16mm print. A positive print struck from negative for viewing and transmission. Attenborough wanted 16mm because it could be carried into a forest by two men; the BBC preferred 35mm, and the compromise shaped everything that survives of the expedition years.
21. 2013 - Shooting on a wind-up 16mm Bolex. A clockwork Bolex in use. Attenborough argued for lightweight 16mm against a BBC that preferred 35mm, and the condition of allowing it was that colour stock be used because it produced the best black and white picture. The Zoo Quest colour negatives were an accident of that argument.
22. 2014 - Camera trap set for a Jerdon's courser. A trap rigged to detect a nocturnal bird thought extinct for most of the twentieth century. Detection rather than aesthetics is the point of these installations, and their footage is the raw material a natural history series later cuts into a sequence.
23. 2015 - Cineflex gyro-stabilised camera mount. A gyroscopically stabilised housing slung under a helicopter and controlled by joystick from the cockpit. It gives steady long lens aerials despite rotor vibration and is the signature look of Planet Earth in 2006, letting a camera hold on an animal from a distance that does not disturb it.
24. 2015 - Camera in an underwater housing. A sealed housing lets a camera work at depth and under pressure. The Blue Planet in 2001 and Blue Planet II in 2017 depended on housings, rebreathers and remotely operated vehicles, and on divers such as Doug Allan who were biologists before they were camera operators.
25. 2015 - Arriflex 16 ST. A reflex 16mm camera of the kind used through the Life on Earth era. Life on Earth in 1979 was shot over three years across dozens of countries on film that had to be exposed, flown home and processed before anyone knew whether the shot had worked.
26. 2015 - Bolex H16 with the film path open. The gate and loop formers exposed for threading. A jam or a lost loop in the field meant the shot was gone with no way of knowing until the film came back from the laboratory weeks later.
27. 2016 - Cineflex mount on an aircraft. The heligimbal in position. Before this, an aerial shot meant a camera operator leaning out of a door with a wide lens; after it, a helicopter could hold a tight shot on a running animal from hundreds of metres up.
28. 2016 - Camera trap image of a Pacific fisher. An animal photographed by an unattended trap investigating a bait station. Images like this are research data first and television material second, and the two uses have converged as trap resolution has risen.
29. 2017 - 500 Hours In A Sub | Blue Planet II Behind The Scenes. The Blue Planet II team spent 500 hours in a submersible. Deep sea rovers and crewed subs are what let the series reach depths that earlier natural history filming could not, and each dive returns very little usable footage.
30. 2017 - Blue Planet II behind the scenes: The moment giant sharks attack crew submarine - BBC News. Sharks strike the crew submersible during Blue Planet II filming. The submersible work is among the highest risk shooting in the genre and the incident was reported as news rather than promotion.
31. 2017 - Filming Hundreds Of Mobula Rays At Night | Blue Planet II Behind The Scenes. Filming mobula rays at night for Blue Planet II. Low light and starlight capable cameras opened night time marine behaviour to filming, though the BBC's publicity makes first ever claims that are hard to verify.
32. 2017 - Sneaky croc camera captures incredible footage | Spy in the Wild - BBC. A crocodile shaped spy camera films at close range for Spy in the Wild. Disguised robotic cameras are a declared technique, unlike the undeclared captive filming that was industry practice for decades.
33. 2017 - Sharks Attack Submarine | Blue Planet II Behind The Scenes. Sharks attack the Blue Planet II submersible. Crewed submersibles carry their own camera systems and viewports, and the footage of the attack was itself shot from inside the vessel.
34. 2017 - Reflecting On A Life Filming Below The Waves | Blue Planet II Behind The Scenes. An underwater camera operator reflects on a career filming below the waves. Doug Allan, the principal underwater and polar cameraman of this era, died on 8 April 2026 aged 74.
35. 2017 - Filming Sharks In Protected French Polynesian Waters | Blue Planet II Behind The Scenes. Filming sharks in protected French Polynesian waters for Blue Planet II. Marine reserves are where the densest fish populations remain, which makes them the productive locations for underwater crews.
36. 2017 - Filming Walrus With The Megadome | Blue Planet II | Behind The Scenes. A megadome housing used to film walruses for Blue Planet II. Split level dome ports show the surface and the underwater world in one frame, a purpose built solution to a specific shot.
37. 2017 - Behind the Scenes of Sperm Whale Cam | Blue Planet II |BBC Earth. A camera attached to a sperm whale for Blue Planet II. Animal borne tags record behaviour at depths no crewed vessel reaches and are recovered when the tag releases and floats.
