Meet Kathy
An animal lover and conservation advocate from a young age, Kathleen Ricker always knew she wanted to spend her life surrounded by wildlife. While a path in animal and wildlife sciences didn’t seem in the cards she found a love for photography and decided to study it at University. After losing her mother to cancer in 2012 a lightbulb went off in her head. She realized how short life really was and how easy it was to push your dreams till later on. In 2013, Kathleen started planning adventures around the world to witness and photograph wildlife in its natural habitat. What started as small list of 5 places quickly grew.
Kathleen has camped with polar bears on an ice floe edge in the Canadian Arctic, sweated through the Borneo jungle’s picking leeches off her pants to see Orangutans in the wild, witnessed the birth of wildebeest during the migration, stood amongst a half a million penguins in South Georgia, snorkeled with orca’s in Norway, and her favorite adventure… trekked with Gorillas in Uganda. On the first trek into Bwindi National Park Kathleen fell in love with Mountain Gorillas and has since gone to trek with them 14 times.
What Kathleen loves most about photographing wildlife is watching how close their interactions are to human interactions. The more you watch an animal you start to recognize facial expressions. You can see happiness, pain, anger, embarrassment, and adoration. You learn how a mother interacts with her young is the same as a human, they are loving, protective, and exhausted. Capturing these emotions enables Kathleen to tell a story through her photographs.
Going forward, Kathleen wants to focus more heavily on photographing primates specifically gorillas. She is hoping to travel to every location that a species of wild gorillas inhabits and capture how they live. She wants to show how similar they are to humans in hopes to build people’s compassion and desire to keep these animals protected. She also plans to work on local projects such as Bee Farming in Maryland.
When Kathleen is not traveling the world she is a Wedding and Elopement Photographer (Love and Adventure Photography) based just outside of Washington DC in the US. She has been photographing weddings since 2005 and has photographed weddings and elopements around the world including in Antarctica and a safari wedding in Kenya.