Will Burrard-Lucas has added the elusive black leopard to his portfolio of dramatic photographs, writes Oliver Smith
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With modern TV documentaries offering impossibly intimate access to the rarest of animals, it’s easy to assume no species hasn’t been snapped time and again. Not so for the black leopard. So uncommon is the big cat that there has been no scientific documentation of one in Africa since 1909. Until now.
Will Burrard-Lucas, a British photographer, had heard rumours that the elusive creature had been spotted at Kenya’s Laikipia Wilderness Camp. After following leopard tracks with a guide, he speculatively set up a camera trap. After three fruitless nights, his luck changed on the fourth. “I don’t think it sank in immediately what I’d achieved,” he said. “Usually with the flash, you can see the animal very clearly. But as [the leopard] blended in with the black night, all I could see were these eyes staring out of the picture.”
Burrard-Lucas described the historic photographs as “the culmination of a decade of experimentation and efforts to push the frontiers of wildlife photography”. Here he chooses five more of his favourite images.
For more of Burrard-Lucas’s images, follow @willbl l on social media.
Audley Travel (01993 838510; audleytravel.com/kenya) om/kenya) offers a nine-day trip p from £5,000 per person (based ased on two sharing) including ding three nights at Laikipia pia Wilderness Camp (full board), ard), one night in Nairobi bi (B&B) and three nights hts in the Masai Mara a (full board) including international and internal flights and transfers.
A SHOWER OF PENGUINS“I guide photographic trips toAntarctica and the Subantarctic islands every year, but this image from the Falkland Islands, taken in 2009, is my favourite from the region. It shows rockhopper penguins washing salt from their feathers after emerging from the sea. To capture the wonderful scene, I exchanged my telephoto lens for a wide angle and crawled as close as possible. This allowed me to bring in more of the surrounding environment.The perspective really appealed to me and thereafter I aimed to capture close-up images of other wild animals around the world.”
LEOPARDS SPOTTED AT GROUND LEVEL“What I really dreamt of was capturing close-up images of iconic wildlife in Africa – the sort of wildlife that might maul or trample me to death if I even left my vehicle. To achieve this, I created BeetleCam, a remote-control buggy for my DSLR camera. Today I use a fifth-generation BeetleCam to capture ground-level images of animals across Africa, including lions, leopards, African wild dogs, hyenas and elephants. This image shows a young leopard and her mother that I photographed with BeetleCam in 2013, while living in Zambia for a year.”
DRAGONS IN THEIR DEN“I visited the island of Komodo in 2011 and wanted to get a close-up, wide-angle image of a legendary Komodo dragon in its forest habitat. These are the largest lizards on Earth and they are ferocious predators, so simply crawling up to them was not an option. Instead,LIONS LI AND STARS ST“By 2015, digital cam cameras had com come a long way and their lowlight per performance was ma making it possible to photograph ani animals at night so much better. Du During a project to photograph Af African wildlife at
BARN OWL BY NIGHT“To capture close-up images of shy creatures, I started developing my own Camtraptions camera trap system. These are stationary high-quality cameras that I leave on a game trail for days or weeks at a time, with a sensor to automatically trigger the camera when an animal passes. This is an image taken with one of my camera traps in the UK in 2017. I used invisible infrared flashes to avoid blinding the barn owl as it landed.”
night in Liuwa Plain in Zambia, I wanted to capture the animals under the starry sky, so I used my BeetleCam to achieve the ground-level perspective. I lined the lions up with the Milky Way and illuminated them with an off-buggy flash.”