38. 2017 - Pelican Invades Director's Tent On The Galápagos Islands | Blue Planet II Behind The Scenes. A pelican enters the director's tent during Blue Planet II filming in the Galapagos. The behind the scenes strands record the long unproductive waiting that the finished sequences remove.
39. 2017 - Chased By Angry Sea Lion | Blue Planet II Behind The Scenes. A sea lion chases a Blue Planet II camera operator. The behind the scenes strands record the mishaps and failures that the finished sequences remove entirely.
40. 2018 - Paillard-Bolex H16 Reflex, 1956 model. A reflex Bolex from the year Zoo Quest for a Dragon was made. The Zoo Quest negatives sat in the BBC Natural History Unit film vaults until an archivist identified them as colour in 2015, and Zoo Quest in Colour aired on BBC Four on 17 May 2016 as part of his ninetieth birthday programming.
41. 2018 - A working Bolex from a small film unit. The Bristol Natural History Unit's first camera was a Bolex of this type, bought secondhand from a Bristol shop out of petty cash. The Unit was founded in July 1957, three years after Zoo Quest began, and its roots go back to Desmond Hawkins in BBC West Region in the 1940s.
42. 2019 - Our Planet | Walrus | Behind the Scenes | Netflix. Netflix behind the scenes on the Our Planet walrus sequence. The programme attributes the falls to shrinking sea ice; zoologist Susan Crockford argues polar bears may have driven the animals off, director Sophie Lanfear rejects that directly, and the LSE Grantham Research Institute published a rebuttal to the sceptic framing.
43. 2019 - Our Planet Behind the Scenes - Great Barrier Reef. Our Planet crews film the Great Barrier Reef. Our Planet is a Silverback Films production for Netflix with WWF, not a BBC series, and its makers set out to show environmental damage rather than avoid it.
44. 2019 - DJI Ronin three-axis gimbal. A lightweight motorised gimbal that keeps a handheld camera level while the operator runs. Planet Earth II in 2016 used rigs of this class to travel with a locust swarm and to follow hatchling marine iguanas being chased by racer snakes on Fernandina.
45. 2019 - Stabilised gimbal head with a RED camera. A remote stabilised head carrying a digital cinema camera and a long zoom. The Natural History Unit makes a great many first ever claims about camera technology; most cannot be independently checked and the phrase is best avoided.
46. 2019 - Camera trap installation. Camera traps also rediscovered Zaglossus attenboroughi, the long beaked echidna named after him, in the Cyclops Mountains of New Guinea decades after the single 1961 specimen the species was described from.
47. 2019 - Manipulator arm on an underwater ROV. Remotely operated vehicles carry cameras and manipulators to depths no diver can reach. The Blue Planet in 2001 and Blue Planet II in 2017 both used submersibles and ROVs, and the deep sea sequences in those series are the parts that could not have existed a decade earlier.
48. 2019 - ROV manipulator, detail. Working at depth means lighting a scene that has never had light in it, and the animals filmed there frequently respond to the lights themselves. The technique changes the behaviour being recorded, which is a problem the finished sequences rarely acknowledge.
49. 2019 - Bolex cine camera. An archivist identified the Zoo Quest negatives as colour in 2015, and Zoo Quest in Colour aired on BBC Four on 17 May 2016 as ninetieth birthday programming. It is a BBC discovering its own treasure story released as an anniversary broadcast, which is worth flagging as institutional self promotion even though the discovery is real.
50. 2019 - Bolex H16 of 1935. The design dates from the mid 1930s and was still the standard expedition camera two decades later. Charles Lagus carried one of this generation through Sierra Leone, British Guiana, Indonesia, New Guinea, Paraguay and Madagascar between 1954 and 1963.
51. 2020 - 5 Amazing Animal Behaviours Caught on Spy Camera | BBC Earth. Behaviour captured by disguised spy cameras. Robotic animal shaped camera housings let crews film inside groups at distances a human operator could never hold.
52. 2020 - Stunning Drone Footage of Islands From The Sky | BBC Earth. Aerial drone footage of islands for BBC Earth. Drones replaced much of the helicopter work that the gyro stabilised Cineflex housing pioneered on Planet Earth in 2006.
53. 2020 - Wild Tapir Caught On Camera | The Dark: Nature's Nighttime World | BBC Earth. A tapir filmed by night cameras for The Dark: Nature's Nighttime World. Low light colour cameras made night filming possible without infrared's monochrome look.
