Lone Bison Films
Stars wheeling over cardon cactus in the Baja desert

Andy Best

Adventure Cinematographer & Photographer

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The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
Michelangelo
Andy Best in the field with a camera

About

Twenty years of this. I have hauled a camera up a volcano before sunrise, out onto a glacier in Patagonia, and into Camp 4 alongside the man who invented the V grade, on his way back to a boulder problem he first climbed twenty five years earlier. One year it was out of a helicopter door over the Columbia Icefield. The next it was Manhattan.

Most of the work happens at the far end of the road and then a good way past that. I lived out there for more than a decade and put close to half a million miles under the truck doing it, which is to the moon and back. Most of those miles had my daughters in the back seat. Other years it was a van on the South Island of New Zealand, or the long way around the North Coast 500 in Scotland.

The best of it happens after dark. I have never gotten over the night sky, and I will drive a long way for a clear one and sleep under it when I get there. Most of the work I care about was made when I was the only thing awake. The pictures and the moments I keep going back to are the ones that shifted my perspective.

Campaigns with Toyota, Samsung, Nike, DJI and Travel Alberta. Pictures with National Geographic Travel and Adventure. Southern Oregon is where the mail goes. I am somewhere else as much as I can manage.

Sony Alpha Ambassador
Twelve years · Founding member, Alpha Imaging Collective

Films

Cinematography & direction

Still from Old Man Lightning
Banff Mountain Film Festival
Best Film · Climbing

Old Man Lightning

Directed by Dawn Kish · Cinematography, Andy Best

John Sherman invented the V grade, then spent a quarter century not climbing Midnight Lightning. At fifty seven he goes back for it.

Still from Still Wild, a helicopter at sunset with crew unloading
Outside
First look feature

Still Wild

Directed and shot by Andy Best

Began as a conservation film and turned into something else halfway through, which is usually how the good ones go.

Work

Panoramic braided glacial river running through Alaskan mountains
Aurora curling above black spruce, Alaska
The Milky Way over Devils Lake, campfires burning in the treeline
Pink and violet sunset over the Sea of Cortez, Baja
An older man in a straw hat on crutches against a painted wall, Baja
An arched wooden door under a tile awning on a vermillion wall, iron lantern alongside
A fly fisherman silhouetted against the sun, spray and line caught in the light
A sea cave opening onto a bright beach, Baja
A fly fisherman casting into a still turquoise lake in the Canadian Rockies
Portrait of a fisherman in a blue cap, Sicily
Last light on the spires of the Badlands
Stoney Creek, Banff
Children in the back of a Land Rover Defender, Patagonia
A lone dune under night sky, Death Valley
Yosemite valley
Desert at last light

Collaborations

National GeographicSonyPatagoniaToyotaOutsideSmugMugFlickrTreeline Outdoors
SamsungChevroletNikeAdidasColumbia SportswearMountain HardwearEddie BauerGore-TexTravel AlbertaGoal ZeroGoProInsta360DJIHuckberryCamelBakThe Nature ConservancyLemurGlyph TechOutdoor ElementMountain CollectiveB&HLaCieGerber
TiffenBespoke PostUBCOShimodaCairn

Selected features

Press

The Last Thirty

Short pieces from the road. Photo essays, and a podcast, about the parts of a trip that never make it into the picture.

Listen on Spotify. Written pieces are on the way.

Contact

info@andy.best

Assignment, campaign and expedition work. A rough scope and some dates are plenty to start with.

The Milky Way over the Alvord Desert playa with a lit rig below