Pierre Gavarry
Wildlife Photographer & Visual Storyteller

Sandeep Kulkarni (00:03.298) Today's guest is Pierre Gavarry. Hold on. Am I saying your name right? I needed to ask you that first before I get into it.

Pierre Gavarry (00:09.046) Yeah, honestly, that's really impressive because you got it perfectly the first time.

Sandeep Kulkarni (00:12.91) Okay, let's go. Today's guest is Pierre Gavarry, a photographer from the south of France whose work explores the emotional side of wildlife photography, using atmosphere and editing to transform images into deeply expressive visual stories.

Suraaj Parab (00:50.242) Welcome to The Artist Conversation.

Pierre Gavarry (00:52.47) Thank you, thank you guys for inviting me.

Sandeep Kulkarni (00:56.61) Yeah, we're so happy to have you and talk to you and see your work. There's so much to talk about. So jumping right in, Pierre, talking about the origin and discovering photography: you mentioned that growing up, you were surrounded by different forms of art—music, drawing, and graphic design. So what was it about photography that eventually became the medium that felt most like your voice?

Pierre Gavarry (01:25.73) That was a really fun way to go into photography because I first started to edit photos before taking photos. Maybe I just saw some guys on YouTube and the internet doing this and I was like, okay, that's amazing how you can transform an image by editing. So I tried this. I went through a few ways of editing—like too much, just enough, and everything you have to. And then I started to take photos with an old phone, and I found this really, really cool to do. So I invested some money, discovered photography, and put everything in me into photography for two years, and here I am.

Sandeep Kulkarni (02:13.246) That is pretty cool. And when did this journey start exactly? Wow, yeah, you just mentioned two years ago. And you've got so much work already. I mean, it is amazing, and you've traveled too, right? Or haven't you?

Pierre Gavarry (02:29.282) No, no, no, I haven't traveled since I started photography. I do everything around where I live. I'm lucky I have some beautiful birds to show, so that's cool.

Sandeep Kulkarni (02:40.622) Yeah, I was going to say, so you're lucky that there's a lot of... of course, France is beautiful. I was looking at a lot of your pictures. Are there a lot of things from the Alps and some other surrounding places, or just...

Pierre Gavarry (02:57.058) Yeah, I went one time to the Alps. But most of the things you can see are from the place I grew up. It's called Lozère. It's a cold mountain place in the center, just a bit north from where I am right now, actually.

Sandeep Kulkarni (03:20.598) And how do you spell it?

Pierre Gavarry (03:22.122) Lozère. L-O-Z-E-R-E.

Sandeep Kulkarni (03:28.15) And you pronounce it Lozère?

Pierre Gavarry (03:30.368) Lozère. It's a place in France where fewer people live.

Sandeep Kulkarni (03:39.246) So it's a quiet and nice place. That's very nice.

Pierre Gavarry (03:41.856) Yeah, that's a really beautiful place.

Suraaj Parab (03:47.458) That's super. When I first saw your work on Instagram, I was mesmerized by your editing skills with the masking and everything, because I come from a photography background myself, but my music kind of overwhelms me, so I had to choose music. But Pierre, your work often feels very emotional and atmospheric. When did you first realize that photography could communicate feelings, not just document reality?

Pierre Gavarry (04:23.554) Honestly, I didn't do that on purpose. I think it's like everyone; when you are an artist, you do it when you are in the right place of doing what you want to do. You just do it naturally, I think. But yeah, then I realized that because of the people following me, because of the comments. When you realize that, you can put even more into it, I think.

Suraaj Parab (04:56.679) Okay, that's nice. And for all our listeners and viewers who are listening to us today, I want to share some of Pierre's work from his Instagram. So I'm just sharing the screen over here. Here is some of Pierre's beautiful work, these pictures from his Instagram wall.

Sandeep Kulkarni (05:34.062) There's a lot of emotion. Look at that lens.

Suraaj Parab (05:34.119) Yeah, it's like a torpedo. I remember during my photography days, photographers used to call it the "Holy Trinity" lens—the three lenses. This Canon was the top one of the whole set.

