When Roy Toft isn’t traveling the world leading photo safaris or snapping his own pictures of elusive wildlife, he returns to the 28-acre property off Highland Valley Road in Ramona that he’s called home for nearly two decades.

It’s where Toft, 61, has grown to admire the local animals and, over the last several years, captured snippets of their lives on trail cameras he’s set up.

Toft has taken the best of these photos and put them together in a photo book, “Wild Ramona,” which he plans to release in the coming months.

“Let’s make some nice images of Ramona’s wildlife,” Toft said. “It’s fun to do something local, for local people.”

His images are a step up from the typical grainy trail camera footage. His set-up includes six high-quality DSLR wide lens cameras set up around the property and up to five small strobe lights per set to produce the flash for the photos. While checking and managing the locations, Toft keeps about 180 rechargeable batteries in rotation just to power the strobe lights for the photos.

All the field equipment is in a protective housing, which Toft then mounts using custom setups when he finds an area to shoot.

“It’s time in the field, having the right equipment and just leaving it for months and months,” he said. “The imagery of the book is three years with six cameras full-time, seven days a week.”

Toft’s journey into the world of photography started in 1991, when he quit his job as a bird trainer for the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. He followed and documented his colleague Bill Toone in Borneo for several years during an exploratory visit to help the locals determine if selling butterfly larvae was a viable source of income.

Toft had been a hobbyist photographer before, and would take pictures of birds in the free-flight aviaries at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. He also dabbled during vacations. Toft had had thoughts of making photography a full-time career, but the Borneo trip gave him the push he needed to get started.

“It was disconcerting, it was exciting, it was scary,” he said. “No more paycheck coming in and I realized pretty quickly trying to build a portfolio back in those days, you had to spend pretty much all your own money to go out and produce a portfolio of work.”

Over the next several years he built up his portfolio and eventually got connected with National Geographic photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols in 1994 as his assistant. After finishing a shoot at the San Diego Zoo, Nichols invited Toft to continue as his assistant while he photographed other zoos in the U.S. for a story on new zoos and their updated technology.

Toft went on to assist Nichols for the next two years, taking photos of tigers for National Geographic in India.

Toft said he did mainly remote camera work during this project, in the early years of trail cameras in 1994. He described the process of camera trapping as setting up a studio in the field. The animal would trip the motion sensor as it wandered by, essentially taking its own photo. Toft was managing six cameras on trails, setting up near watering holes during the hot months.

“For tigers that was a perfect fit,” Toft said about the the camera setup.

“A 50-page story in Nat Geo, a good majority of those photos came from camera traps. It’s wide angle, you’re close up, it was all very unique then,” he said.

Toft didn’t continue shooting with camera trapping much going forward. It was a lot of work to acquire the equipment, set up the cameras and leave them out for months while constantly checking on them and changing batteries, he said.

Until the pandemic hit, Toft led photo safaris where he took small, private groups to wildlife photography destinations while putting on workshops and answering questions along the way. It was his photo safaris to Costa Rica, where he’s been visiting for 30 years, that inspired his first book “Osa, Where the Rainforest Meets the Sea.”

When the pandemic prompted the cancellation of Toft’s photo safaris for the foreseeable future, he revisited camera trapping, this time to get photos of big cats on his own property. He and his wife, Stella, placed small trail cameras around the area to see what animals showed up, but didn’t get very good photos, he said.

“I knew the stuff was out there,” Toft said. “At some point when COVID hit I decided I needed another project.”

Toft said he had made a trail going through the property in 2007 after his house and vegetation burned down in the Witch Creek Fire. He rebuilt and replanted in the same spot, and since then the plant life had regrown around the trail, it left a corridor for animals to use.

Over time Toft found his favorite spots along the trail to set up the equipment and start capturing footage. He said his wife was a huge help during the process.

“She helps me taking care of the trail where all the animals walk and going down with me to change batteries and swap cameras around,” Toft said. “She’s been a big part.”

Stella Toft said it was a fun project to take on, but a lot of work was involved, sometimes taking two or three hours to set up a camera. Walking the trail to check on the cameras was a way she and her husband were able to exercise during the pandemic, she said, plus the payoff for all the work was huge.

“Every other day, every third day, we would go and swap the camera cards,” she said. “It was like twice-a-week Christmas because we were just excited to see what the camera trap got.”

As he did for the tigers in India, Roy Toft set up camera traps at places with water that would bring in the animals.

“You know, it’s amazing, I’ve never seen a mountain lion here,” Toft said. “Twenty years and I’ve never seen one in person, but I’ve got great photos,” he said as he pulled up a picture of a mountain lion and its cub one of his cameras took.

Bobcats, mountain lions, foxes, rattlesnakes, deer, birds and even some close ups on bugs were some of the animals Toft’s cameras caught in action.

Each chapter of his “Wild Ramona” photo book will highlight a different set, he said. Toft creates sets based on a background he thinks will be interesting — it can’t all be about the animal, he said. Like an artist, Toft worked to create a unique scene with good lighting to frame the animals.

Sometimes that means finding the perfect rock to use as a backdrop. For one set Toft built his own pond to attract the animals.

“An animal walking on a trail gets old real fast,” Toft said. “You gotta have something special.”

All this came together for his favorite photo of the project, which he chose to be the cover of the book. To some, it may just look like a mountain lion emerging from some flowers, but to Toft it was an artist’s dream come true.

When the ceanothus, or California lilac, started blooming on Toft’s trail, his wife remembers him hurrying out to set up a camera to capture what might pass through during the two-week bloom period.

Two days later he found evidence of a mountain lion passing through and was initially devastated because he thought he had missed it, she said. She reminded him about the camera they had set up and he discovered the photo it took.

“For those to come through, the ceanothus blooming and a mountain lion to come through and for me to have a camera there, it’s all good,” he said.

Toft said the plan is to self publish and have the book go to the printer in mid-October and ready for sale by February 2024. He said he hopes the book will help normalize wildlife.

So much of people’s experiences with wildlife is reactionary or based on fear, Toft said. Through his own wildlife encounters, Toft said he’s come to realize this fear comes from a lack of knowledge.

Stella said it’s been rewarding to be able to preserve a piece of Ramona’s wildlife in a world were it’s quickly disappearing.

“For me it’s almost scary,” she said. “I don’t know if the kids of our kids are going to be able to see wild animals.”

Toft invites readers to share in his appreciation and excitement of Ramona’s wildlife, instead of being afraid when a mountain lion walks through.

“If they can have this book on their table and be proud when we have a mountain lion walk through instead of calling the authorities, then that book has done what I wanted,” he said.

“Be proud of where we live in Ramona and actively work to keep these things. They all go away if we don’t appreciate them.”