Never go back…

The first time I stayed at Kicheche Bush Camp in the Masai Mara, I saw five cheetah kills. This time, I didn’t see any in a whole week, so I had to make do with silhouettes, leopards, cubs, birds—and a few slow pans in honour of Paul Goldstein…!

On the plus side, I did get a few photographic ‘firsts’:

• a lioness carrying a cub in her mouth

• a serval jumping across a river—although I didn’t have time to set a fast enough shutter speed!

• a giraffe silhouetted on the horizon at sunset.

And if there’s anybody reading this who doesn’t believe wildlife photography is the only thing that matters, the staff treated me like royalty…!

The Camp

If Bush Camp were somewhere off the A3, I’d go there every week. It’s the best place I know for cheetah hunts, and staying there is always a pleasure. Unfortunately, it’s in the Olare Conservancy of the Masai Mara in Kenya. That means it takes me 29 hours to get there door-to-door—including an Uber to Heathrow Airport, a nine-hour flight from London to Nairobi, an overnight stay at the Tamarind Tree Hotel and a 40-minute flight to the Mara.

On this occasion, my international flight was delayed by 90 minutes when someone on the plane fell seriously ill. The next day, flooding in the Mara led to my local flight being diverted from Ol Seki to Ol Kiombo via a change of planes. In the end, the first plane did go to Ol Seki, but by then my ride was waiting for me, so I had to put up with a transfer of an hour rather than 15 minutes.

To make matters worse, the plane landed two hours later than scheduled, and I couldn’t even take pictures of the wildlife as we drove to camp. The route took us through the Masai Mara National Reserve, and we didn’t have the necessary permit, so I had to leave my camera in my bag.

Bush Camp hadn’t changed very much, but my only visit was in 2018, so it wasn’t exactly familiar. I recognised a few of the staff, but Darren and Emma had been replaced by a new manager, Dido, and my general recollection of the place was a little hazy.

Dido is a man’s name in the Ma language, but it was easy enough to get his pronouns right! After a buffet lunch, he showed me to my tent, which was Sungura (meaning ‘Spring Hare). As usual, it was quite a trek…!

I took a few photos (see above), unpacked my camera bag and walked back to the main area for my first game drive…

Daily Routine

There was some flexibility in the exact timings, but the daily routine was pretty much the same as always in Africa:

• 0515 Wake up

• 0545 Mango smoothie in the main area

• 0550-1130 Morning game drive with Josphat (Sapit) in the LandCruiser (including juice and another smoothie at around 0830)

• 1300-1330 Lunch in the main area (although I switched after a few days to having dinner instead)

• 1545 Juice in the main area

• 1550-1830 Afternoon game drive with Josphat (including sundowners)

• 2000 Dinner in the main area

In between all those activities, I generally went back to my tent to rate my photos, recharge my camera batteries and surf the internet. The electricity supply and Wi-Fi signal were fine, but there was no coverage in the main area—to encourage conversation…!

Food and Drink

Lunch and dinner were both three-course meals served with whatever drinks you wanted. The food was generally Western with a few African dishes thrown in for the sake of variety, such as ‘kimanga’. A typical meal might consist of soup followed by a meat dish with a variety of salads and something creamy or chocolatey for pudding.

I don’t go to Africa for the cuisine, but it’s still a bit depressing that the main course is always a buffet (with plated starters and desserts). The dishes themselves aren’t bad, but it’s not the best format to make guests feel special. How many top restaurants in London offer diners an all-you-can-eat buffet…?!

To avoid the landslide of calories, I continued with my recent habit of having just one meal a day. I started by having lunch, and then I switched to dinner—hoping that the food might be slightly better.

I generally ate with Dido and Chris, who was one of the other guests. There was also a group of German speakers, but they preferred to eat alone—although I did talk to Tomas, Manfred, Eddie and Anja a couple of times when I bumped into them in the main area.

Staff

The staff at all the Kicheche camps are very friendly and helpful. Nothing is too much trouble, and they always seem to have a smile on their faces.

I mostly spent time with my guide, Josphat, and the manager, Dido (who was replaced by Ann when he went on leave). He seemed to appreciate my stories, and he even said he thought I’d make a good tour group leader, which was nice to hear.

In addition, I met a few others here and there—and I apologise if I get any of the names wrong:

• Ester

• Abraham

• Kennedy

• Charles

• James

• Banta

In the past, I’d always gone to Kicheche with Paul Goldstein, who’s one of the owners—either with Exodus or via a direct booking with Benson at Chameleon Safaris. However, it didn’t quite work out this time.

