By Jenn Gidman
Images by Kristi Odom
Kristi Odom was supposed to have been an electrical engineer. But when she inherited camera equipment from her late grandfather, she started photographing concerts in college for the student newspaper, which led to a photography contract with RollingStone.com and, eventually, a move to Australia, where she got her photography degree. "It's hard to take electrical engineering classes when you've been up all night shooting U2," she says. "Photography took over."
After Kristi finished her degree, she was scheduled to head back to the US. But, once more, life had other plans. "I found out that for $400 more than my ticket back to the States, I could get a round-the-world airline ticket, so I traveled around the world for a year instead." It was during this time that she discovered her love for animals. "Maybe because I've always lived in big cities, I'm really drawn to nature," she says. "It's an opportunity for everything else to disappear so you can just see the divine."
Kristi eventually discovered she also enjoyed taking wedding photos: "I realized I could be an artist and create something really special and emotional for my clients." But she still felt the pull toward animal photography, which she now does in conjunction with her wedding work. "I tend to book a lot of destination weddings, because I've become really good at incorporating environment into my photography," she says. "So when I'm overseas in these different countries and cities, I'll take side trips to do conservation projects where I can photograph wildlife. It's perfect for me to marry the two. I feel like it gives my style a bit of an edge and a unique way to target clients, who will often turn out to be veterinarians or into travel, just because of my other work."
Kristi had been searching for a lens that would fit with her wildlife wanderlust when she heard about the Tamron SP 150-600mm lens. With its versatile focal-length range, Vibration Compensation (VC) feature, and speedy, quiet USD (Ultrasonic Silent Drive) motor, Kristi knew this lens would ensure crisp, sharp images that highlighted every creature's feather or tuft of fur. "I thought it was too good to be true," she says. "In the past, going out into the jungles or rainforests with long lenses had been logistically complicated, both to ship to my destination and to carry. I was ecstatic when I first brought the 150-600 along with me—it's so lightweight, and the images I got back were incredibly sharp. I've been really impressed."
Part of her technique in the wildlife images she creates is to establish new ways of connecting with her subjects, sometimes in more abstract ways. "There are certain things I find marvelous in my subjects," she says. "I'll take pictures of the animals' faces, but I also photograph a lot of 'parts.' It's a fun challenge for me to get people to connect to animals in a nontraditional sense, such as by photographing just the neck of a giraffe or the curled-up fingers of an orangutan."
Another reason Kristi likes to "deprive people of seeing the animals' faces," as she puts it, is to make a subtle statement about how the world's wildlife is faring. "A lot of these animals are disappearing because people aren't conserving—they're overhunting or illegally trafficking," she says. "That's part of what I was trying to convey when I took a picture of a marine iguana swimming away from me. Plus, the way they move their feet and tails through the water is fascinating."
Showing relationships between animals is also important to Kristi, and she tries to do so in subtle ways. "I spotted a mother and child orangutan in Borneo hanging on a vine," she says. "We had taken a boat deep into the jungle to find them, and they had such unbelievable personalities. I took a few pictures of these two, and I actually got the face of the baby in the frame in some of them, but I didn't like those as much as this one, where you just see their hands clinging to the vine. It not only shows their relationship, but also the awkward arms and their shapes. Something about that composition really drew me in."
Kristi also leans toward shooting in black and white, mainly to minimize anything that might take away from the point of the photo. "I often find color to be distracting and pulling the eye in different directions where I don't want it to go," she says. "Using black and white allows me to concentrate more on textures and patterns and show that to the viewer instead. The contrast you can show is wonderful."
Although much of her work is in black and white, Kristi will occasionally spot a colorful scene that spurs her to show off that vibrancy. "I was taking pictures in the rain of these blue and yellow birds standing side by side," she says. "They were sheltering from the weather under this thatched roof, and the background was dark enough to use as an element in the image to show off their colors. The contrast of the blue and yellow is great—and again, if I had shown their faces instead of just their wings, I don't know that that contrast would have been as obvious." (She also didn't mind when the color version of an image she took of an endangered Bornean gibbon's arm placed in a competition and was exhibited at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in DC.)
Tapping into her engineering background allows Kristi to spot interesting visuals when she's composing her images. "I find it so exciting when I find mathematical patterns in nature, like spots or stripes," she says. "There's just something about seeing the flow of all the lines in an elephant's trunk, or the shape of a blade of grass, or the spikes that go up an animal's spine that's so awe-inspiring. I'm baffled how some of this stuff happens in nature."
Kristi doesn't always incorporate those patterns or colors in a straightforward way. "When I was in Kenya, I noticed that the zebras' stripes kind of blend in with their surroundings when they run," she says. "I wanted to emulate that camouflage effect, so I used a slow shutter speed to make the image more compelling."
Kristi hopes her images help mitigate some of the frustrations and hectic pace so many of us experience in our everyday routines. "I want my photography to push the magnificence there is in this world, because sometimes that gets lost," she says. "If I can remind people of how beautiful it is out there, I'll feel complete."
*Not all images taken with 150-600 lens.
To see more of Kristi Odom's work, go to www.kristiodom.com.