Pierre Gavarry (06:03.616) Yeah, you need those big ones.

Suraaj Parab (06:06.251) But it's really beautiful; your work is really mesmerizing. How did this special technique come up? I saw your educational videos also where you talk about masking and how you developed this style of your own.

Pierre Gavarry (06:26.658) I think it's all about watching other people doing it, then trying to reproduce the same. Finally, when you understand what you are doing—like why this slider is doing that—then you can put your touch into it. It takes time to try things and to understand things. It's not all about theory; I think it's really about practicing a lot, and then you discover your own way to do it. Then you can put your style into it.

Sandeep Kulkarni (07:07.222) Right, right. I also saw on your website that you have your prints, your Lightroom presets, and some of this stuff. I actually work for Adobe, so I've worked a little close with that team too. It was really good stuff what you had on there, very informational and educational. It's nice to be in a situation where you're learning and producing work, but then you're also putting that into action to pass the knowledge on to others, right? Like, "Hey, this is how I did these presets, this is how this works, take a look." That's a really good thing you're doing because a lot of people would just be so engrossed—which there's nothing wrong with—they'll just say, "Here's my work," but they'll never share how they achieved it. I'm sure a lot of young photographers in your fanbase on Instagram are wondering how you got that lighting, captured the mood, and the color. It's great you're passing it on. Maybe you didn't think about it that way, but unknowingly you are passing it on.

Pierre Gavarry (08:38.774) Yeah, because I think something really important is that knowledge is the only thing that multiplies when you share it. It's not like money; if you give money, you have less money, but if you give knowledge, you keep your knowledge and someone else has the knowledge and can spread it to other people. So, yeah.

Sandeep Kulkarni (08:57.43) 100%. I used to teach a long time ago in the media industry—animation, visual effects, motion graphics, and all that. I used to say the exact same thing you just said: when you share your knowledge, you're not losing it; your knowledge is going to grow, and you get to learn so much from other people too.

Talking about the emotional side of your images, you've mentioned that for you, an image is not just visual, it's emotional. When you're taking a photograph, are you thinking about the feeling you want the final image to evoke, or what is your thought process?

Pierre Gavarry (10:06.806) No, I never think about this when I'm shooting. That's the part I love the most about shooting birds, because you can't control the birds, and you can't control the light. In fact, you can control almost nothing. You just take the photo, hope for a good focus, and then I think I do everything in post-production with editing. All the emotion is when you click, but I don't control it. It's like living a moment. Sometimes you just don't take the picture; you just live the moment. When you do take the photo, most of the time you have the feeling that you felt in the moment.

Sandeep Kulkarni (10:57.888) Nice. It requires a lot of patience, right?

Pierre Gavarry (11:03.286) Yeah, especially with the kingfisher, which is my favorite bird. Sometimes I spend hours and hours for weeks without even seeing it, and you have to keep going. That's where the feelings are important, because if you go to a place and can't accept that you won't get any photos, just don't do it, because it will be a bad moment for you. Just being in the place, feeling something, and being at peace with nature and the calm is the best thing, I think. The photo comes after that.

Suraaj Parab (11:42.21) One thing I was curious to ask you about: when I started photography, the genres I felt closest to were events and landscapes. Looking at your work, is there any special reason you got into birds? I found that birds are your favorite topic.

Pierre Gavarry (12:10.582) Yeah, there is a reason and it's pretty fun. I really love landscape photography, but when you take a photo of a place, you can't take a thousand photos of the same place. With birds, you can go again and again to the same place and get new photos. That's the main thing that makes me go for birds.

Suraaj Parab (12:33.377) In wildlife, there are other animals and critters too. What is it that brings you closer to birds especially?

Pierre Gavarry (12:49.164) Where I live, we don't have that many wild animals. There is a zoo where I can go, but it's not the same; the animals are not free. Birds have something really special. They can fly away in one second. You might not see them, then you see them, you hear them—it's an all-in-one thing that makes me feel good when I'm outside.