Paul was leading a Big Cat’s Whiskers safari with Jonathan Scott at Kicheche Mara, and I’d tried to book a place on that, but there were no single spots left. Instead, I’d booked a week at Bush Camp and a week at Valley Camp, hoping that I might still bump into the two of them somehow.

In the end, I didn’t meet Jonathan, and I only saw Paul briefly over lunch and dinner. He did go on a couple of game drives at Bush Camp, but he went with another guest in her vehicle.

Guests

Chris had been a teacher, and we got on pretty well—until she told me to be careful using the word ‘old’ to describe two ladies in their 70s!

A Swedish lady called Anneli arrived after a couple of days, and we went on a few game drives together as well as eating lunch or dinner at the same table. I gave her a few tips on photography, and when I showed her my photos, she said she might even be interested in buying a print. We shall see…

Given that the German speakers kept themselves to themselves, it was pretty quiet in camp most of the time. That was a bit of a shame as I always enjoy meeting new people when I’m on safari. However, I did benefit from being the only guest on most of my game drives.

I’d booked a private vehicle for a couple of days, but it was expensive, so the fact there weren’t too many guests in camp worked out nicely in one respect, at least!

Wildlife photography

The whole point of going to Kicheche was to photograph cheetah hunts—and ideally a kill or two. I’d visited Kicheche in 2018, 2021 and January 2024, and I’d always seen at least one kill, so I was hoping my luck would hold.

In the end, I didn’t really see one properly, but I was at least close by when one took place. Nashipae and her four 15-month-old cubs came across a young impala that Josphat hadn’t even seen. I happened to look up when one of them made the kill, but I was too far away to see it properly—let alone take any pictures.

That was disappointing, but it wasn’t the end of the world. One of the reasons I go to Africa is the sheer variety of wildlife, so there’s always something to photograph. I’m not that keen on buffaloes, elephants, giraffes or warthogs, but I’m happy to get sightings of leopards, lions or cheetahs.

If there aren’t any big cats around, I tend to focus on the birds, especially rollers, kingfishers, bee-eaters and raptors. I love to shoot them when they take off, and the pre-release capture feature on my Nikon Z8 makes that trivially easy.

Another favourite activity of mine on safari is to try to take silhouette shots of animals at sunrise or sunset…

Silhouettes

The first thing I normally do on a morning game drive is to look for a suitable place to get sunrise silhouettes—but it’s not as easy as it might sound. One of the main problems is finding the right spot. It needs to be a treeless plain sloping up to the east—ideally with a convex camber to make it easier to see animals on the horizon.

The Masai Mara is a good place to do this. The landscape is generally flat, but there are always folds in the ground or slight slopes that give you the opportunity for silhouette shots—as long as the animals cooperate!

Once I’d told Josphat what I had in mind, he was pretty good at finding wildlife in the right spots. I managed to take dozens of silhouettes, mostly of topis and Masai giraffes. There were days when there was too much cloud to see the sun rising or setting, but the weather was generally good enough.

In terms of camera settings and technique, there’s nothing very complicated about capturing silhouettes. Cameras are programmed to expect 18% of the light shining on the landscape to be reflected back, so a bright sky naturally leads to animals in the foreground being silhouetted.

I normally shoot in manual with ISO, but I’ve recently switched to using aperture priority and manual ISO for silhouette shots. That’s because the sky is almost always bright enough that you don’t have to worry about your ISO climbing too high.

If you set it to the minimum possible value (usually 64 on Nikon cameras or 100 on other brands), you can then set a suitable aperture manually and let the camera ‘float’ the shutter speed.

If you want the clouds and/or sun to be reasonably sharp, it’s wise to use an aperture of f/16—especially if you’re using a long lens. However, if it’s too dark to do that, you can always compromise by dropping it to f/11, say, or increasing your ISO.

If you want to make your photos darker or brighter, you can easily do that by changing the exposure compensation setting. Different cameras let you do this in different ways. My Sony ⍺1 has a dedicated exposure compensation dial on the top plate while my Nikon Z8 has an exposure compensation button that I have to hold down while turning the main control dial.

In practice, the main difficulty is usually finding animals in the right place. Once you’ve done that, you just have to work fast enough that you don’t miss your chance. The sun rises and sets pretty quickly near the Equator, so you don’t have long!

Quick decision-making is a big help in wildlife photography, so you need to know what kinds of shots you want to take and dial in your settings well in advance. Then, when the moment arrives, you’ll have time to choose the right composition.

