Cherry Kearton: The eccentric influence on a young Sir David Attenborough

As a child, a young Sir David Attenborough was transfixed by a film about penguins, shot by a man who almost single-handedly changed the way we viewed the natural world: Cherry Kearton.

In the late 19th Century, photography was a laborious process suited more to indoor portraits than the great outdoors.

The highest-quality cameras shot on glass plates and were cumbersome constructions made of hardwood and brass. The plates needed plenty of time to expose an image – hence the studied gazes of subjects in Victorian studios, standing stiffly in front of the camera's lens.

It was only towards the turn of the century that cameras became small enough to be truly portable. In a leafy corner of Surrey in England, two brothers out on a walk used one to take pictures of a bird's nest. It turned out to be the first-ever photo of a bird's nest with eggs in it.

In doing so, one of them – Cherry Kearton, the younger – not only became probably the world's first professional wildlife photographer, but helped inspire a young boy who would later become the most famous naturalist of the television age – Sir David Attenborough.

"Kearton's films captured my childish imagination," Sir David said ahead of the radio series Attenborough's Life Stories in 2009. "It made me dream of travelling to far-off places to film wild animals."

In 2012, Sir David even travelled to Bradford to the National Science and Media Museum to view the cinema camera Kearton designed himself and which he used to shoot his 1935 documentary The Big Game of Life.

Richard and Cherry Kearton grew up on a Yorkshire farm in the late 1800s. John Bevis, who wrote a biography of the brothers called The Keartons: Inventing Nature Photography, says they "were from a very working-class family who were mostly miners; Richard was the elder brother by about nine years".

Richard had been invited to a job in publishing in London, and eventually his younger brother Cherry joined him.

"They were out together with friends in Elstree, about 1892, and Cherry was always very interested in the latest innovations, and cheap cameras, pocket cameras, were just becoming available, and he'd brought along a camera. Richard was more knowledgeable about natural history, and he found a bird's nest and he said, 'Cherry, have a go at taking a photo of this.'

"They had an idea on the spot that they would make a book, illustrated entirely with photographs, of birds and birds' nests. There hadn't been a book like that up 'til that time. That meant travelling all across the country, because a lot of birds have very site-specific nesting locations."

Written by Richard and illustrated using Cherry's pioneering photographs in 1898, the book British Birds' Nests: How, Where and When to Find and Identify Them was the first nature book to be entirely illustrated with photographs. More books followed, and the pair would publish together for more than a decade. "Cherry was a very good photographer; compared to the natural history photographers of the time, his composition was very nicely framed, he had an artistic eye," says Bevis.

He adds that having catalogued the birds' nests and eggs of the British Isles over thousands of photographs, "[Cherry's] next thing was to get photos of birds themselves, and they needed to make some kind of [animal] hide". 

"They came up with this series of wonderful realistic hides, the most famous of which was the Hollow Ox, which was a cow's hide over a wooden frame with just enough room for a photographer inside,........

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