
Bertie GregoryFollow Bertie : Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Instagram
Bertie Gregory, Nat Geo Wildlife Cameraman, Demands the Most Reliable Gear When Shooting in Rugged and Remote LocationsWild_Life with Bertie Gregory, the first-ever all-digital wildlife series from National Geographic, takes its young host to some of the world's most spectacular and remote wildlife destinations. For the current season, Bertie and his crew voyaged to the inhospitable Subantarctic island of South Georgia to document the remarkable recovery of the wildlife there. And once again, Bertie turned to rugged, reliable, and high-quality gear from Anton/Bauer, OConnor and Sachtler.
Kit List
Dionic XT 90
OConnor 2560 fluid head
OConnor 60L tripod
OConnor HiHat
OConnor Cine HD aluminum baby legs
Sachtler flowtech 75
Hunkered down with 400,000 penguins on a cold and rugged outcrop miles from civilisation would be an unusual day for most people - but not so for Bertie Gregory. At the age of just 22, he made history with the debut of Wild_Life with Bertie Gregory, National Geographic's first-ever all-digital wildlife series and the cornerstone of its YouTube channel.After a successful first season, in which Bertie focused on the coastal fauna of Canada's Vancouver Island, Season Two of Wild_Life premiered last October with five online, 10-minute episodes and a one-hour TV special on the Nat Geo Wild channel. Entitled Wild_Life: Resurrection Island, the latest season places Bertie on the island of South Georgia, a tiny speck in the South Atlantic ocean nearly 1,000 miles from the nearest mainland. The full five-episode series, together with a selection of bonus content, is currently available through National Geographic's online channels including natgeo.com, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat.
South Georgia is the holy grail of wildlife filmmaking, and it's teeming with one of the highest concentrations of wildlife on the planet. It's living proof that it's not too late to save wild places.
After a rough-and-tumble, 870-mile sea voyage aboard a 50-foot sailboat from the Falkland Islands, Bertie and his three-person Nat Geo film crew fetched up on South Georgia.For several weeks, the crew would live at anchor and spend every day on the island, getting up close and personal with macaroni penguins, wandering albatrosses, fur seals, and other remarkable wild inhabitants.Bertie's mainstay for shooting on South Georgia was a RED HELIUM 8K cine camera and Canon Cn20 50-1000mm zoom lens, supported by an OConnor 2560 fluid head and an OConnor 60L tripod. This camera-lens combo is massive and heavy, but the great thing about the Oconnor setup is that it's relatively lightweight, Bertie says. That made the whole rig a lot easier to carry around to rugged spots and then move in and set up quickly and quietly, for those times when we were sneaking up on an animal and hoping to catch it before a particular behavior finished. To film the smaller animals such as baby fur seals and penguins, Bertie used an OConnor HiHat with 150mm bowl to get the rig as low to the ground as possible. And when the unforgiving polar winds for which South Georgia is famous made simply standing up a challenge, Bertie turned to a set of OConnor Cine HD aluminum baby legs.
When you're on the end of a long and bulky lens and the wind is roaring, you need as much stability as possible - and the OConnor baby legs are built like a brick out-house.
Rock star. Bertie meets the neighbors
For the times when light weight was paramount and kit space was minimal, Bertie turned to the game-changing flowtech 75 tripod from Sachtler.Bertie relied on flowtech75 to create motion-controlled, time-lapse video, including stunning images of clouds rolling in and out of South Georgia's glacial mountain landscapes. The flowtech75 is perfect for this type of shot, since it can go very low to the ground without the use of baby legs or a high hat. That's important in time-lapse imagery, because you want to capture changes in the foreground in the frame, he explains.
Bertie captures stunning images of clouds rolling in over South Georgia's glacial mountains.
flowtech75's extremely light weight made it a welcome addition to the Wild_Life crew's gear list. Since flowtech75 is super-lightweight, we were able to take it along without really adding to our load. That's important, because when we were trekking across the island, we had to carry all our gear on our backs, Bertie comments. It also meant we could use a tripod that was really fit for purpose, instead of trying to make one of the other tripods do such a specialized job.
Anton/Bauer's Dionic XT90 on-camera batteries were another critical element in Bertie's kit. At the time, the Dionic XTs were prototypes, so we were slightly nervous about using them in such a remote spot. After all, South Georgia is a long way from the nearest camera store, Bertie says. But the batteries worked flawlessly, and we love their nice, compact size. That makes them really easy to stack and pack what we need for a full day's shoot without taking up too much valuable space. Another key factor was the Dionic XTs' performance in cold conditions, which can seriously hamper battery life. Although South Georgia wasn't terribly cold (hovering around zero Celsius for most of the shoot), Bertie reports that the batteries performed beautifully at the undisclosed location for his next project - where the temperature would often plunge to minus 30 Celsius. No batteries work quite as long as they might in warm weather, but the performance of the Dionic batteries was pretty crazy in such a cold climate, he comments.
Bertie is currently shooting Season 3 of Wild_Life, highlighting a location that will remain under wraps until the show premi
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
06/09/2026
June 9 2026, 23:00 (PDT) Dolby and MagentaTV Bring Fans Closer to the FIFA Worl...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
23/06/2026
Australians in Film and Screen Australia's talent development initiative UNT...
23/06/2026
Visual Productions Unveils RdmRelay2 Four-channel Relay Control at InfoComm 2026
Brie Clayton June 22, 2026
0 Comments
New Relay Solution Combines DMX, ...
23/06/2026
SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible, Opening Standards Library to the Gl...
22/06/2026
Behind The Mic provides a roundup of recent news regarding on-air talent, includ...
22/06/2026
Cosm has announced the appointment of David Ho as Chief Legal Officer, a newly created executive role reporting to President and CEO Jeb Terry. Ho will oversee ...
22/06/2026
Warner Bros. Discovery and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have announced the developm...
22/06/2026
Daktronics has completed an audio control system upgrade at Petco Park in San Di...
22/06/2026
Accelerate Media has named John Willi as President and announced the launch of the Accelerate Sports Network (ASN), a prep sports media and streaming platform c...
22/06/2026
All Women's Sports Network (AWSN) and 3XBA (3 3 Basketball Association) have announced live television coverage of the annual 3XBA tournament on Friday, Jun...
22/06/2026
OWL AI has announced the appointment of Jay Prasad as Chief Executive Officer and member of the Board of Directors. Prasad succeeds Josh Gwyther, who has served...
22/06/2026
CP Communications delivered RF video and audio support for TNT's Inside the NBA at the 2026 NBA Finals, providing main show coverage in San Antonio and ea...
22/06/2026
Polymarket has announced a partnership with GRID, an official esports data platf...
22/06/2026
As sports venues continue to evolve into more video-centric, fan-engagement-driv...
22/06/2026
As the regional sports production scene shifts toward streaming, this Texan helps lead the engineering behind Victory+'s growing live platform...
22/06/2026
By Kristin Feeley, Director, Documentary Film & Artist Programs
the memories of your elders [are] a scaffolding for you to build your identity on - and t...
22/06/2026
New hyper-resolution analyser EQ revealed
CEDAR Audio's all-new Icons plug-in series has just gained its newest member, Blade. Described by the compan...
22/06/2026
Turn any live input into a cinematic soundscape
Designed for use in the studio and on stage, Sampleson's latest creation is capable of taking any audio ...
22/06/2026
Adds guitar strings to Eurorack rigs
ADDAC System are renowned for their weird and wonderful synth designs, and their line-up includes plenty of gear that...
22/06/2026
FIFA World Cup 2026 fever grows, as more than one third of Australians tune in ...
22/06/2026
In our latest blog, Tim Pearson explores NAGRA Venturi, the new streaming security solution for the AI era from NAGRAVISION. Designed to aggregate and analyze ...
22/06/2026
Expanded integrations give advertisers access to distinct contextual signals acr...
22/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
22/06/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
22/06/2026
Xilica today announced the release of Dynamic Voice Lift, a new feature in Xilica Designer v4.12 that brings adaptive speech reinforcement to large meeting spac...
22/06/2026
Telecom operators have seen remarkable returns from using generative AI to automate network management, customer care and back-office operations. Most of that i...
22/06/2026
Monday 22 June 2026
Official trailer released for Katie Price: Nothing to Hide,...
22/06/2026
The next era of AI will not be defined by compute alone. Its growth will be dete...
22/06/2026
Mission, Vision and Veritas - new Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) supercom...
22/06/2026
At the ISC conference running in Hamburg this week, NVIDIA is introducing new so...
22/06/2026
For the past two years, the U.S. National Science Foundation's National Arti...
22/06/2026
JUPITER, Europe's first exascale supercomputer at Germany's Forschungszentrum J lich, runs on NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchips and NVIDIA Quantum-X800 Inf...
21/06/2026
To call the 2026 FIFA World Cup a big undertaking would be a big understatement....
21/06/2026
New series now live on Udemy
Regular SOS contributor and Cubase workshop columnist John Walden has just released a new Cubase video course that is now avail...
21/06/2026
Hot tubs sit at about 38 to 40 degrees Celsius, warm enough that most people can only soak for about 15 minutes. NVIDIA's newest AI servers can run their co...
21/06/2026
Sunday 21 June 2026
Sky announces immersive documentary series The Wargame
The Wargame first looks
ZIP (2MB)
Sky today confirms the commission of The Wargam...
20/06/2026
New add-on creates doubles & vocal stacks
IK Multimedia's latest ReSing add-on kits the innovative software out with the ability to automatically genera...
20/06/2026
What exactly is Apogee Control V3?
Control V3 is a new mixer application that controls Apogee interfaces. The new hit feature is that V3 finally allows for...
19/06/2026
Split compound eases operational challenges at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club...
19/06/2026
North Carolina, Oklahoma meet in the best-of-three Finals as ESPN leans into spe...
19/06/2026
Company launch comprehensive mix-comparison tool
The Him DSP are a plug-in company founded by The Him, an EDM DJ and producer who has amassed over half a bi...
19/06/2026
Major Sampler upgrades introduced
The latest version of Bitwig's DAW software has just entered public beta testing, and is available now for all users w...
19/06/2026
Four times the power of their predecessors
Akai Pro have just introduced upgraded versions of two of their popular standalone MPC systems, kitting them out ...
19/06/2026
Data from May shows seasonal outdoor trends triggers lower viewing
Warsaw, Pola...
19/06/2026
Buttons is best control system in the rAVe Best of Infocomm Awards 2026...
19/06/2026
Mavis Studio Makes iPad Production More Powerful
Brie Clayton June 19, 2026
0 Comments
InfoComm update brings new NDI Preview, PTZ control, USB audio ...
19/06/2026
Immersive Studio Metaverse Stage Tackles Post with Blackmagic Design
Brie Clayton June 19, 2026
0 Comments
New narrative projects rely on DaVinci Reso...