Graham Wallington was born on the 23rd of January 1971 in Johannesburg to Shirley and Barry Wallington. He has a younger, but much taller (6'11") brother Keith, who is also much smarter and substantially more mature. :)

He was lucky enough to go to only one school, St John's College in Johannesburg, and while his academic and sporting performance were average and dismall respectivley, his love of art, photography and people was born and nurtured. He also picked up some pretty solid values and philosophies from both his parents and school, much of which was undone by his friends, most of whom remain close both geographically and emotionally.

At the age of 8, Graham was given his first computer (ZX Spectrum 48k) by his parents. It was on this 'toy' that he discovered the programming language of Basic (and later Machine Code) which just seemed to make imminent sense. He completed his first working piece of software, a very 'basic' flight simulator, within a few months and thereafter his parents never stopped nurturing this passion with more computers, lessons and encouragement.

His grand parents and parents would often take him and his brother on holidays to the Kruger National Park, the Okavango Delta, Mauritius, Plettenberg Bay and sailing in the Seychelles. These experiences fostered a deep love, respect and enjoyment of all things wild and natural. On one of these trips Graham was introduced, at the age of 11, to SCUBA diving, and another life long passion was born.

Graham's father gave him his first camera, and since that day photography has played a constant role in his life. He has boxes and discs of images stretching back to childhood. However, it was after Graham built a darkroom at the age of 14, that he discovered that he was actually far more talented at manipulating and 'finishing' photographs than at taking them.

By the age of 18, and when he left school, Graham was a qualified SCUBA diving instructor, and had decided to follow this career path. His first job was at the Le Galawa Sun on the island of Grande Comore in the Comoro Islands. He spent almost a year on these beautiful islands discovering new dive sites, guiding tourists underwater and learning how to drive boats and 'fix things' with very little. Then he moved to Los Angeles, California, and began working for NAUI College as an Instructor Trainer. This lasted 9 months before Graham found himself working as a divemaster and boat captain on Grand Cayman in the Carribean for Don Fosters Dive. For a year he did hundreds of awe inspiring dives, took thousands of people SCUBA diving and snorkeling, took countless underwater images and had a ball captaining several stunning boats. But the road beckoned and this time he went to Australia's Barrier Reef (3 months) and then spent another year working in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, which was just mind blowing above and below the water. It was here that he got the opportunity to practise his underwater videography and photography extensivley.

On return to South Africa, Graham changed career and went into the financially lucrative world of real estate. Although to begin with it was not very lucrative at all, and he was forced to fall back on his photography to pay the bills. He specialised for some time in photographing buildings from the air for their owners, and would spend many hours each week flying around Johannesburg. Eventually his property career began to take off and Graham formed his own company specialising in the marketing of off-plan (sold before they are built) small apartments in Johannesburg. The business took off, but Graham had no idea how to run it, manage it or keep everyone doing what they were supposed to. As a result the very poor cash flow killed what was otherwise a very successful business, and Graham found himself looking for a new career ...

He dabbled with the idea of creating a magazine focused on crime, but couldn't stomach the images of violence that he found in the archives of the Star newspaper. In his research and wanderings on the computer, Graham discovered a gateway to something called the World Wide Web in 1994, only a few months after it came into existance. He quickly got a copy of the browser Mozila, which he still has in it's origonal box, and set about surfing the few hundred thousand web pages (not web sites) that existed in this new world. Graham was immediatley smitten by this discovery and he knew that this was going to be his future.

With a school friend he formed a small web design company and set about the impossible task of convincing people that having a website for their company was not only a good idea, but one day every one would be doing it. At first there were very few takers, but slowly it began to pick up and soon they had developed a bit of a name for themselves in the nascent world of Internet website design in Johannesburg, South Africa. As he designed and coded more and more websites Graham found himself thinking more and more about creating a website of his own. Something that would have global appeal and be unique and useful ... not another brochure site.

He briefly considered gold because it is something that South Africa, and specifically Johannesburg exports to the world, but very quickly realised that gold had a very small future online. Then he stumbled upon the Amazing Fish Cam, a webcam looking at somebody's fish tank at home. This was as exciting to Graham as first finding the World Wide Web ... his website would have to be based on a webcam, but what should the subject be?

Wildlife of course! And what better place than Africa to deliver LIVE wildlife to the world via the Internet. From experience he knew that a waterhole would generate the best chance of seeing a wild animal in the african wilderness, and everybody knows that the best game viewing is in the Sabi Sands Reserve, Mpumulanga, South Africa. But this was all going to cost money (far more than he realised then) and he didn't have much. So Graham needed a backer, a partner to invest the money to help him realise his dream. He found just such a person in Paul Clifford, and together they founded AfriCam.

