I’ve taken more pictures of cheetahs than of any other animal, so here are a few things I’ve learned along the way…
Action Shot - High Shutter Speed
To me, a kill is the most exciting thing you can witness as a wildlife photographer. It could be a bear catching a salmon at Brooks Falls or four male lions taking down a buffalo, but the most exciting of all is probably a cheetah hunt.
Until I went to Kicheche Bush Camp in the Masai Mara in 2018, I’d never seen a kill on safari, and I was getting very frustrated. Fortunately, Paul Goldstein came to the rescue, and on that trip I saw five cheetah kills in a week!
The picture above shows the first of those kills, and I must admit I was very lucky to get such a good shot. The whole thing was over in less than 10 seconds. The cheetah started stalking a Thomson’s gazelle., it sprinted after it. It caught it, it killed it and it was all over!
I’d dialled in a high shutter speed (1/1600), and I tried to focus on the cheetah, but it was moving too fast. Somehow, my focus slipped on to the gazelle, and I ended up with one shot out of a burst of around 25 that showed a sharp gazelle and a blurred cheetah racing behind it.
Fortunately, the animals were heading straight towards me, so it didn’t much matter that the gazelle was sharp rather than the cheetah. However, they were still over a hundred yards away, and another gazelle rather got in the way, so I had to crop the shot dramatically and ‘lose’ the other gazelle!
After that, I saw four other cheetah kills on my trip to Kicheche, and I was able to get a few slow pan shots of cheetahs and a couple of their cubs learning how to hunt a scrub hare.
However, I never managed to get a better kill shot than this one. It’s just a very difficult shot to pull off. You have to have the right settings, a good starting position in your vehicle and, of course, a large dollop of luck…!
So what can you do to improve your chances?
The most important thing is careful preparation. “The readiness is all,” as Shakespeare would say, and that means getting the right settings and standing in the right position.
If you’re looking to take shots at a high shutter speed, you should probably be on Manual (using Auto ISO) at 1/1600 of a second and around f/8. That gives you the best chance of reducing motion blur and also allows for a reasonable depth of field.
You should also be using AF-C (Nikon) or AI-Servo (Canon). This allows the focus to be updated continuously as the animal moves. There are different versions available, but I prefer to use Nikon’s 3D tracking - although I’ve recently experimented with the d25 option that doesn’t track the subject but uses 25 points instead of just one.
Finally, I’d use back button focus so that you can keep focusing even when you’re taking pictures.If you have a vehicle with an open top, you should be standing up and resting the end of your lens on a beanbag on the rail that goes round the edge of the roof. That gives you the best view and allows you to pan properly.
There’ll probably be at least one other person in the truck, so it’s worth moving your lens from one side to another beforehand just to make sure you have enough room to work.When the action starts, it’s important to pan across smoothly with the subject, which should be the cheetah rather than its prey.
Try to take short burst rather than one long ‘spray and pray’.
If you’re using a DSLR, the fact that the mirror is constantly coming down will slightly impede your view, so you need a break to make sure that you’re still following the cheetah and - crucially - that you still have focus lock. Once you lose focus, it doesn’t matter how many shots you take because you won’t want to keep any of them!
You should also bear in mind that it’s the kill shot that is the big prize here. Shots of a cheetah running fast on its own are no substitute for the moment of truth when you have both animals in the frame and the cheetah is tripping its prey.
If you manage to follow all those tips, then - who knows? - you might get lucky.
The only problem, of course, is that cheetah kills don’t come around all that often, so the best thing to do before you go on safari is to practise closer to home. That might involve deer in your local park or birds in flight or just cars and bicycles on a nearby main road.
I know it’s not the same, but, as Gary Player always used to say, “The more I practise, the luckier I get!”
Action Shot - Slow Pan
I took this shot on the same trip to Kicheche in 2018, and I took it in almost the same way. The only difference was that Paul had been in my ear for a couple of days trying to persuade me to use a slower shutter speed.
Paul’s a great fan of the slow pan to heighten the sense of energy through the use of blurred legs or wings and a blurred background, and I’m now a convert.
