Adventurer and filmmaker Wolgang Obst teaching at FCAL

Palm Coast Observer
News

The storm kicked up fast, and lightning cracked all around the 12-foot aluminum johnboat where wildlife filmmaker Wolfgang Obst had set up in the Everglades to film a colony of wood storks.

“Now came the storm, and it came down so hard my whole rig collapsed,” he said. “The lightning was striking right and left. And I thought, if lightning strikes the water and I’m in this aluminum boat, it is over.”

Obst had been shooting upward through the trees and a haze of rain, his camera protected by a clear plastic tarp draped over its top and down the sides of the boat. Water streamed into the boat when the rig folded, drenching Obst and rising around his feet as he struggled with the electric motor.

He got it working and motored out of the rookery.

An alligator followed.

Later, Obst wondered what he’d been thinking to head out into such threatening weather in that tubby little metal boat. “It was crazy,” he said. “But I got great footage. I needed that footage.”

Close calls

Obst, now 76 and a resident of Palm Coast, had a number of close calls in a photography and documentary TV career that led him to more than 30 countries and more than 100 films.

There was the time in Thailand when he was sneaking up on foot behind a herd of elephants and suddenly one appeared right in front of him. He still doesn’t know where it came from.

Or the nights he spent alone in a little tent in the Alaska wilderness, where the grizzlies would run their snouts along the outside of the tent fabric.

Or the days shooting underwater in Florida with dive gear, when he had to push curious alligators away with his video camera.

Or the time a bush pilot who’d dropped him off on the Arctic tundra and agreed to resupply him forgot about him for a week, leaving Obst to kick salmon out of the river for food, warily watching the nearby bears.

Or the time he was filming caribou and the herd, 200,000 strong, stampeded toward him — a tsunami of sharp hooves and antlers — then parted at the last second and streamed around him on either side.

Now Obst runs a photography and filmmaking camp called Classroom in the WIld Florida (http://www.classroominthewildflorida.com) at a ranch on the Ocklawaha River and teaches photography and filmmaking at the Flagler County Art League, passing to others the skills he says brought him a life of freedom.

“I like to open the eyes of people to nature,” he said. “I find that people just walk through life without seeing. But photography teaches you that.”

Flying

When Obst was a boy growing up in his native East Germany, he wanted to fly planes. Not the noisy motorized kind, but the silent gliders developed in Germany after the war, when motors on airplanes were restricted.

But in East Germany, only Communist Party members could fly the gliders, and Obst, a supporter of the anti-communist resistance, figured it was something he’d never do.

At 16 or 17, he swallowed that dream.

Decades later in California, Obst boarded a small glider for his first date with Rebecca, his future wife. They married less than a year later.

“I had thought we were going on a picnic,” Rebecca Obst said. The glider was better, she said. “There’s nothing like it. It’s so quiet. So peaceful.”

By then, Obst was an accomplished glider pilot who’d developed innovative ways of rigging camera equipment to the small planes’ frames to get shots few others could. Getting in a glider was the fulfillment of a dream he’d given up on.

“When I had my first solo flight, I thought, ‘Remember when you thought you’d never fly gliders?' That taught me never to give up on a dream.”

But the voyage from East Germany to that airfield in California was long.

Journeys

Obst walked out of East Germany in 1961 at age 24, using forged papers that named him as a West German businessman to bypass the 17 checkpoints on the way.

After he crossed, the world seemed to open up to him. And Obst wanted to see it all.

“One morning, I walked into the streets of Frankfurt, and I walked up to a travel agency,” he said. There, posters advertising tours to Italy hung in the window. “And it struck me: You are really free to do that now.”

Obst and a friend set off in in an old car, bound for Africa. They crossed into Morocco from Spain and then headed east for Egypt and south into Sudan.

“Often, we didn’t know in the morning if the evening would see us in one piece,” he said.

On the journey, Obst fixed radios and electronics. In Egypt, where his blond hair and blue eyes made him seem exotic, he made money dancing in folk routines.

He used it to keep the car working and buy food at small villages. He lost 25 pounds.

And Obst, who’d studied graphic arts, began taking pictures. Later, he got a film camera, carefully read the manual, and began filming. He spent months at a time in the bush. He began selling photos, and spent the next two years on the go. “It was a two-year trip without stopping. Just following the sun and living free. Totally free.”

That skill in backcountry travel and filmmaking led to a 30-minute film about Alaska grizzlies, which Obst financed with his own money, hoping someone would buy it.

The film, “Bears of Alaksa,” ran on NBC. Then there were other opportunities. He went back to Africa, following a pride of lions for two months. He used a Land Rover to get around, and slept in the bush.

“Sleeping on location, you really get the flavor or the feel of the place. You have to be out there when the sun rises and the sun sets,” he said.

Audubon sent Obst back to Alaska to film the caribou migration, and he spent months alone in the bare, wind-bitten landscape of ice and permafrost, hauling his camera gear on his back. Eventually, he stopped carrying the shotgun he’d brought with him for protection. It was just too heavy. Wolves followed him, but he didn’t mind.

“For them, I was entertainment,” he said. “You could see the level of intelligence. They’re the most wonderful creatures you can imagine.”

After his marriage, Obst brought Rebecca on his voyages, and she loved the freedom of working outdoors.

“It’s a fun lifestyle. Every day is an adventure,” she said. “When you’re not doing it, that’s what’s hard.”

Documentary filmmaking is a tough business, Obst said, but worth it. Traveling for work and fun, he has journeyed to 56 countries. Working in the bush or the rainforest or the tundra, he took his time to get the right shots.

Sometimes that meant years.

And sometimes he laid down his camera to see the landscape through his own eyes instead of the lens.

“There were moments when I didn’t film or take pictures,” he said. “It was too beautiful.”

BOX:

Wolfgang Obst will teach classes at the Flagler County Art League throughout the year.

The first, “Turn Your Photos Into Art,” will be held at the FCAL Center at 160 Cypress Point Parkway,
Suite 207C, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Nov. 16-17.

Payment — $125 for FCAL members or $140 for nonmembers — is due Nov. 1.

For more information and a schedule of Obst’s classes, call the art league at 986-4668 or visit http://www.flaglercountyartleague.com/edu2013-photography-Obst.html.