Some photos are harder to come by than others. The average paparazzo will tell you that much. But capturing the rarest of images can often put a photographer’s very life in jeopardy. Far trickier than snapping the picture of an unsuspecting celebrity from the other end of the beach with a telephoto lens are the shots taken in more demanding environments with even wilder species set in the middle of the frame.
     Prints from an assortment of nature and wilderness photographers are on display at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles through April 17, and what the pictures all have in common is that they were perilously difficult to take. Risking the loss of life and limb in bone-chilling Antarctic waters, gator-infested swamplands, disease-ridden jungles, or at the site of erupting volcanoes, the lensmen responsible for these images managed to come away with photographic evidence of scenes rarely observed by the human eye.