Sunrise and sunset times don’t vary very much, and I generally consult the weather app on my iPhone to find out what they are locally. That way, I know well in advance when I have to be ready.

As you can see from the gallery (above), I like to take pictures of animals silhouetted on the horizon with either clouds and/or the sun in the background. The sun doesn’t take very long to rise or set, so you need to be ready and aware of what’s happening.

I ended up missing a few good shots one morning. The field of view with my 600mm lens was so narrow that I couldn’t see the part of the sky where the sun was coming up, and by the time I realised, it was too high to put it right next to the animal! Whoops…

Leopards

As well as cheetahs, leopards can frequently be seen in the Mara. Whichever camp or lodge you end up visiting, the guides will generally know about any and all sightings of the big cats, so it’s usually easy to jump on the bandwagon.

Some of the local cats even become famous. Fig was well known in the Masai Mara. She was such a beautiful and approachable leopard that thousands of people took photographs of her—and someone told me she even ended up with her own Instagram account!

I never saw Fig, but I did see a couple of her granddaughters at Valley Camp. She had many litters (before being mauled to death by a lion), and one of her daughters is called Figlet. Again, I didn’t get a chance to see her, but I did see her two cubs, Flash and Spot.

In addition, I saw Sanquet and her cub, Nadala—once in the same tree at the same time! Leopards are usually very solitary animals, so that was a rare treat. At Bush Camp, I saw Natito and her 10-month-old cub.

As you can see from the gallery (above), leopards spend a lot of time in trees. They find a comfortable branch and spend the day either hiding from predators or looking for prey. Once they make a kill, they then hoist it up into the tree, often ‘hooking’ the horns of the gazelle or antelope on a branch to make sure the carcase doesn’t fall to the ground.

Cubs

I think most people would agree that young cubs make a wildlife sighting far more interesting. They can be cute, curious and playful, and they add so many opportunities for particular activities, such as suckling, play fighting and tree-climbing.

I was lucky enough to see young lion, cheetah and spotted hyena cubs while I was staying at Bush Camp, and the hyena cubs were especially good to see. I’ve only seen young hyena cubs once before, so it was nice to have a chance to photograph them. The hyena is one of the Ugly Five, so you might say they have faces only a mother could love, but I think they’re still cute…!

Slow Pans

Paul Goldstein taught me the slow pan when I went on a photographic trip with him to Svalbard. I’ve taken thousands of slow pans over recent years, and I took a few more at Bush Camp.

Whenever Paul sees an animal or bird moving, he slows down his shutter speed to produce motion blur. That’s his thing. It’s not to everyone’s taste, I guess, but I think it’s a good way to create a sense of energy.

At Bush Camp, I took slow pans of the big cats and their prey. I was very pleased with the one I took of a cheetah hunting a warthog (see headline image), but I also like the ones in this gallery (above).

The trick is always to use the slowest possible shutter speed whilst keeping the animal’s head sharp. As a rule of thumb, I tend to use a shutter speed that represents one over my subject’s speed (in miles per hour), so that means around 1/4 or 1/5 of a second for walking animals or up to 1/60 for a cheetah at full speed.

Another problem is that animals spend so little time running around. Hunts are rare, and the only other reason most animals have for sprinting is if they’re playing with their siblings.

Sometimes, gazelles and other prey animals can suddenly bolt en masse, but you need good reactions to turn that into an opportunity for a slow pan. It happened several times on my trip to Bush Camp, but my reactions were generally far too slow. Shame…

Birds

When people ask me if I photograph birds, I often say, “Of course—as long as there aren’t any animals around!”

I’m joking, of course, but it’s true that my top priority as a wildlife photographer is the big cats. Birds can be colourful and energetic, but it’s not quite the same, is it…?

Having said that, birds almost always give the photographer more opportunities to take action shots than mammals do. When birds land, you know for a fact that they’re bound to take off again, and that means a chance to get a bird-in-flight shot.

I still take bird portraits, but I’ve learned to wait until they take off to give myself a much better chance of a great image. That sometimes makes me very unpopular with guests who’d rather not wait 20 minutes for a lilac-breasted roller to fly away (!), but it works for me.

My general approach is to look out for an attractive bird perched on a branch. I then dial in my standard settings and wait for it to fly. I usually shoot wide open in manual mode with auto ISO. My shutter speed depends on the size of the bird: 1/1600 of a second might work for an African fish eagle, but a lilac-breasted roller needs at least 1/3200, and a little bee-eater probably needs 1/4000.

As I’ve mentioned, pre-release capture makes the Z8 or Z9 a perfect tool for getting bird-in-flight shots. In the old days, I used to get very frustrated when I missed out, but now, if I get set up in time, I very rarely fail to get the shots I want.