Suraaj Parab (13:21.825) Understood. I remember going to a bird sanctuary in India called Bharatpur. I was learning from a bird photographer there, and he told me that for bird photography, you have to be a great bird watcher first—knowing how they fly and what time of year they migrate. Wildlife photography involves massive patience and long, quiet moments in nature. How do those quiet experiences influence the emotional tone of your images?

Pierre Gavarry (14:25.09) That's hard to say. I think it's a mix, because I love to think that the more time you spend getting nothing, the better the photo will be right after. Because you accept that you have nothing, you keep going with the passion, and then when you finally get something, you are so grateful and happy. Because you're happy, you put something good into your photo.

Sandeep Kulkarni (15:06.634) When I think about wildlife and bird photography, it immediately puts a calm in my soul. I have a friend here in the US who does a lot of wildlife photography. Suraaj used to do this for a long time, and even I, almost 20 years ago, got a Nikon camera and tried to get into it. But it came to a point where I could only do one thing—music or photography—so I chose music. I still do video editing, so I'm close to the camera, just in a different way.

Pierre Gavarry (16:13.824) Yeah, I think that's because we can't do something if we're not 100% in it. I used to do a lot of music; I've played guitar since I was six years old. But because of photography, I don't play guitar anymore, because we put everything we've got into it.

Sandeep Kulkarni (16:36.012) Now, it's the opposite for us! No, that's beautiful. Referring back to your Lightroom presets and editing, you've described editing not only as photo manipulation, but as an interpretation. How do you personally decide where the line is between enhancing a photograph and transforming it into something too personal?

Pierre Gavarry (17:07.906) That's a good question. I know a lot of people don't agree with me, but as long as I don't add visual objects that were not in the original photo, I think it's okay. I use AI a lot today to denoise, or sometimes to remove little things that I don't want, but I don't use it to add something. The line is there for me.

Ultimately, it's just a question of what art is. If it's still artistic, I don't think you really have a line to cross; it's all in your mind. But the thing that is important to me is to be honest with people. That's why I always show the RAW photo, so people can see the original and what I did to it.

Suraaj Parab (18:06.591) Yeah, I understand that many people will not agree with using AI. When I started around 2010, autofocus was a new thing, and people back then were like, "Oh, you are using autofocus? You're not a real photographer. Real photographers use manual focus."

Pierre Gavarry (18:39.874) Yeah, it's always like that when we have new stuff. It was exactly the same with the internet. We have to adapt ourselves to new technology and play with it, because even if we don't want it there, it will keep going, so let's use it.

Sandeep Kulkarni (19:03.502) One has to be open-minded. I've seen people shy away from enhancement, but it's just a tool. It's not taking away your artistry; it's enhancing it. It's totally okay to show the RAW and what you did with it. It shows you know what to do to take it to that level. Especially with AI, people should adapt to it, whatever medium you are in.

Pierre Gavarry (20:07.066) Yeah, I agree. It's a big, useful tool, so I don't know why we shouldn't use it.

Suraaj Parab (20:17.865) Exactly. Your images sometimes feel calm and poetic, and other times they feel darker or more introspective. What role does your own emotional state play when you are editing your work?

Pierre Gavarry (20:50.594) Most of the time I don't even think about what I want to do. It's just about testing a preset, trying something else, and then moving to another photo. Sometimes you come back a week later and you find something. You don't know why, but that's why I never delete a single photo. From my past two years, I've still got everything because I love to watch what I did in the past. Sometimes you find something really good that you didn't even notice when you took the photo. When I edit, it's just about letting the flow and the work happen. Rarely, it happens that I already know exactly how I want the photo to look when I take it, but most of the time it's a surprise.

Sandeep Kulkarni (22:21.43) Your hard drive must be full!

Pierre Gavarry (22:27.808) Yeah, it's so annoying. I started by buying external SSDs, but then I realized I needed more and more, so I went back to older HDDs. Every time I go outside, I come back with 150 gigabytes of photos because I shoot in burst mode. It takes so much space.

