'Lift as you climb'

From the moment she was born, Erin Ranney has been surrounded by the outdoors.

Whether it was exploring her family's Mason County tree farm or tagging along on a fishing trip to Alaska before she could walk, Ranney has always heard the call of the wild.

"I was surrounded by wildlife," Ranney said. "And I was always really excited by wildlife."

Building upon that love and passion for the outdoors, Ranney has carved out a career as a wildlife cinematographer that has taken her around the globe.

Ranney's work has appeared on National Geographic, Walt Disney Co., BBC and PBS, some of which she is prevented from talking about because of nondisclosure agreements until it airs.

"I don't think it (being a wildlife cinematographer) was something I envisioned myself doing because I guess I didn't see it as a career path," Ranney said. "I didn't know anyone who did it and I thought working with animals meant you were a veterinarian or a biologist. That was kind of the two lines of career paths I thought existed. I just wanted to work with animals."

A 2009 graduate of Shelton High School and the second of four children of Scott and Candace Ranney, she has family ties to Mason County that stretch back more than a century. Ranney attended Washington State University in Pullman on an academic scholarship while competing for the Cougars' rowing team for four years.

Ranney said she planned to go to WSU to become a vet, but halfway through she realized it wasn't for her and switched her major to Wildlife Ecology and graduated in 2013.

"After I graduated, I worked in the field for a year and I ended up in Madagascar doing a lemur population dynamics study. It was like three to four months in the rainforest, intensely counting lemurs, and I happened to buy a Costco DSLR pack," Ranney said. "My grad student supervisor had a long lens and I completely fell in love with taking photos."

Ranney's "aha" moment came after her return to Shelton when she presented some of her photos to her mom's elementary school class.

"Every single book about Madagascar was checked out after I showed the pictures and talked about my trip," Ranney said. "That was the 'aha' moment of I could spent forever writing a scientific paper that maybe a few scholars read or I could use images and visuals to get kids and people excited about nature and science."

After realizing what she wanted to do as a career, Ranney applied to grad school for wildlife filmmaking, and was accepted at the University of Salford in England, graduating with a Master of Arts in Wildlife Documentary Production in 2015.

From there, Ranney's career began building momentum as she worked in Alaska, South Georgia Island and the Falkland Islands. She also spent five years as a deep sea video engineer aboard EV Nautilus - owned by the Ocean Exploration Trust and run by Dr. Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the RMS Titanic and German battleship Bismarck.

It was aboard the Nautilus that Ranney got a piece of advice from a supervisor that has stuck with her.

"I had a boss (on the Nautilus). He called, he sat me down and said, 'I just want you to promise me that you'll lift as you climb.' That's a quote by Mary Church Terrell, an incredible woman, and I think that sometimes we get stuck in this idea that we can't help others until we've reached the absolute top," Ranney said. "What he was trying to tell us, we talked about it quite a bit, he was saying, no matter where you are in your career, there's someone behind you that wants to be there, and you can help them get to that place."

Taking those words to heart, Ranney is actively involved in helping women break through into wildlife cinematography and other similar fields.

"Right now, in wildlife filming, less than 5% of cinematographers are women. It's still really, really low. And I think I've now made it to the point where I am pretty established, like, I get work constantly. And I'd like to give back and I'd like it to be easier for the women and girls behind me who want to do this career path."

Growing up, Ranney said she didn't see it as a career path because she didn't know anyone that did it for a living.

"I was always really excited by wildlife, but I just, I didn't even have a camera. I just didn't understand that it was a job. And I don't think I understood it was a job until I was back from Madagascar, looking up jobs for that. Because no one in Shelton, you know, films wildlife for a living or works in TV that I know of."

That's something Ranney hopes to change.

Ranney is partnering as a volunteer with Girls Who Click, an organization that provides free nature workshops for girls ages 13 to 18. She is hosting a workshop at the Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually Wildlife Refuge on the basics of wildlife filming and photography. The workshop is from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. June 10.

You can sign up or find more information at http://www.girlswhoclick.org.

"It's just a chance for girls to see that this is an actual path you can take and even if they decide not to do it, but they just fall in love with the hobby. If it gets more girls outside taking photos, I think that's really exciting, too. It should be available to everyone and I think anyone should be encouraged to fall in love with nature. I think it just helps us if more people love nature."

Ranney also strives to help adult women succeed. She helps run a social media group for current and aspiring wildlife camerawomen, which offers workshops and master classes.

"It's built a really cool community of women that instead of this idea, I think oftentimes women are kind of put against each other, there's only enough room for one, they call it the scarcity effect, where you think scarcity effect, you think there's only room for one woman, so you fight each other, you don't help each other. And that's a completely different attitude in our group, our groups are all about sharing information and helping each other and saying each other's names in a room. So if I can't take a shoot, I know three other women who are great who could do it. So we've tried to change the culture in general. And it wasn't like that, when I started."

Ranney praised the support of her family and friends that she's met along the way as being crucial to her career, especially while she was still finding her footing in a competitive industry.

"I was really lucky to have parents that were like, 'go for it, go for whatever you dream of,' which is really cool. I really appreciate my parents, when I told them, 'I'm gonna go film wildlife for National Geographic,' they were like, 'all right, go for it, instead of being like, get something a bit more stable.' Because the first years aren't stable, they're really hard.

"I am really fortunate because my grandma was a pretty groundbreaking female pilot in Alaska, a female bush pilot in Alaska. And my dad, in turn, is one of the most supportive people ever for everyone, but especially women," Ranney added. "Growing up, he never made me feel any different from my brother. We always had the same opportunities to play outside to learn different skills."

Ranney said her favorite part of her career is the people she's met.

"It's amazing to see the wildlife and I love seeing wildlife, but you end up meeting some of the coolest people," adding that she met some of her best friends and her husband, who is from the Falkland Islands, during her work.

Ranney added that while she loves her job, sometimes it's not glamorous work, recalling once having walked through a bed of ticks and being covered in them, or another time when filming bears that one walked up behind her while going to the bathroom.

"I vomited on a crossing; I don't get seasick very often, or ever really," she said. "I've been seasick once and it was in a huge storm. I will tell you that the pain and the negatives isn't always the most glamorous thing, but you just have to remember that the good parts will outweigh the bad parts. And it builds good character, I guess. You become really open about your body functions. That's the other thing you cannot be shy about."

As Ranney's career has moved forward, so has her desire to continue helping others that aspire to break into what she said can be a "pretty brutal" field because that support can make all the difference.

"It's realistic that when you're going into such a competitive field, or really just into anything, you're gonna have those times where your competence drops, there's gonna be times where you struggle, especially early on. The whole motto of our camerawoman group on Facebook, like, how I work now is 'lift as you climb,' " Ranney said. "And it means just helping people constantly behind you. It doesn't matter how far you are in your career. Once I started doing that, it's just all a perfect storm. Now, I would say I am I am a confident person, I'm good at my job. And I love my job. And I love helping other people, not just women, but other people get into it."

Girls Who Click

What: Basics of Wildlife Filming and Photography, led by Erin Ranney

Where: Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually Wildlife Refuge

When: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. June 10

Who: Girls ages 13-18

For more information and to register for the workshop, visit http://www.girlswhoclick.org.

Author Bio

Justin Johnson, Editor

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
Email: [email protected]