54. 2020 - Young Hyena Breaks Camera | Waterhole: Africa's Animal Oasis | BBC Earth. A young hyena destroys a remote camera at a waterhole. Remote and camera trap rigs are routinely damaged by the animals they are placed to record.
55. 2020 - Tiny World - Behind the Scenes | Apple TV. Behind the scenes on Tiny World for Apple TV. Apple also produced Prehistoric Planet, narrated by Attenborough, with a Hans Zimmer score.
56. 2020 - Camera trap being installed. Fixing a trap in rainforest. The technology facet of Attenborough's story is genuinely under served in freely licensed photography, because the equipment that matters most is usually being carried by a crew whose work is not itself filmed.
57. 2021 - Filming Flying Squirrels at Night | Eden: Untamed Planet | BBC Earth. Filming flying squirrels at night for Eden: Untamed Planet. Infrared and thermal imaging made nocturnal behaviour filmable without lighting that would alter what the animals do.
58. 2022 - Chasing the Rare Snow Leopard | Behind the Scenes of Frozen Planet II | BBC Earth. Filming snow leopards for Frozen Planet II. Higher resolution camera traps are the standard tool for elusive animals, left in place for months and checked on foot.
59. 2022 - Risking Treacherous Seas To Get The Shot | Behind The Scenes | Blue Planet II | BBC Earth. Blue Planet II crews work in heavy seas to reach a sequence. Weather is the limiting factor in most marine filming and expeditions are routinely abandoned without footage.
60. 2022 - Filming the Impossible with Drones | The Green Planet | BBC Earth. Drone filming for The Green Planet. Lightweight UAV cinematography is one of the newest additions to the toolkit, following the Cineflex helicopter rigs that defined the Planet Earth aerial look in 2006.
61. 2022 - How to Bring Plants to Life on Camera | The Green Planet | BBC Earth. The Green Planet used a robotic motion control rig to move around growing plants. Time lapse combined with motion control lets a static subject be filmed as though the camera were tracking a moving animal.
62. 2022 - Filming in the Frozen World | Behind The Scenes Of Frozen Planet II | BBC Earth. Filming in polar conditions for Frozen Planet II. Cold degrades batteries and lubricants, and the polar specialists in this discipline included Doug Allan, who died on 8 April 2026.
63. 2022 - Sea Lions vs Galapagos Sharks Hunting Brawl I Behind the Scenes | Blue Planet II I BBC Earth. Behind the scenes on a Blue Planet II hunting sequence in the Galapagos. Underwater camera operators work on rebreathers to avoid the bubble noise that scuba exhaust produces.
64. 2022 - Orca released from captivity thrives in the wild | Behind the Scenes of Frozen Planet II | BBC Earth. An orca released from captivity, filmed for Frozen Planet II. Frozen Planet's polar bear den sequence in 2011 was shot in a Dutch animal park with artificial snow, which the BBC admitted, defending it as avoiding disturbance to a wild den.
65. 2022 - Eider Ducks Fight To Survive | Behind the Scenes of Frozen Planet II | BBC Earth. Filming eider ducks for Frozen Planet II. Arctic shooting seasons are short and crews commit to a location before knowing whether the behaviour will occur.
66. 2023 - Our Planet II | Behind the Scenes | Netflix. Behind the scenes on Our Planet II, a Silverback Films production for Netflix. The late Attenborough work is largely not BBC, which changes both the rights position and the editorial register.
67. 2023 - Behind the Scenes of Planet Earth III | BBC Earth. The making of Planet Earth III. The BBC's behind the scenes strands, running since the Planet Earth Diaries segments, are the richest record of how these sequences are actually obtained.
68. 2023 - Filming the World's Rarest Cats I Behind the Scenes of Frozen Planet II I BBC Earth. Frozen Planet II crews film some of the world's rarest cats. Camera traps and remote triggers do most of the work for animals that will not tolerate a human operator nearby.
69. 2023 - Filming a Pack of Arctic Wolves | Planet Earth III Behind The Scenes | BBC Earth. Filming Arctic wolves for Planet Earth III. Long lens work from a distance is the standard approach where approaching the animals would change their behaviour or endanger them.
70. 2023 - Ancient Life Discovered in Antarctica | Behind the Scenes of Frozen Planet II | BBC Earth. Filming under the Antarctic ice for Frozen Planet II. Diving beneath sea ice requires a cut entry hole and safety lines, and is among the most constrained shooting environments in the genre.
71. 2023 - Braving Extreme Filming Conditions | BBC Earth. A compilation of extreme filming conditions across BBC Earth productions. The physical demands on operators are the part of the work that the finished programmes deliberately remove.
72. 2023 - Our Planet II Behind the Scenes Puma Hunt | Netflix. Filming a puma hunt for Our Planet II. Silverback Films produces the Our Planet strand for Netflix, and the series was explicitly built to show environmental threats the earlier blue chip films left out.
73. 2023 - Behind the scenes of BBC Wild Isles l Hilary Jeffkins I RSA Fellows Festival 2023. Producer Hilary Jeffkins on making Wild Isles, the 2023 series about British and Irish wildlife. Wild Isles was made when the pristine framing critique had already changed how these series are structured.
74. 2023 - Filming Wild Isles: Sir David Attenborough Visits Skomer Island Ep. 2. Attenborough visits Skomer Island during Wild Isles filming. He was 96 during that production and still travelling to locations for pieces to camera.
75. 2023 - Filming Wild Isles: Sir David Attenborough Visits Skomer Island Ep. 1. Wild Isles filming on Skomer Island, off the Pembrokeshire coast. The series turned the blue chip apparatus onto British wildlife rather than distant wilderness.
76. 2023 - Recovering a camera trap. Retrieving a trap after weeks in the field. Most of what a trap records is empty frames triggered by moving vegetation, and the ratio of retrieved footage to usable footage is the least glamorous fact about this technology.
77. 2024 - What's it Like to be a Meerkat? | Animals With Cameras | BBC Earth. Animals With Cameras mounts cameras on the animals themselves. Animal borne cameras are a distinct branch of the technology, giving a viewpoint no operator can occupy.
78. 2024 - Filming A Family of Snow Leopards | The Making of Asia | BBC Earth. Filming a snow leopard family for Asia. Remote cameras left running for long periods are how a species this scarce is documented at all.
79. 2024 - How We Film Tiny Animals | Inside Big Little Journeys. How very small animals are filmed for Big Little Journeys. Probe and snorkel lenses, macro sliders and motion control are the tools that make miniature subjects filmable at scale.
80. 2024 - Capturing The Rare Snow Leopard On Camera | BBC Earth. A long form account of capturing snow leopards on camera. Higher resolution camera traps are the technology that turned this species from nearly unfilmable into a recurring subject.
81. 2024 - Behind the Scenes of a Nature Documentary | Mammals | BBC Earth. Behind the scenes on Mammals, the 2024 BBC series narrated by Attenborough. He was 98 when it broadcast and continued taking on new landmark series.
82. 2024 - Filming the Adorable but Elusive Red Panda | The Making of Asia | BBC Earth. Filming red pandas for Asia. Elusive forest species are among the hardest subjects and usually require remote cameras left running for months.
83. 2024 - The Strangest Flower on Earth | The Making of Asia | BBC Earth. Filming a rare flower for Asia. Plant sequences depend on time lapse rigs holding position for weeks, a technique The Private Life of Plants established in 1995.
84. 2024 - A Close Encounter with Endearing Echidnas | The Making of Mammals | BBC Earth. Filming echidnas for Mammals. Zaglossus attenboroughi, Attenborough's long beaked echidna of New Guinea, is among the endangered species named after him.
85. 2024 - Secret World of Sound with David Attenborough | Official Trailer | Netflix @Netflix. The trailer for Secret World of Sound with David Attenborough. The series won the sound factual category at the BAFTA Craft Awards in 2025.
86. 2025 - Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age - Season 3: Puppet Behind the Scenes | Apple TV. Apple TV shows the puppet work behind Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age. Prehistoric Planet builds CGI palaeoenvironments over live plates, with a Hans Zimmer score, and is an Apple production rather than a BBC one.
87. 2025 - Behind the Scenes: Challenges of Filming Across Dry and Wet Seasons | 4K UHD | Kingdom | BBC Earth. Filming across dry and wet seasons for Kingdom. Blue chip natural history shoots are planned around seasonal behaviour, which fixes the schedule years ahead of transmission.
88. 2025 - Steadicam operator at work. A body mounted stabiliser that isolates the camera from the operator's stride. Steadicam and its descendants are why a modern natural history sequence can move continuously through a landscape rather than cutting between locked off tripod shots.
89. 2026 - Extremely Rare Jaguar Filmed On Camera Trap | Expedition Guyana | BBC Earth. A jaguar recorded on a camera trap during an expedition in Guyana. Camera traps document animals no crew is present to film, and Guyana was one of the destinations of the original Zoo Quest run as British Guiana.