Sandeep Kulkarni (22:56.406) Wow, and it's all high-res RAW pictures. Continuing on the editing aspect: for a lot of photographers, editing begins as a technical skill. At what point do you think it becomes an artistic language or a signature style?

Pierre Gavarry (23:38.92) I think it's exactly the same as a painter. You have to learn the techniques so you can express what you want to say in your photo without thinking anymore about how to do it. It's like, "I like this photo, but I would love to make this part a little brighter or change the saturation." You don't think about the technical steps; you just do it. It's like drawing without asking yourself how to draw what you want to draw.

Sandeep Kulkarni (24:16.608) When you first got into photography, was developing that style instant for you, or did it take a while?

Pierre Gavarry (24:55.33) It took me more than one year of full-time work to find a way. The moment you realize you have your own style is when you can put it into words. For myself, it's a cinematic, dark style. It's about desaturated tones and playing more with the light. The hardest part was analyzing what I was doing and being able to say, "My style is this."

Suraaj Parab (25:45.128) Understood. Every artist goes through a phase we call G.A.S.—Gear Acquisition Syndrome. Did you ever go through that phase of wanting expensive cameras and low f-stop lenses?

Pierre Gavarry (26:14.912) I had the luck to have some money on the side when I decided to start photography, because I can't start something if I don't do it 100%. I just said, "Okay, I have this amount of money, I can try for this amount of time, and let's see where it goes." Thankfully, it's working well enough for me to survive and continue. I invested in it knowing it was risky, but if you don't take risks, you won't go anywhere. I don't necessarily recommend that approach to anybody, but that's how I did it.

Suraaj Parab (27:19.521) With the increasing presence of AI in visual creation, how should a photographer think about AI today?

Pierre Gavarry (28:03.872) I think it's a personal question. For myself, I use AI just to gain time and be faster. When people comment on my posts saying, "You cheated, it's AI," I'm like, "Yes, but I could have done the same without using AI. It just would have taken me so much more time." So for me, I'm okay with that. But I also follow people who are doing full AI art, and I think it's really cool because it's still artistic. They're just creating something with a different technology.

Suraaj Parab (28:59.561) What advice would you give to a new person just getting into photography with all this AI exposure and phones that are highly capable of clicking pictures?

Pierre Gavarry (29:27.868) I can give advice only to people who are trying to do something similar to what I do—keep taking photos and try to edit them to find your voice.

Sandeep Kulkarni (29:51.278) So you think of AI in your workflow purely as a tool, or as a collaborator?

Pierre Gavarry (30:08.16) It's just a tool for editing photos, but it's a full collaborator when it comes to writing scripts, descriptions, and things like that. I'm a heavy user of ChatGPT; it's almost my best friend for work.

Sandeep Kulkarni (30:23.198) Right. There's a lot of philosophical conversation happening about authenticity in photography. Do you think AI changes how we define what a photograph really is?

Pierre Gavarry (30:58.458) The definition changes by itself. We cannot say to someone who is taking a good photo on a phone that they are not a photographer. They are doing something great. They are pressing the shutter, even if it's a digital shutter. It's still photography the moment you try to create something with it.

Sandeep Kulkarni (31:27.636) I'm glad you think that way. People are doing amazing things with iPhones nowadays, both in photo and video.

Pierre Gavarry (32:15.552) Phones nowadays are just amazing. They will never replace a camera, but you can do so many things. They are making full movies with phones now. It's just amazing because it's about people creating stuff.

Sandeep Kulkarni (32:56.876) To me, that is still art. It's a technique and a combination of things.

Pierre Gavarry (33:13.686) It's the same with music. When electronic music came out years ago, some people said, "No, it's not music anymore because you don't have traditional instruments," but it's still music. It's the same whenever a new tool enters an art form.

Sandeep Kulkarni (33:28.014) Exactly. When virtual instruments came out, people thought it was cheating, but you just have to adapt to it. If you don't want to use it, don't use it. Live musicians aren't gone, but it opens doors for people who can't afford everything.