The problem with taking action shots at a high shutter speed is that it doesn’t look like anything is actually moving. Imagine taking a shot of a Formula 1 car driving at 200mph down the Hanger straight at Silverstone. If your shutter speed is more than about 1/1000 of a second, then it just looks as if the car is parked on the track!
Far better to experiment with a much slower shutter speed - around 1/50 to 1/200 of a second - in order to generate blur in the right places.
The exact speed depends on the speed of the animal and its angle of movement - the faster it is and the closer it is to moving at right angles to you across the frame, the faster your shutter speed needs to be.
The idea, though, is to keep it as SLOW as possible while still keeping the most important part of the subject sharp. In the case of wildlife, that will be the eye (or just the head if the animal is smaller or further away).
For the cheetah shot above, I used 1/100 of a second, and the head is pretty sharp (although not quite perfect).
However, the cheetah’s legs are a bit blurred, and the background is also blurred, which gives a much more vivid impression of the movement of the animal, which was sprinting across the savannah at around 68mph!
In terms of my settings and technique, they were pretty much the same as for the high shutter speed shot, but the shutter speed obviously has to be a lot slower. It’s not an exact science, and you’ll have to experiment in the field, but here’s a rough guide to the right shutter speeds for slow pan shots:
Elephant: 1/4 of a second
Walking animal: 1/6-1/15
Running animal: 1/13-1/20
Birds in flight: 1/15-1/125 (depending on the size and speed of the bird)
Cheetah at full speed: 1/60-1/100
In order to get such slow shutter speeds, you’ll have to adjust the aperture and/or ISO settings. If it’s a cloudy day, you can probably get away with simply using a much smaller aperture such as f/16 or f/22 and staying in Manual mode using Auto ISO.
However, game drives in Africa often take place in bright sunlight, and that means you might run up against the aperture limit of your camera and lens, which might be f/32 or f/36.
If that happens (or if you’re simply worried about the kind of diffraction effects that tend to soften images at narrow apertures), you might want to switch to shutter priority (Time Value or Tv if you’re a Canon user). You can then usually set an artificially low ISO value that’s not available using Auto ISO.
On my Nikon D850, for example, the base ISO is 64, but I can go all the way down to ISO 32 if I select it manually. That gives you an extra stop of wiggle room when it comes to your aperture setting.
If you’re slow panning a cheetah in grassland, your shots might look a bit better with 1/3 or 2/3 of a stop of positive exposure compensation.
When it comes to the technique of panning itself, there are a few more things to bear in mind:
Keep your elbows tucked in at your sides for stability and hold the camera with both hands - rather like the tail gunner in a Lancaster bomber!
Take pictures only in the middle portion of the panning arc (after you’ve had time to get used to the motion of the animal but before it starts to face away from you).
Try to keep the central focus point in your viewfinder over the eye of the animal (because it’s usually more sensitive than the rest).
Try to turn as smoothly as possible, relying on your torso and big muscle groups rather than your wrists and arms.
To summarise, the slow pan is an exercise in risk and reward. It’s much more difficult to pull off, but the prize is that much greater.
If you want to sell more prints or win competitions or just impress your family and friends, it pays to experiment. When Paul Goldstein first taught me the slow pan on a cruise in Spitsbergen, I took 1,504 pictures during the day, and I only kept four!
However, I’ve practised whenever I could, and my hit rate now is much higher. I still fluffed my chance when we saw a cheetah kill on my second trip to Kicheche, but I’m not giving up!
Having a high frame rate makes life easier, so that’s why I bought a motor drive for my D850 that allows me to shoot at nine frames per second.
Using a tripod is impossible on a game drive, but that’s another way in which you can give yourself a better chance of success. Good luck…!
Portrait - Through the Grass
Every now and again, I learn a new photographic technique. It doesn’t happen very often, but it’s a great feeling when it does!
Portraits of animals can very easily be a bit boring, and it’s sometimes hard to turn them into ‘Wow!’ shots, but one way of doing that is to use a blurred foreground to mask part of the animal.
I saw this first in Jérémie Villet’s prints in the Wildlife Photography of the Year exhibition at the National History Museum, and it now seems to have become quite fashionable. Jérémie generally takes pictures in winter environments, so it was generally snow in the foreground, but long grass works just as well.
The only problem with taking this type of shot in Africa is getting close enough to the ground to make it work.