The first webcam was installed on Djuma Game Reserve at Bush Lodge. None of the other landowners in the Sabi Sands saw any point, or even understood, what Graham was on about when he asked their permission to install an Internet webcam at one of their waterholes. However, Jurie and Pippa Moolman like the idea and immediatley said: "yes, go for it!" Ever since those first meetings and trips to Djuma in 1998 (just after Josh was born) Jurie, Pippa and Graham have been the best of friends.

AfriCam turned out to be a massive adventure and steep learning curve on many levels. The traffic to the webcams grew and grew so quickly that within a month it was the busiest website on the African continent, and held the title for at least 4 years. After the initial investment by Paul Clifford, which was more than double what was predicted by the time it worked, there were many other investors and a great deal of money was invested. Although AfriCam achieved some amazing things, including more than 50 wildlife webcam instalations all over the world as well as a 27 episode LIVE TV series to the BBC's UKTV Horizons, a lot of money was wasted as well. In the end however, $15 million dollars of committed investment did not matarialise, the dot-com-bomb had gone off and the investment could not be replaced. As a result the company folded in 2002 under the pressure of its expenses with no way to fund them. It was a great loss, but a lot of lessons had been learned.

Although Graham did stay involved in AfriCam for a while, when a few of the die hards bought it out of liquidation, it was never the same and slowly limped along as a shadow of the once pioneering broadcaster. Finally, when Campbell Scott and Jurie Moolman dissolved their partnership in Vuyatela, Paul, Jurie, Peter Armitage, Alex Wills (Graham's cousin) and Graham all left AfriCam to Campbell.

Graham and Peter Armitage (AfriCam's ex CEO and Graham's good friend) decided to strike out on their own onto the dangerous waters of TV channel creation. First they created quite a successful TV show called 'Investor Campus' where Peter would analyse a different Johannesburg Stock Exchange company each week, and then they formed ProperTV, which was a weekend long TV show showcasing properties for sale in South Africa. The business model was interesting, the work was desperatley dull and the money was barely there. They had dreams of creating a full blown property TV channel and launching it in the United Kingdom, and it might have worked ... if they had the capital. (This is the story of Graham's life: "Oh, what could be done with capital.") But alas, they ended up giving the channel to Summit TV, the parent channel and broadcaster and moving on ...

They decided to create the Business Television Network. An ambitous (maybe too ambitous) LIVE business TV channel in the style of CNBC or BloombergTV  only with a different business model. Instead of licensing the channel to pay tv operators, like the other two did, BTN would create its own closed subscriber base from the ground up. In other words Graham and Peter would not only create 8 hours per day of fresh LIVE and useful business TV content they would also secure and build a brand new network of viewers and subscribers on their own satelite pay tv platform aimed exclusivley at the proffesional investment market. In spite of what seemed like an impossible mission they almost pulled it off. 3 months of preperations, followed by 1 month of broadcasting and then, you guessed it, they went belly up due to a lack of funding!! Actually this time it was probably a good thing, as the workload would have killed them both.

Peter returned to a very succesful career in the world of financial services, while Graham struck out into the notoriuosly dificult world of natural history filmmaking. A genre of TV that is famous for no work and even less money. At first he produced small inserts for the likes of 50/50 on the SABC (South African Broadcasting Corporation) including a series called: 'Djuma Diaries"and then an investigative program about the ilegal killing of leopards for Carte Blanche on Mnet. Later he directed and produced a 60 minute pilot on behalf of ORTV (United Kingdom) for Animal Planet called Okavango Untamed. It was during the making of this film that Diana Kruger, the presenter, Alex Wills (Graham's cousin and the camera man on the shoot) and Graham were atacked by a hippo. Diana was seriously injured and very nearly lost her leg. She did in fact end up having many many operations and still suffers as a result.

Graham was then given the opportunity to direct a three part series in the Serengeti, Tanzania for National Geographic. The producer on this series was Emily Barnett, and it was on the very romantic plains of the Serengeti that Emily and Graham fell in love. Late one night, while following hunting lions in Infra Red, they began discussing the content, channel and business that would become WildEarth. These discussions and dreams continued during post production in London and then in Johannesburg after Emily decided to move out to South Africa. For Christmas in 2005 Emily bought Graham the domain name: www.wildearth.tv ... and WE was born.