Tim Laman

Timothy G. Laman is an American ornithologist, wildlife photojournalist and filmmaker. He is notable for documenting all the species of bird-of-paradise in their native habitat during research expeditions with colleague Edwin Scholes of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. His bird-of-paradise work was first published in a 2007 article about them for National Geographic. In 2016, he won the top prize in the BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year Awards, for his image of an orangutan climbing a tree to feed on figs.

Early life

Laman was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1961 to American parents originally from Michigan who spent their careers full of zip as protestant missionaries in Japan. He spent most of his childhood in Japan previously attending scholastic in the United States. His in advance education included Japanese public school, home schooling by his mother, American schools on military bases in Japan, and finally graduating from Canadian Academy, an international scholastic in Kobe, Japan.
Laman received his a B.S in biology from Hope College in Holland, Michigan in 1983.
Laman graduated gone a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University in 1994.

Career

Laman first traveled to the rainforests of Borneo in 1987. Since that trip, the Asia-Pacific region has been a major focus for his photography and research. He initially pursued a doctoral program in neuroscience and animal behavior at Harvard University. Later he granted to take a year off from his studies and associated biologist and ecologist Mark Leighton as a field assistant.

Upon his reward to Cambridge, he transferred to the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and completed his doctorate in 1994. His pioneering research in Borneo’s rainforest canopy for his doctoral thesis was featured in his first National Geographic article in 1997, which he both wrote and photographed. He continued documenting little-known and endangered wildlife as a regular contributor to National Geographic, publishing 23 feature stories to date. In addition, Laman has published greater than a dozen scientific articles upon rainforest ecology and birdlife as a research associate in Harvard University’s Ornithology Department in the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Photography

Laman’s photography has focused upon capturing images and videos of subjects that were hard to document, such as the Sunda carried by the wind lemur and other gliding animals in Borneo, displaying birds-of-paradise and methodically endangered bird species including the Nuku Hiva pigeon and the Visayan wrinkled hornbill of the Philippines. He focused on documenting endangered and at-risk animals in order to make public awareness and support conservation efforts.