Before photographer Ami Vitale ventured up to the Wolong Nature Reserve in China, local panda caretakers warned her not to get her hopes up.
"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 soaked 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.
Here's how Vitale, working for five years on the project, captured some of the wildest panda photos we've ever seen.
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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 bright 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. To shoot a picture, she'd slip her camera through the fence and gingerly follow a panda with her hands to aim and shoot.
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 stuck 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?'"
However, even photographing pandas within more structured habitats, like the ones where the babies are kept, proved challenging.
Flourescent 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."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider