The lions, leopards and other big cats of Winter

Surviving a flat-out charge from an enraged grizzly bear would top ’most anyone’s cocktail-party chat list.

It probably won’t make Steve Winter’s top 10.

The National Geographic photographer, who in 2008 was named Wildlife Photographer of the Year, has been attacked by everything from flesh-eating parasites to a one-horned India rhinoceros.

As of a few days ago, the rhino encounter in Kaziranga National Park in northeast India was holding fast to the No. 1 slot on the photographer’s “Most Scared” register. The photographs and story will appear in the August issue of National Geographic magazine.

The internationally acclaimed photographer will be at the Paramount Theater at 4 p.m. June 20 to present, “BIG CATS: An Afternoon with National Geographic photographer Steve Winter.” The event is a fundraiser for LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph, which is on its every-third-year break this June.

The popular TREES exhibit, a feature of the festival, is currently on display along Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. The large banners this year display new images by Winter, as well as photos from previous TREES artists Michael “Nick” Nichols, Flip Nicklin and Tom Mangelsen.

Winter is perhaps best known for his eye-popping pictures of fierce felines such as jaguars, tigers and snow leopards. The rare cats are extremely elusive and, unlike the rhinos in India, usually flee the instant they get a whiff of a human.

“About 80 percent of the world’s remaining one-horned rhinos live in Kaziranga National Park in northeastern India,” Winter said recently via telephone from his New Jersey home.

“Our vehicles were attacked several times by them, and one actually crumpled in the door of the Jeep I was in.

“But the scaredest I’ve ever been, bar none, was when we were riding on elephants in an area that was so dangerous it was closed to tourists. There were armed guards walking nearby, and I thought, ‘What do these guys see when a rhino comes at them?’

“Then I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to put a camera on a bamboo pole with a remote control on it, and get a picture of the elephant’s trunk and tusks with a rhino in the distance?’ ”

Winter rigged it up, and almost immediately a rhino appeared in the field they were passing through.

“For whatever reason, this rhino didn’t like this bamboo pole with a black thing on it that went click, click, click,” Winter said. “He reacted to it with false charges and all that.

“Then we had to go up a bank, which put the elephant lower than the rhino. When we started up that bank, this rhino turned and charged us. Rhinos have huge teeth, and it bit my elephant on the trunk.

“Right before the guard shoots in front of the rhino, which is a common occurrence, the elephant does a one-eighty and knocks the gun out of his hands. The rhino then proceeds to bite the ass end of the elephant, which is going berserk, and it starts running full bore across this field.”

The rhino, in hot pursuit, starts trying to jump onto the left and then the right sides of the panicked pachyderm. Most people would have concentrated on holding on, but not Winter.

“I was trying to take a picture of the rhino jumping up, when the elephant jerked to the right,” Winter said. “I flew off the elephant, but managed to grab the rope at the last moment.

“My heart is in my throat, and one of the guards starts yelling for the bamboo pole. When he gets it, he starts hitting the rhino in the face with it. It took a long time before the rhino took off.

“Now the elephant won’t move, and a guard said we needed to find my camera. I said, ‘Forget the camera, we need to find a gun.’ We’re out in the middle of nowhere, everybody is freaked out and there are rhinos all around us.

“We finally got the elephant calmed down, and we went back to the bank where all this started. The elephant found the gun, picked it up with his trunk and threw it over his head.”

Such exploits have earned Winter a reputation among his peers for guts, grit and whatever-it-takes determination to get the image.

Growing up outside Fort Wayne, Ind., he credits his father and National Geographic magazine for inspiring him to become a professional photographer.

“My father gave me my first camera when I was seven, and he taught me everything I knew as a young person about photography,” said Winter, who is also director of media for Panthera, a charity with the mission of conserving the world’s 36 species of wild cats.

“He taught me the importance of composition, which is to this day the bedrock of what I do. And it was looking at the photographs in National Geographic as a kid that made me want to go and explore what to me were these amazing alien cultures.

“I wanted to go to those places and be one of those photographers. I readily admit that, at the time, I had no interest in animals or wildlife. It was the people and cultures that fascinated me.”

While studying at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, Winter met Nichols and soon became his assistant. It was Nichols’ occasional get-togethers of fellow photographers to share their recent work that eventually evolved into LOOK3 after he moved to Albemarle County.

“Becoming Nick’s assistant was the start of my real education,” Winter said. “I can’t say enough about the influence he has had on my life as a photographer. He taught me so much about the power of the single image, and I think what he has done with LOOK3 is nothing short of amazing.

“It’s such an important addition to photography in the United States, and the world at large. It brings everybody back to the power of the single image, while bringing together in celebration everyone who loves photography.

“It’s one of the most incredible things I’ve seen in the world of photography in years. I love LOOK3 and I think it’s incredible that it’s in Charlottesville, which is one of my favorite cities.”

Winter said his transformation from a cultural to wildlife photographer occurred while on an assignment for Merck Pharmaceuticals in Costa Rica. He had been hired to photograph a project Merck was funding to try to find new drugs in the rainforest.

“It was an absolutely life-changing experience to see the life in this rainforest for the first time, and work with these passionate scientists,” Winter said. “And to see how everything is so totally connected between the natural world and our world in general.

“Now conservation is an incredibly important part of my life. What I’m trying to do is show the world the big picture out there, and the successes and failures and new answers that science has.

“I’m a positive guy, and there are answers out there to save all these species. And I’ve learned that if you can get a picture onto the page of a magazine that really affects people, it will help get funding for them.”

Winter’s first wildlife assignment was photographing the strikingly beautiful quetzal. The bird, regarded as sacred by the Mayans and Aztecs, is so rare that only a photographer with great patience and determination would even consider taking on the challenge.

“Steve got into photographing things that no one else could photograph,” Nichols said. “First there was the quetzal, which is a little bird that’s so unbelievable that when you see it you feel as if you’ve died and gone to heaven.

“But they’re disappearing, because of what is happening to the forest. What he had to endure to photograph the quetzal was incredible. To sit there and sit there for weeks waiting for this bird to fly out of the mist.

“These are pictures that come with an amount of pain you can’t … Well, he has taken what I do to another, higher level of personal suffering.”

Nichols also has a reputation for enduring tremendous hardships to get a single riveting photograph. Both he and Winter have taken pictures so powerful that they have helped raise large amounts of money that have gone toward helping some of the most endangered species on Earth.

“Steve has accomplished these impossible jobs that have had incredible conservation relevancy,” Nichols said.

“If you photograph something sexy like a quetzal, snow leopard or a tiger — everything Steve is doing — you make a case for that whole environment that creature lives in.

“When you get into the cats, you’re protecting huge amounts of land, because they need that kind of territory, and the prey that lives in it, for it to be a balanced ecosystem. If you take out some of the top animals, the most charismatic ones, the chain falls apart without them.”

During next Sunday’s event, Winter will show his evolution as a photographer, as well as his latest work with big cats.

He also will talk about and show photos he took of the Central Asian snow leopard that earned him first prize last year in the “Nature Story” category from World Press Photo.

“I can’t tell you how important it is to me to be able to give something back to LOOK3 and Nick, and get people interested in the kind of photography I do,” said Winter, who is giving the presentation pro bono.

“I’m going to try to get everyone excited about ways we can actually save some of these big cats and the new science behind it. And I’m grateful for this opportunity to also hopefully influence the next generation and tell them there are answers.”

Of course, there will be plenty of adventure stories as well. There was that grizzly — and, oh yeah, the quicksand.

“I was photographing tigers in Myanmar when we came across some very fresh tracks,” Winter said. “I see this guy start running, kind of tiptoeing across the sand, and I thought, ‘Whoa, he’s really excited.’

“Turns out he wasn’t excited at all. He was tiptoeing over quicksand. Nobody warned me, so I stepped into it, and boom, I’m up to my waist in it.

“It’s just like cartoons, just like the old Western movies. You start moving and it just sucks you in. I could only think about the fact that everything I know from cartoons is that this is it.”

Learn how Winter escaped the quicksand, and much more, at 4 p.m. June 20 at the Paramount Theater.

Tickets to “Big Cats: An Afternoon with National Geographic Photographer Steve Winter” are $18 adults and $12 for youth.

A $50 VIP ticket includes preferred seating and a “meet the artist” reception following the show. Tickets are available at the Paramount and at www.theparamount.net.

AT A GLANCE

Big Cats:

An Afternoon with National Geographic Photographer

Steve Winter

4-7 p.m. June 20

$18; $12 youths; $50 VIP ticket includes “meet-the-artist” reception

Paramount Theater

ww.theparamount.net

979-1333