Passion drives senior alumnus into the wild
September 18, 2001 - At an age when most people are either well into retirement or giving it serious thought, 70-year-old Albert Karvonen, '60 BEd, '66 MEd, is successfully dreaming up more ways to keep working.
Karvonen, who lives in Amisk, Alberta, located roughly 15-km east of Boyle, is the founder and president of Karvonen Films Ltd., a 25-year-old Edmonton company that has produced award-winning nature films for many networks, including CBC, CTV, Discovery Channel (U.S. and Canada), Finnish Broadcasting, and the BBC. Among the company's TV series are Wilderness Journeys, Wild Encounters, Treasures of the Wild, and In Wildness.
A teacher and elementary school principal for 23 years, Karvonen was inspired to buy his first camera, for still photos, while taking a science course from the late Cy Hampson, '43 BA, '65 PhD, at the U of A more than 40 years ago.
"He showed me all these beautiful nature pictures he was taking," Karvonen recalls. "I got a camera and started taking pictures of grouse."
That was in 1958. Since then, Karvonen has taken photos, slides, and film of everything from caribou in the High Arctic to wildebeest in Kenya. He's captured, on film, bears catching salmon in B.C., grey whales frolicking in the Pacific off the coast of Baja, bald eagles soaring in Alaska, and the interaction between wolves and wapiti in Yellowstone and Jasper National Parks.
Karvonen's passion for nature began when he was growing up on a farm in northeastern Alberta. But it wasn't until after he bought that first camera and began spending his free time filming what he loved that his passion began to overtake his life.
"I had a beautiful job, a great staff, I enjoyed my principalship, and I had a great relationship with Edmonton Public," he recalls. "But I thought, 'wouldn't it be nice to get away from my job and do what I'd really like to do for the rest of my life, work on natural history films?'"
In 1975, when Karvonen quit his job, he and his wife, Pirkko, who was working as a weaver, had five children and a paid-up mortgage. That turned out to be a good thing, because Karvonen's first foray into full-time filmmaking--going on the road for the Audubon Society, narrating films--was anything but lucrative. "I couldn't make a living," he says. "The pay was so poor you couldn't exist."
But he brought his cameras on all 140 Audubon trips he took and collected a variety of moving and still images, which he used to make educational films. From there he moved to commercial films for television.
Karvonen's first motion picture camera cost $1,600. The comparable camera, new, today, goes for about $250,000--one reason it would be much harder to break into the business now. But, Karvonen says, anyone with a passion will find a way to make it work.
"The first thing you need to do is get out into the woods, or the prairie, or the Arctic and sense nature and try to do something with it," he says. "If you have no desire to really, really be with nature and to seek out bears or seek out elephants, you're not going to be able to hack it because nature filming is, in itself, basically patience and waiting. These are not paid actors. You cannot get animals to do what you want unless you have zoo animals. We believe strongly in filming animals in their natural habitat, their natural homes."
And if that means getting up-close-and-personal with grizzlies and black bears, so be it. "I appreciate their strength and understand that if they decided to go for me they could probably kill me with one swat," he says. "I guess that's one of my strengths. I have this connection with nature. I go out there and try to be one with the environment."
And he strives to make films that will show others how precious that environment is. "We want our films to raise the awareness of the public with respect to the environment or animals or air or water," he says. "How can you protect something if you don't understand what the prairies and the forests are all about? We are all about developing passions for the natural world."
This article originally appeared in the autumn 2001 edition of New Trail, the University of Alberta Alumni magazine.
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