place we were living in a very remote part of the jungle in central sort of ways and. we discovered that living nearby us was a tribe not had much contact with the outside world before and although i was there supposed to be studying dragonflies i actually ended up. spending my whole time with this try and communicate via two translators we had a translator from english to indonesian and then indonesian to the travel language here which is. i can remember that because i made a dictionary of five hundred five hundred words from their language and wrote them down that no one had ever had this hand written copy is still the only there three in the world i guess i don't know i don't know if this was a long time ago and since the advent of the internet i have actually googled the tribes called the weiner and i've googled it and some people you know people know about them now there's a lot of people go there on adventure tours and things like that but when we went

there very few outsiders that ever travelled around this part of indonesia you know you're remind me of when i went with an ethiopian a russian colonel came up to mrs alexander can you make me a dictionary of the ethiopian languages which when i'm having to get ice i don't mind just leave your bag which can you write it down and that and i took about book and i wrote in the language in russian lexus and i mean it became the best summary how all the russians they use this very thing you know that it had counting to ten like well things like that you know. i think in well indonesia has four thousand dialects and it's a funnily enough even to this day this was years ago that we were there i can still remember the name for smoking which was i don't know why i remember that yes because. the tribe we were with had no they had no agriculture they had no they didn't even have clothes they had a form of no weaving technology book yes they smoked because when the japanese were fighting in indonesia. somehow tobacco made its way into their culture and some

other strange things did as well we met a guy one day and like i say they had no weaving technology they made a sort of clothes out of. substance called the past which was mashed up pulp of a bark of a tree and it forms a sort of lowing cloth and things like this and one day walking in the jungle week we met a guy in his lawn cloth and his blowpipe and here a top hat with no top on it fashioned out of the past and he said he'd sit somehow doing like you say during the various wars and conflicts that had happened around southeast asia small pieces of outside culture had made their way and it was fascinating i know i know that teacher indonesia is. and if you're a plural. ok my girlfriend used to study you know i used to speak in the navy really i lived there for three years. well it's it's only natural

for a british guy to tell you to be an animal lover but it's not really natural to to quit science you studied science or something so was a difficult decision for you were as you said from the very beginning you you were mostly interested in travelling then in really research yeah i wasn't i don't. i think a lot of people i am and i would say that eighteen when i had to choose my university degree i wasn't i didn't know what i wanted to be as a lot of people done. science or something always like animals or something i always liked but when i started practicing so to speak then soon i realised that you know i'm much more interested in the human animal which is very listen in one of the your interviews you said there was a period in your life when you needed big change even sold your house you quit your job what did it feel what was the depression and what. i will be like well i

mean today is one of the days when i want to sell everything in the morning but it became a bit better after lunch but. it was something like that i liken it to i don't know whether you've seen the film fight club fight club yeah yeah there's a scene with a lead character has a realisation that the life he's living is not what he wanted to live and i mean he goes on a homicide or sort of like a maniac all sort of you know killing spree but i didn't do that obviously i worked at a newspaper for seven years and won a national newspapers in london and after a while it's easy to become disillusioned with the work you're doing often because i felt that we were focusing on stories that didn't really tell the full story on planet especially earth. so the full story or don't really matter they matter sometimes but i think if you believe if you watch the news if you were to believe it you'd think the whole world was in conflict with ross news i've been working news for my whole life news has nothing to do with real life actually news is

something that does that but every day you know that's the real life is the news is quite different exactly where i was a news photographer and i just felt that i was covering stories that were pushing rather a negative view of the world and i decided to just quit it all and take off with just my camera in iraq sack and ironically what i'm doing now is the complete antithesis so by no means in my reporting on what's happening in the world i'm reporting on all the nice stuff all the interesting stuff all the colorful stuff i'm doing i'm no better than what i was before at least i believe in what i'm doing you did you did you first supported boston you did you yes you have sought you to boss the journalist the kind of it was before i was working i i was studying i started as a part time course in photography and we were asked to do a dissertation you know a project because i'd already traveled the first thing i did was i contacted an aid organization in the town where i lived and it was during the balkan conflict they

