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America, taking the animals through a corridor increasingly crowded with fences, highways and human development.
• The project won several awards for science and environmental journalism and became Riis' entry into the world of conservation photography.
• In 2008, he won a Young Explorer's Grant from National Geographic magazine, which covered some of his expenses during the pronghorn project. National Geographic used images in the magazine and a book, and it hired him to shoot pronghorn video for a series called Great Migrations, which won an Emmy for cinematography.
• "I got an Emmy, and I guess I still don't really know how to run a video camera. That's the truth of the matter," he said.
• Wildlife photojournalist Steve Winter saw Riis' pronghorn work and brought him along as an assistant on a National Geographic assignment shooting tigers in Thailand. That led to an assignment in Uganda, and then to his first full feature, shooting the Gobi bear in Mongolia in 2011.
• "I've been pretty lucky. I became friends with a few people who really helped me out and pushed my career and my assignments to the next level," he said.
• Riis prefers the camera-trap technique because it allows him to take close-up wide-angle pictures of wild animals. He approaches his work as a biologist rather than an artist, as his main interest is figuring out where the animals are going to be so he can set up the cameras.
• "You show the habitat that they depend on and you also show the animal, and the only way to do that is to be within a couple feet of the animal. Since it's a wild animal, you can't get close to it," he said.
• This year, he's been on assignments in Venezuela and Guyana, working with teams of scientists and documenting their work as well as the wildlife they're researching.
• "I'm trying to make science and conservation more accessible to the general public, trying to get people connected to what's happening to the planet," he said.
• On every assignment, he's listened to scientists talk about changes taking place, and not for the better. He's seen endangered tigers, jaguars and lions poached.
• "To witness a couple poaching events over a few months, that's pretty insane," he said.
• But as a photographer, he has a venue to help people explore the world.
• "Even a lot of Wyoming people don't have a lot of time to spend in remote parts of Wyoming where there are a lot of wildlife. More and more, people are resorting to pictures and video of these wild places," he said. "It's a way for people to connect to

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