Pierre Gavarry (34:03.905) That's a really good point. Sometimes when people are angry in my comments, I'm like, "Hey, calm down bro, I'm not forcing you to do it the way I'm doing it. Do it the way you want, but let other people do it the way they want."

Suraaj Parab (34:28.257) Coming back to your bird photography, have you ever photographed a remarkably rare bird, and what was the story behind it?

Pierre Gavarry (34:50.978) I don't really have rare birds here. A lot of friends ask me why I don't travel to find rare birds, and I tell them, "You just take your car, drive 10 minutes, and you can see a kingfisher." People don't realize we have beautiful birds right where we live; you just need to pay attention, take a big breath, and watch what's around you. We have common birds, but they are all beautiful in my opinion. They all have their own ways of singing and moving.

Suraaj Parab (35:48.898) How has clicking all these birds changed your way of looking at nature and life over the years?

Pierre Gavarry (36:01.634) In a bad way because now I can't just go outside and have a normal walk! Many times my girlfriend wants to just go for a walk together, and I'm like, "Okay, but can I take my gear?" She says, "No, we're just spending time together." But when I'm outside, I see a bird and think, "I could have made an amazing photo out of that." But the good part is that my eye watches things much more closely now. I can see really little things that most people walk right past—a little river, a tiny moment. I'm more able to take time to see things.

Suraaj Parab (37:01.641) Do you think audiences will start valuing emotion in an image more than strict accuracy as editing tools become more powerful?

Pierre Gavarry (37:26.816) Yeah, I think so, because for me, photography has never been about reality. A photograph is a frozen frame, so it's all about what you want that frame to tell. Depending on how you take it, a scene can tell a totally different story. I don't try to make something perfectly real; I just try to show my personal vision.

Sandeep Kulkarni (38:11.586) That reminds me of the saying that an image speaks a thousand words. When I managed a photography program at a college in San Diego, the faculty would take students on photojournalism trips, like crossing the border into Mexico to shoot inside a prison. The stories written on those individuals' faces in just a single image were absolutely amazing.

Pierre Gavarry (40:03.522) Yeah, I really love photojournalism. It shows the raw reality and the beauty of it—taking a photo of something dramatic, but showing the world a totally different, artistic perspective.

Sandeep Kulkarni (40:43.786) With technology making it possible to instantly generate almost any image today, what do you think will separate a true photographer from someone simply generating pictures?

Pierre Gavarry (41:10.594) It's about living the moment. If you can't tell the story behind your photo—the place you went, the hours you waited—it's different. You can be a digital artist and tell a great story about what you created, but you can't tell the story behind a real lived moment. That is the big difference.

Sandeep Kulkarni (41:37.058) I agree. That storytelling and lived-moment aspect is everything.

Pierre Gavarry (42:19.53) Thinking about what happened is the best way to look at a photo. Let me share a screen to show you one of my favorite photos I took. It’s not wildlife at all, but it makes you ask what happened. (Shares screen)

Suraaj Parab (43:45.289) Wow, what is this place? Was it a swimming pool?

Pierre Gavarry (43:54.428) It's actually my underground parking garage. We had a really big problem with heavy rain over the past three months, and something broke, so it completely flooded. When I saw the water, a crazy neighbor of mine decided to get some balloons and float them on the water. I grabbed my camera, took some photos, and got this one.

Sandeep Kulkarni (44:29.132) That's amazing! You made a creative moment out of a bad situation, and now you have a great story to tell.

Pierre Gavarry (44:41.504) Yeah, what I like about this photo is that you want to try to understand what's happening, but it's really hard if you don't know the backstory. That's the fun part.

Suraaj Parab (44:57.215) Yes, art is about storytelling. Thank you so much, Pierre, for sharing your time and your process with us. To everyone listening, please check out Pierre's website and his Instagram, look at his beautiful bird pictures, and check out his Lightroom presets. As Pierre said, sharing knowledge multiplies it. Don't forget to share this episode, and we will see you next time on The Artist Conversation.

Sandeep Kulkarni (47:11.938) Thanks, Pierre. Thanks, everyone.