were running aid to muster overland i was yes and most of the same time you know right now ok well you know it's not a must i never must know is easy it's called the bridge of the bridge. yeah yeah yeah yeah that's right yes i was there i was there like months after it was destroyed yeah there was no well actually the army built a bridge temporarily where the old bridge was but yeah they and they said i could go provided i drove a truck because there was no room on the truck for a photographer so two of us it takes five days from london to drive but by truck to muster and we the drivers in each truck and while i was there i should say but you know you three i had been there because i when i went for love from gatwick there was that there was an early. you know that was that russian company who did airlifts will with cargo also like humanitarian aid straight to muster from gatwick i went there this was this was we were driving seven and

a half ton trucks are overland through. this period you know once we got there we went twice one time we went in winter and in in we got stuck in snow for three days you know it's not a there's a few high altitude while you have to go over some of the mountains around croatia and the snow was thick it was a christmas christmas time trip one of the most famous things that she did was wit and humor planted with the b.b.c. who got there did they find find your way you found them was a sort of a dream job thing when my oh no certainly was a dream job for me they don't come around very often they found me on account of some work i'd done in northeast india while they were recently researching the program and one of the research is called me because i've travelled of rabbit or had then around an area of north east india called the seven sisters states which are very not so good back then hardly travel told by outsiders and i made of quite

a few photo documentaries there and during their research they came across this work and they asked me if i could sort of tell many stories around there one of which made it into the film actually was the story of a khasi tribe in make a liar who create these incredible living bridges across rivers very hard to explain when you see them i should i think we should be one of the wonders of the world they're absolutely amazing two hundred year old bridges across rivers made completely out of living trees with stones inlaid and walkways it was fantastic you know. so yeah they contacted me about that and we just started a dialogue and i discovered the b.b.c. natural history unit don't normally commission a photographer for these large projects they did this is what i would ask it would be because it's a television series and it was a pretty you. i mean to to hire a television crew and a still photographer make them work together i mean this sounds absurd and i think he was criticized for that decision. in the beginning how how did you how did you.

mean it was. like you say is different does it i mean video and photos it's quite a different thing i think. you know this is the digital world we live in now when you make a program your you have to reach to as many audiences as you can online and film stills or you know blogs you know what it's like and unlike the natural history film about animals humans are quite predictable you know if you know if someone says they're going to be somewhere at a certain time chances are they'll be there which means rather than sitting in a hide for three months waiting for a snow leopard to come out of its lair you know so it's affordable when this is the mind the main point you can send people away and you know roughly going to get the shots when you do it but working alongside a film crew is hard as a photographer i've never worked as photographers we work a lot because they stop clicking stop like lashing. the bane of my life.

after was you were you work a way to work around it says timothy allen that renowned travel photography response will be back shortly after we take a break so stay with us we'll continue this interview in letting. you know sometimes you see a story so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else you hear or see some other part of it and realize everything you. are is a big. good laboratory jim mccurry was able to build

a most sophisticated robot which all unfortunately doesn't give a darn about anything tim's mission to teach creation why it should care about humans and world this is why you should care only on the. line. which brightened if you knew all about song from funniest impressions. his phone starts on t.v. dot com.

and length. and. to speak your language just cut. programs and documentaries in arabic it's all here on all t.v. reporting from the world's hot spots fifty yard p.

interviews intriguing story to tell you here. in troy arabic to find out more visit arabic don't all teeth don't call.

welcome back to spotlight i'm melding of in just a reminder that my guest on the show today is timothy allen a renowned travel photographer tim well let's let's continue on that the human planet project b.b.c. project you worked up you said that projects like this don't really happen anymore in photography why. i think as you just said you just said two minutes ago that that that you should do both the debate because you don't want to go video blog you

go you go web sites you go posters whatever i think what i was alluding to there is the fact that the project was so large. there are a few magazines left who still commission photography like they used to say for example national university a graphic and when you work for national geographic you still often get the opportunity to do a story in four or five weeks whereas if you work in most other places you may get four or five minutes or four or five days if you're really lucky so yes a project like this doesn't come along around very very often and i don't know many others currently. for photo for to journalists essentially given the opportunity to travel around the world doing covering all the greatest human interest stories still left on the planet did you did you ever do projects in russia i don't think so no we had planned to we had planned well i say we the research team had looked into filming in the north the reindeer herd as up in the