You’ll usually be on a game drive in a safari truck, and getting out of the vehicle will be too dangerous if there are big cats around, so you’ll just have to do what you can.
That might mean finding a spot where the animals are slightly above you (making it easier to shoot at their level) or opening the door and holding the camera down by the side of the vehicle.
The ideal solution would be to climb out of the truck (on the opposite side from where the animals are) and lie underneath it, but those kinds of opportunities don’t come along very often!
Once you’ve found a good vantage point, the trick is to get a blurred foreground while keeping your subject sharp.
That can be quite difficult as the autofocus system on your camera will naturally try to focus on the grass rather than the animal, so you have to be patient and maybe even be prepared to switch to manual focus.
As soon as you’ve managed to focus on the animal, you should take a burst of shots in order to maximise your chances of getting a ‘keeper’.
A stray blade of grass blowing across the face of a cheetah can ruin the picture, and that’s often impossible to see in the viewfinder, so it’s a numbers game. The last thing you want to do is get back home and find you didn’t take enough ‘insurance’ shots when you had the chance.
When it comes to settings, I’d recommend using Manual mode on Auto ISO with a reasonably fast shutter speed (1/1000-1/2000 of a second) and a wide open aperture (usually either f/4 or f/5.6).
You’re not trying to blur windblown grass by using a slow shutter speed, and the whole point of the shot is to generate foreground blur, so you don’t want the extra depth of field that comes with a narrow aperture. After that, it’s just a matter of timing.
You’ll probably have to wait until the animal is sitting up before you’re able to take any pictures, but be careful about the background. You want the animal to be surrounded by a sea of grass, so try to crop out the sky or any other intrusive elements such as trees, vehicles or other animals.
If it all works out, you’ll have taken a shot that very few other people have seen, and you should allow yourself a quiet smile of pride…
Portrait - Wide-angle Close-up
Paul Goldstein wasn’t very impressed when I turned up at Kicheche without my wide-angle lens. I must admit, I did want to practise wide-angle wildlife portraits, but I also wanted to pack lightly to avoid having to check a bag, so I didn’t think about it too carefully. I also had plenty more Covid-related things to worry about…!
In the end, the lack of a wide-angle lens didn’t much matter, but there were certainly a few occasions when Paul switched lenses in order to take advantage of a dramatic sky.
The whole point of a wide-angle close-up is to be able to fit in as much background as possible. It’s one version of an ‘environmental portrait’, and you need a focal length of around 18-35mm to pull it off.
However, getting the subject to appear big enough in the frame means you either need to be very close or you need to be shooting a big animal like an elephant or a giraffe.
The raison d’être of this type of shot is to ‘tell a story’. That phrase always annoys me, but I can at least understand the idea behind it, which is to show animals in their natural environment.
I tend to favour close-ups, but I don’t want to have only one string to my bow, so I’m prepared to give it a try. If that means having to switch lenses in the middle of a game drive, then so be it, but I’ll probably end up simply swapping my 18-35mm for my 80-400mm for a few days the next time I’m on safari…
For a wide-angle close-up, your settings are less important than the focal length of your lens and the position of the animal.
The whole point of choosing a wide-angle lens is that it distorts perspective, exaggerating the size of nearby objects whilst de-emphasising those in the distance, thus increasing the apparent distance between them.
This is particularly useful when you’re very close to an animal and you have something you want to show in the background such as a dramatic cloud formation or a vibrant sunset.
All you have to do is to get as close and as low as possible, choose an appropriate aspect ratio (probably portrait in order to fit in the sky) and snap away…!
For this particular shot, I obviously didn’t have my wide-angle lens with me, so I had to make do with my 80-400mm, and I was lucky that we were just far enough away from the cheetahs that I could fit them both in!
Even at 80mm, the tail of the female cheetah is slightly exaggerated in size, but that effect would have been multiplied if I’d been using my 18-35mm lens.
At the end of the day, a close-up taken with a long lens could have been taken at any range and look just the same, but a close-up taken with a wide-angle could only have been taken from a few feet away, and it’s that intimacy that you’re trying to capture with this type of shot.
Yes, David Yarrow’s been doing it for years, but he has camera traps and a much bigger budget, so I do what I can…!
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