I didn’t see many rollers or bee-eaters at Bush Camp, but there were a few eagles and grey-headed kingfishers to keep me busy—and even more at Valley Camp. You can see my favourite photos in the gallery (above).

Verdict

I often say that my enjoyment of a trip depends entirely on the quality of the photos I take, but that’s not quite true. The whole experience of being on safari has enough going for it that it doesn’t really bother me if I don’t get great sightings or produce potentially award-winning images.

There are two places where I feel truly comfortable: the first is my local tennis club, and the other is Africa. Yes, it helps to feel the emotional ‘high’ of hitting a great serve or taking a superb picture, but it’s still good to be outdoors, doing something I love with a crowd of like-minded people.

Whether it’s tennis or photography, though, one thing I hate is making mistakes. I get very frustrated if I accidentally use the wrong settings—and it’s very easy to do. That’s partly down to using a different brand of camera, which can be confusing, but there were plenty of occasions on this trip when I forgot to check my shutter speed, my frame rate or my exposure compensation—and I accidentally took a whole batch of sunrise silhouettes in JPEG rather than Raw!

It’s also true that I didn’t see as many cheetah hunts as I would’ve liked at Bush Camp, and that was a bit frustrating. However, it isn’t realistic to expect the second experience of anything to be as good as the first, and I still enjoyed my trip.

To spice things up, perhaps I’ll go to Kicheche Laikipia next year for the rhinos and move on to Laikipia Wilderness for a glimpse of Giza, the black leopard. Now, that would be exciting. I can’t wait…!

Species

Animals (34)

African bush elephant 

Banded mongoose

Bat-eared fox

Black-backed jackal 

Cape buffalo 

Cheetah

Coke’s hartebeest 

Common eland

Common impala 

Common warthog

Coqui francolin

Defassa waterbuck

Grant’s gazelle

Grass mouse

Hippopotamus 

Kirk’s dik-dik

Leopard 

Leopard tortoise 

Lion

Masai Mara

Nile crocodile 

Olive baboon

Plains zebra

Reedbuck

Rock agama lizard

Scrub hare 

Serval

Slender-tailed mongoose

Spotted hyena

Thomson’s gazelle 

Topi

Tree agama 

White-bearded wildebeest 

White-tailed mongoose 

Birds (89)

African fish eagle 

African grey hornbill

African pied wagtail 

African pygmy kingfisher 

Ashy cisticola

Bare-faced go-away-bird

Bateleur

Black kite

Black-bellied bustard

Black-chested snake-eagle

Black-faced firefinch

Black-shouldered kite

Black-winged lapwing

Blacksmith lapwing

Blue-eyed starling

Buff-breasted sandpiper

Cardinal woodpecker 

Cattle egret 

Chestnut lark

Chin-spot batis

Common kestrel

Common ostrich

Common sandpiper

Crested francolin 

Crowned lapwing

Diederik cuckoo

Egyptian goose

Emerald-spotted wood-dove 

Fork-tailed swallow

Golden-breasted bunting

Goliath heron 

Grey crowned crane

Grey-backed fiscal

Grey-headed kingfisher

Grey heron 

Grey kestrel

Hamerkop

Helmeted guineafowl 

Hildebrandt’s starling 

Isabelline shrike

Lesser sand plover

Lilac-breasted roller 

Little bee-eater 

Magpie shrike

Malachite kingfisher 

Marabou stork 

Martial eagle

Northern wheatear

Northern white-crowned shrike

Pallid harrier

Pectoral-patch cisticola 

Pied kingfisher 

Plain-backed pipit

Purple grenadier

Red-billed oxpecker 

Red-cheeked cordon-bleu

Red-necked spurfowl

Ring-necked dove 

Rufous-naped lark

Rüppell’s long-tailed starling

Secretary bird

Silverbird

Sooty chat

Southern ground hornbill

Spotted thick-knee

Spur-winged lapwing

Steppe eagle

Striated heron

Striped kingfisher 

Superb starling 

Taita Fiscal 

Tawny eagle 

Temminck’s courser

Terek sandpiper 

Three-banded plover

Usambiro barbet

Verreaux’s eagle-owl

Wattled starling

White stork

White-backed vulture 

White-bellied bustard

White-browed coucal

White-winged widowbird

Wire-tailed swallow 

Yellow bishop

Yellow-billed oxpecker 

Yellow-fronted canary

Yellow-rumped seedeater

Yellow-throated longclaw

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