{"id":151807,"date":"2025-10-29T17:07:15","date_gmt":"2025-10-29T17:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/151807\/"},"modified":"2025-10-29T17:07:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-29T17:07:15","slug":"photographers-bat-portraits-capture-their-unique-personalities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/151807\/","title":{"rendered":"Photographer’s Bat Portraits Capture Their Unique Personalities"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Three<\/a>Jos\u00e9 Gabriel Mart\u00ednez-Fonseca <\/p>\n

A photographer whose biology work brings him up close and personal with bats captures incredible portraits of the often-misunderstood creatures. <\/p>\n

Jos\u00e9 Gabriel Mart\u00ednez-Fonseca tells PetaPixel that bats are a fascinating and diverse group of animals and notices personality differences in each individual during his encounters with them. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn many places around the world, bats are presented in negative ways and people often fear them completely unnecessarily,\u201d says Mart\u00ednez-Fonseca. <\/p>\n

\u201cMany are threatened by misconceptions, habitat loss, and invasive species. Given how important they are to our ecosystems: pollinating crops, controlling insects, dispersing seeds, and allowing forest regeneration \u2014 just to name a few \u2014 we need to help change that.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Mart\u00ednez-Fonseca began photographing bats while growing up in Nicaragua, a country with an unusually high number of bat species. He currently lives in Arizona, conducting postdoctoral research on biodiversity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bats I work with are wild and I only handle them briefly while I collect data,\u201d Mart\u00ednez-Fonseca explains. \u201cIt\u2019s important to note that whenever I am handling bats, it is usually for scientific research, and I have permits to do so. I then take photographs before I release them back into the wild.\u201d <\/p>\n

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How Does He Take the Photos? <\/p>\n

While Mart\u00ednez-Fonseca\u2019s photos look like a professional shoot done in a studio, he is very much on location \u2014 holding the bat with his left hand while his right hand holds the camera. His setup is a couple of camera flashes with diffusers, a Nikon D500<\/a> or D850 with a 60mm macro lens.<\/p>\n

\u201cI use light stands for the flashes that I can adjust to my most comfortable position. Believe me, this is important when you process over a hundred bats a night,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

The photographer also uses a red light \u201cto minimize stress on the bats,\u201d which leads him to use DSLRs instead of mirrorless because the older-style cameras \u201cfocus more reliably on red light.\u201d <\/p>\n

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But as well as bat portraits, Mart\u00ednez-Fonseca also captures action shots which require more skill, more patience, and more equipment. He will use two to four flash units connected to an infrared trigger. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you have done high-speed photography, you know how this works. One or multiple cameras do long exposures over and over, waiting for the bat to cross the beam and fire the flashes in the otherwise complete darkness,\u201d he explains. \u201cHere, the more cameras the merrier because you can have multiple angles of the same bat at the same time.\u201d <\/p>\n

The more cameras \u2014 and lenses \u2014 he has, the more chance of earning a keeper since sometimes the bat\u2019s wing is covering its face or is flying in the wrong direction. \u201cHigh megapixel DSLRs like the Nikon D800 are great because you often need to crop the photos quite a bit, and these cameras can be found for relatively cheap nowadays,\u201d he adds. <\/p>\n

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While gear is great, Mart\u00ednez-Fonseca\u2019s real skill lies in his knowledge of the bat species he\u2019s photographing: where they roost, where they come to drink, and what time of year they are active.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor example, bats use \u2018flyways\u2019 to commute between their rest and feeding sites. These flyways can be recognized, and we use them to sample bats for our study, but they also can be used to set up the photography equipment,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, nothing is 100% predictable with wild animals, but you can increase your success rate if you recognize these patterns. This unpredictability makes photographing bats in the wild equally exciting.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Bats inhabit every continent except Antarctica. Mart\u00ednez-Fonseca has photographed 256 bat species, a fraction of the 1,500 known bat species \u2014 new ones are being found all the time. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere are probably 100 species I would like to see in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America, too many to name them here,\u201d he says. \u201cPhotographing all bat species of the world is a moving target, and I will likely never be able to come close to doing so. But I would like to photograph at least one bat species from each family, of which there are currently 21. I am missing five; some are very difficult because the species are endangered or only occur in very restricted geographic areas.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>Nevertheless, Mart\u00ednez-Fonseca\u2019s collection of bat photographs is impressive. <\/p>\n

All of Mart\u00ednez-Fonseca\u2019s proceeds from his photography work go into funding small research projects in Nicaragua. If you would like to support his efforts, then go to his website<\/a> and buy a print or download a photo. More of his work can be found on Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Image credits:<\/strong> Photographs by Jos\u00e9 Gabriel Mart\u00ednez-Fonseca<\/p>\n