For me, the Congo rainforest is the essence of wilderness. As you venture into it, the roads and navigable river tributaries become ever more vegetation-clogged until eventually the only way forwards is on foot, through boggy swamps and along narrow forest trails…
In the relentless heat of the day, Shompole Conservancy seems like an inhospitable place. A layer of fine dust blankets everything and it is impossible to move without sending puffs of it drifting off on the breeze. It is very dry and it might appear that little wildlife could survive here. At night, however, the story is quite different…
In early 2019, I released my first images of a black leopard in Kenya. However, the project did not end there. For a period of time, I knew where I could find an African black leopard and I was keen to make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
As I was winding up the fieldwork for Land of Giants, I shifted focus to another of Tsavo’s majestic inhabitants: Black Rhino. Tsavo West is a one of the most ruggedly wild and beautiful landscapes I have encountered in Africa, and a fitting bastion for these ancient mammals.
Since childhood I have been fascinated by stories of black panthers. For many years they remained the stuff of dreams and of farfetched stories told around the campfire at night. Nobody I knew had ever seen one in the wild and I never thought that I would either. But that didn’t stop me dreaming…
Earlier this year, the BBC set me a challenge… to recreate my African Wildlife at Night photos here in the UK.
The low-light capabilities of modern cameras allow us to photograph wildlife in ways that would previously have been impossible. Over the last year or so, I have pushed my cameras to the limits in order to take striking images of nocturnal African animals.
In August last year I undertook an assignment for WWF in the Zambezi Region of Namibia. Our aim was to obtain high-quality images of elusive animals, some of which had only ever been photographed on research cameras before.
During my year in Zambia, I started to use camera traps to photograph nocturnal wildlife. A camera trap is a stationary camera that is trigged automatically when an animal is detected in a predetermined position. I usually positioned my traps on busy animal trails. In...
