We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Nicholette-Antoinette Drehmann a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Nicholette-Antoinette, thanks for joining us today. Can you share a story that illustrates an important or relevant lesson you learned in school

It wasn’t a school setting, but a meeting that I attended to for photography with group minded people at Fontenelle Forest. I will always remember a guest speaker that had worked with National Geographic. He had said that if they send you on a Project to photograph a rare jaguar for six weeks, but you were not able to photograph it because of how elusive it was you come back with something whether it’s photographing landscape or flowers or bugs you come back with something. This had taught me that no matter the intentions of photographing an animal if I cannot photograph it because of it being elusive or the shots were not as good because of it being too far away, I’ll start photographing the landscape or other animals that pertain to the main animals Diet But I never leave empty-handed

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

In someways it’s better that I’m not a household name, I feel if I was it would put too much pressure and maybe I would not enjoy doing what I’m doing now because it would feel like a job.

I got into photography a long time ago when I was having a creative block as an artist. I had remembered that I used to shoot when I was a kid when my parents bought me my very first Kodak 110 camera. I remember how much I admired photographers such as Thomas Mangelsen and Anna Leibowitz growing up with non-photographers such as Dr. Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey Who were my inspiration for wildlife photography and dealing with wildlife conservation.

Currently, I am what they call a freelance photographer.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Photography is not cheap. You can go into debt for it if given the chance. Unfortunately, I was not given an opportunity to spend solely my time doing photography. You have bills to pay. So during the day I work with the United States Postal Service. This helps find my capital and keeps funding what I do for wildlife conservation photography.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Having content that illustrates my photos. Wildlife conservation is illustrating how important animals are to our ecosystem. A current project I’m working on, Yellowstone, gray wolves will display content of how important they are to our ecosystem and to Yellowstone directly. As of April 2024, the US voted in federal protection for the Gray Wolves. in this one act of voting this now removes the Gray wolves from the endangered species list that affects the lower 48 states in the US. On my platform, such as Instagram, I make sure to add educational content to each photo to help bring awareness of how important conservation is to the area whether it’s local or globally

Contact Info:

• Website: Ndrehmann.com
• Instagram: Drehmannwildlife

Image Credits
Ndrehmann