north. as it turns out we ended up doing the same story in northern norway with the sami people away. kind of a lot of sticks in the end it's quite i mean most the place you were very hard to get to. russia is a vast place i think when it came down to the wire norway it was chosen over russia will be the psalmist people are the same the same part of the sammies people live in russia you know i mean it is the same people just divided exactly by a political border there yeah but since this is you so if you're interested in human stories i mean there's a lot you can find russia in the caucasus for example i mean just wild well things this is i mean since i've been here this is i've had this conversation with so many people and i would love to i mean when i look at a map and i see russia it's i'm i'm in too much in oroville i would not literally know where to stop. it's one of those places that you really need to i mean like i say i wouldn't know where to start it's hard to it's hard to come up with

a plan of what you would do in russia you know so vast but. if we leave russia alone you you described as a person who has been every corner of the world is that true. true you've been everywhere i don't think so no well anyway it's easier to do to say where you have the right somewhere i deftly have been is the. talk to an antarctic certainly i've never been there. someone asked me this morning i think i've probably been to about eighty or ninety countries and i think this one hundred is almost two hundred countries almost so i've been half you know. is there a region a big region we haven't been for example i've never been to latin america i may never know i've sung america out of interest i ever travelled relatively extensively around there my my my sort of black spots my reported areas tend to be eastern europe russia. i went for example last year to bulgaria for the first time ever and found it an incredible job

a nation in the world that's something you i think up on in often for journalists and travellers of his ascent to africa southeast asia i've been everywhere about five times and south america these are the places that and of course europe but it's certainly eastern europe is it's one of those forgotten places and russia like i say because it's so vast i mean when you say russia really you mean in the east we're talking about a completely different country yeah. and in the west completely because our people is not the east the east what is there i mean the sun hardly childcare it's. ok now is there some sort of a favorite spot or you somewhere some you'd like to live well maybe die and. well where i live now is the place i'd love to die i live in a lovely farm in wales. no but my favorite unit will show you know what i you know so much you know that i do with my daughter as well she was born and we're i was

born in the southeast of england. and it is easy to say well this is my favorite place in the world i do love it there. mongolia is one of my most mongolian countries definitely it's an increase of i've been to twelve or six times and like russia mongolia has a why incredibly well i both like the girl we're firstly is the people soledad it's all the little pretty poor right it's well you really asian i mean very different from her from what we used to mean you yes people true but i mean i love camping i'm a one hundred fifty percent of mongolians or forty percent i still. don't know who had say it's ok but for me it's mongolian people. easily some of the friendliest and most hospitable people i've ever met and i like i like their temperament i mean it's the least densely populated country in the world i think. but you have such a diverse set of you know you have the altai mountains which are beautiful and

mountainous they've got the gobi desert which is a sandy desert you've got the grasslands which is what i think the most famous for would it is so much to say you have rain you have reindeer is up in the northeast of mongolia as well it's just one of the it's a mystery to me and every time i go there i mean in this day and age when you travel the world less and less i find when you get off the plane in a country some you don't necessarily feel you're in a foreign place it's very easy to arrive in bangkok and think where am i yet you know mongolia is not like that when you arrive in mongolia you know you're somewhere different and when you leave the city especially the roads disappear and you really travel in straight lines across country it's an incredible place to travel around this instead of using billboards use a compass i mean yeah i mean and you know if you want to write a. this very easy to do i think do you ever think of

changing something in your life once again have you found have you found well i know harmony with yourself or you sometimes think let's quit that and do something else. the i mean i mean you should be you know you're you're an impulsive person and they sound like an impulse or purse then you're reaching that as we in russia say the the age of the middle age crisis right now that global think well let's let's let's divorce that ok last over there none other than that i've been lucky that i've been through that already funnily enough i have been i have a newborn daughter who's only five months old and that has changed my perspective on everything so in that respect yes now when i think i don't longer go on three month trips unless i can bring my wife and daughter which is very difficult so that's the main thing that is probably permeated my life and so you firmly settled while i have settled down and yeah i feel settled i mean i i will never stop myself going away and forcing my wife's incredible she knows that camping to she loves to

