A photographer wore a urine-sprayed panda suit to take the wildest panda photos you'll ever see

Photographer Ami Vitale in a panda costume
Ami Vitale wears a panda costume on assignment for National Geographic.
Image courtesy Ami Vitale

Before photographer Ami Vitale ventured up to the Wolong Nature Reserve in China, local panda caretakers warned her not to get her hopes up.

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"People are like, 'Well how hard can it be to shoot a panda?' You can't believe how hard it was," she told Tech Insider.

But Vitale persevered with a lot of patience — and by wearing a crude panda costume spritzed in panda urine. She went home that day with a shot that ended up as a full page spread published in the August issue of National Geographic magazine.

"I was like 'Oh my God. The panda gods are on my side," she said.

Pandas are shy bear that hide deep in the woods. Up until the 20th century, people spotted them so infrequently that Chinese artists almost never incorporated them into their artwork. Even in the fenced-in Wolong Nature Reserve the bears rarely showed themselves to human beings.

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Here's how Vitale, working for three years on the project, captured some of the wildest panda photos we've ever seen.

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© Ami Vitale / National Geographic

Vitale went to Wolong that day on a mission. To round out her images of the breeding centers, releases, and handlers with the bears, she wanted a shot of a bear alone in the reserve.

It didn't come easily.

"You go there and they sit on the top of treetops for days on end. And I would go into these huge enclosures to try and find them. And I couldn't find them," she said.

"So I would literally wait for days for the panda to come down the tree. And then the rain and it's dark — it's incredibly dark, because they live in bamboo forests."

She and her cinematographer Jacky Poon carried LEDs, heavy portrait lighting for a photo of an animal they weren't even sure they'd find. Both wore panda costumes of an aesthetic somewhere between public-access channel children's program and bank robbery — except for the spritzes of panda urine in their fibers, designed to enhance the bear-fooling effect.

Vitale couldn't enter the enclosures, so instead she circled an electrified fence around the forested area.

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© Ami Vitale / National Geographic

One day they were in luck.

A 16-year-old bear called Ye Ye — named to celebrate the friendship between China and Japan — lumbered out of the mist. Gingerly, Vitale slipped her camera through the fence as Poon lofted the LEDs.

Vitale says the large black-and-white creature posed "like a supermodel."

"She just came up for a moment," Vitale said, "like a magician. And just showed up and disappeared, as pandas do. They're very good at disappearing."

Then the humans were alone again, stunned by their luck.

Vitale said, "We were doing the panda dance after in our panda costumes, dancing around like 'Did that just happen?'"

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© Ami Vitale / National Geographic

However, even photographing pandas within more structured habitats, like the ones where the babies are kept, proved challenging.

Fluorescent lights used in the habitats flicker, and the effect will ruin an image unless the shutter speed is below 1/30 of a second. She had to make images of squirmy baby pandas without letting them motion-blur across her frame.

It's hard to overstate how unlikely many of shots were, according to Vitale.

"Really, these are million-dollar babies," she said, products of China's expensive breeding program.

"[The handlers] want you out of the way. So that was the challenge. And they've got a lot of bad media as well. So they're very sensitive. It was not easy."

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© Ami Vitale / National Geographic

On top of that challenge, she had to convince a reluctant National Geographic staff to agree to the story in the first place.

Vitale had first stumbled across the program on assignment with a film crew unaffiliated with the outlet.

"In the beginning, I have to say, I had seen thousands of photos of pandas, and I thought to myself, 'How could I possibly photograph anything that might surprise people?'" she said. "And then it turned out to be the most unimaginable, interesting exploration that I could have imagined."

As National Geographic reporter Jennifer S. Holland writes in the text of the story, China appears to have achieved a turning point in its panda breeding and rewilding program.

Under the leadership of a man named Zhang Hemin (also known as "Papa Panda"), captive bear populations have ballooned past earlier targets. Handlers wear panda costumes — the same ones Vitale and Poon wore — so as not to habituate the creatures to people. And they've largely cracked the code of panda breeding.

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© Ami Vitale / National Geographic

But National Geographic wasn't thrilled about the idea of yet another panda story between its covers.

"It took a lot of work. Believe it or not, it took a lot of work to convince them this was a story worth running," Vitale said.

After several successful photo essays for the magazine and its side-brands, she had the clout to convince them. Before this panda story, her most well-known photo essay for the magazine covered the black rhino's return to Samburu rangelands.

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Ami Vitale

Vitale got her start as an editor and photographer on the business beat, working out of Prague in the Czech Republic in the 1990s.

Then war broke out in the Balkans.

"I soon found myself going from taking portraits of businessmen and politicians to becoming a war photographer overnight," she said.

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Ami Vitale

For years, Vitale covered war and conflict all over the world, focusing on regions she felt were under-covered. She always freelanced, she said, moving to Angola, Israel/Palestine, and Afghanistan.

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Ami Vitale

Vitale spent the final four years of her conflict reporting in India, covering the war in Kashmir.

Kashmir is a valley on the north end of the Indian subcontinent, near the Himalayan mountains. Its control is disputed, with India, China, and Pakistan all claiming portions of the territory.

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Ami Vitale

Vitale said around this time, she started to feel burnt out.

"I think I got incredibly — just had a meltdown from covering conflict for so long. And realized I was super depressed. Incredibly depressed," she said. "Definitely had post-traumatic stress — whatever the diagnosis is, I knew I needed to stop for a while."

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Ami Vitale

She'd also begun receiving assignments for National Geographic brands, like National Geographic Adventure. Then came a year-long commission from The Nature Conservancy, which allowed her to turn her career toward wildlife photography.

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Ami Vitale

Vitale said she hopes her work helps present a more positive image of conservation around the world.

"I find projects that I'm super passionate about," she said. "And just so you know, I literally invest a ton of money myself in the beginning. Everything I make goes right back into the work."

To sustain herself, like many National Geographic photographers, she takes commercial gigs — applying the skills of documentary and wildlife shooting to make advertisements.

She said it's worth it for the opportunity to shoot these kinds of stories.

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Ami Vitale

When Vitale arrived to one panda release into the wild, it was a major media event. Other photographers and journalists showed up in bright neon jackets and vests.

Vitale, who knew how important it was to the Chinese handlers that the pandas remain undisturbed, wore a ghillie suit — the sort of fuzzy tree costume you may have seen snipers use as camouflage in movies.

"So Papa Panda sees me in this tree costume, and he runs over, gives me a hug and says, 'You, you are going to get to hold two baby pandas. President Obama, he only held one.' So he made sure that not only did I get to hold to baby pandas, but he laid out that year's whole bumper crop of baby pandas for me."

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Ami Vitale

She said that kind of care made it possible for her to shoot the story with this level of access in the first place.

"I think that's what started the relationship. Trying to, like in all my stories, trying to have a little bit of empathy for who your photographing. And in this case it was the panda."

National Geographic August 2016
National Geographic

You can read the full story about China's evolving panda conservation efforts at NationalGeographic.com.

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