help we're going to camp where we live in wales i mean i this summer we had to go tent set up in the garden so we could sleep some nights in the garden you know we love camping but yeah other than that i suppose. i mean the photography world is changing. and i've noticed that myself i shoot films now not by any particular choice it's just that the cameras we've used have started having the option to shoot age on film and more and more now people employ me to shoot film so there is a change in that respect and i feel very that you feel you're safe able to shoot films i mean it's very different because because you're one of the best in stills but a film is different yet you have to go do some training or did you do any drill i've been fortunate enough to train on the job so so sorry dude why don't you just lay sort of amateur stuff you know like going like that it's look like you know like it's a skill there are a lot of time i work with directors basically their main job is to tell me what i

keep forgetting to shoot because i'm good at finding a lovely picture and eliciting emotion around me but when you. in the film there are certain things close ups wides with this kind of stuff that you really do need always exactly i'm the king of a culture where you know. well what's. best about your work what do you like best the process or the results. i don't think i can differentiate i mean i love i love showing people my pictures that's one of the main impulses of what i do but it's undeniable the picture is the result yes the process is that this is the days that you spend in whatever e.-s. freezing or whatever it's undeniable that that is an incredible part of the job. i've heard a lot of people say that. the travel is greatest in hindsight i don't sometimes i agree but on the whole i have many moments when i am fully consciously aware in the

moment of why i'm doing is amazing and i love it and that's the process and i can't deny that that's good because i've been lucky enough to do some really amazing things which are the kind of things that school when i was a school kid i really thought i'd like to do but didn't end up thinking i was. travelling and especially travel for the photography may be a pretty risky job so did you ever really risk your life. i don't mean when you were a kid as he is now well and we all did risk our lives it was called kids but i mean outer live i mean i've when i was a news photographer. i was posted to some conflict but i never by the time i was old enough i realized that it wasn't worth risking my life however i mean with what i do now especially i presented a human planet we did a lot of risky things we we filmed. fisherman forty meters under the south china sea and that was pretty dangerous we climb trees with ropes but the b.b.c.

a very careful about health and safety and consequently we had experts with us overseeing what we did we had training i had rope access training in england we had dive training all this kind of stuff well you're pretty famous here in russia lots of people when i told them we're going to interview so we could have tim he's so famous so do you really feel yourself a celebrity or you'd rather fuel self like a journalist or maybe. no artist or now colleges the whatever you certainly know of celebrities i wouldn't really call myself a journalist anymore to be honest i mean i would never like to live the life of a celebrity that's for sure because your life becomes on during critical scrutiny and that scares them that scares me thank you thank you very much for being with us and just a reminder that my guest on the show today was to the paladin and renounce the talks. and that's it for now from almost two spotlights will be back with more profound comments on what's going on in and outside until then stay on our t.v.

and take. i'm. so. the great russian warriors. prevailing over hazards and asperity. to reenact an epic parade through paris. can they complete their

triumph. with people's admiration for two hundred years. old. both. off. the news sigrid laboratory tim curry was able to build a new most sophisticated robot which all unfortunately doesn't give a darn about anything tim's mission to teach music creation why it should care about humans and world this is why you should care only on the dog. do we speak your language any form of the will or not of the. news programs and documentaries and spanish more matters to you breaking news a little turn it if angles couldn't stories. for you here.

in troy altie spanish find out more visit i to allahabad all tito it's calm. parents versus social workers docu nabby and last stop it could be that kidnapping children have become prizes to fight full why does the law threaten families the social forward to seeing a female they have a right of will call minimal they think they have any kind of suspicion about the well being of the of your children. are also just better at bringing up kids than their own mom and dad in similar we have an industry that is so. concentrated on the other for training children.

to get.