Photographing The Elusive African Leopard

Ask most wildlife photographers where in the world they would choose to go to photograph leopards and the answer will nearly always be the same – Sabi Sands Private Game Reserve in South Africa.   Part of the Greater Kruger Park, but not open to the general public, Sabi Sands is rightly known as an exclusive destination. And that means an exclusive game viewing experience where guests are few but game is plentiful.

Unfenced boundaries allow wildlife to roam freely  – across the private lodges that make up the Sabi Sands reserve as well as the adjacent Kruger – giving the photographer ample opportunities to capture the majestic leopard on film. Off road drives mean you can get up close to these beautiful animals and be mesmerised by sightings of all aspects of a leopard’s life – with a kill, maybe with cubs and sometimes, just maybe with a mate. Sabi Sands prides itself on its high leopard population: in short, there is no better place to track and photograph leopards.  For that very reason it’s where we run our photography courses.

Take a look at the maps to get an idea of where in South Africa the Kruger Park and Sabi Sands are.

As you can see from the map on the right, there are numerous lodges in the Sabi Sands, from those rightly calling themselves the world’s most exclusive lodges, to the more affordable ones that will suit most people’s budgets.

A typical lodge programme would be: up early for a three hour game drive in an open top vehicle, then back for breakfast. After freshening up, you might join a ranger-led bush walk for a couple of hours or relax by the pool. Late afternoon, there’s the afternoon/evening game drive – another three hours out in the bush, perhaps with a sun-downer stop en route home for dinner.

So that’s the setting that we’ve chosen for our photographic courses, which we run at Nkorho Bush Lodge in Sabi Sands.  The entire 4-day, 5-night trip is totally focused on photography, capturing not only the elusive leopard, but also all types of wildlife, from the smallest insects to the largest land mammal, the African elephant.

Canon 1D MkIII with EF 600 f4.0 IS USM Lens at 1/125 sec, f11 and ISO 400

Canon 1Ds with EF 600 f4.0 IS USM Lens at 1/400 sec, f5.0 and ISO 200

We have an exclusive vehicle specially equipped for photographers and an air conditioned classroom at the lodge fully equipped with large screen projector (beamer), tables and chairs and PLENTY of power points. A word of caution – while most lodges in Sabi Sands say they will cater for photographers, what makes our offering different is that you never have to share the game vehicle with non-photographers.  With a maximum of 4 photographers, our game vehicles are never full, so you’re not fighting for space with 6 to 9 others!  Our game rangers are trained to drive photographers around and you’ll always be in the right place, making use of the best light, and will never be too close or too far from the subject. We’ve spent a great deal of time making sure that the course, the environment and the vehicles are designed with photographers in mind, as an all-inclusive package with no hidden charges.

Now let’s start talking about photographing the elusive leopard.  The reason that Sabi Sands is such a good venue is because the leopards there are so relaxed when approached by vehicles.   If you encounter a leopard in the wild that is not comfortable with vehicles and humans, it will usually lie down or even hide or run away. That’s what happens in most game reserves around the World.  The Sabi Sand leopards are completely the opposite, as they have grown up with vehicles and humans around them. Make no mistake, of course, they are still wild and very dangerous animals but just completely at ease with vehicles.  The game vehicles do not pose a threat to them and they see the humans inside the vehicle as part of the vehicle.  It would be completely different if you were outside the vehicle – you immediately become prey or a threat to them and as a result, they’d either run away or you’d become the hunted and end up hanging up in a tree somewhere!

Equipment

The vehicle we use is completely open and we have special tripod head brackets mounted on the vehicle to support your camera equipment.  If you are going to another lodge monopods becomes the only support, and I will always recommend that you support your camera the best you can as most of the photography you will be doing will be with fairly long focal length lenses and shutter speeds that are usually low due to photographing in early morning/late afternoon light.

The ideal focal length is 300mm plus and a fast lens (f2.8 – f4.0) is ideal.  Most of the photographers that we accompany use Canon’s EF 100 – 400 f4.5 – 5.6 IS USM lens, 300 f2.8 IS USM lens, 400 f2.8 IS USM lens or 500 f4.0 IS USM lens.  The 600mm just becomes slightly too long.  Nikon users have one of the best lenses at their disposal, namely the 200 – 400 f4.0 AF-S VR lens, nice and fast zoom with the option of adding a 1.4x converter.

Pro Tip: Don’t be afraid of using use converters. In so many forums you will see comments that converters make your images soft and that you need to stay away from them.  This is simply NOT TRUE!!!!  Here’s the secret of how to photograph pin sharp images with converters.  All you have to do is stop down one or two stops from your new maximum aperture.  As an example, if I use a 1.4x converter with a lens with a maximum aperture of 2.8, then my new maximum aperture will be 4.0.  Don’t photograph at f4.0 but stop down to f5.6 or f8.0 and you will photograph pin sharp images with your converter on.  The same is true for 2.0x converters. Let’s use the same lens with a maximum aperture of f2.8. Your new maximum aperture will be f5.6, once again stop down to f8.0 or f11. See the images below.  One thing to remember is that your Depth of Field (DoF) now becomes very shallow, so stopping down helps with that as well.  I will discuss DoF and Autofocus later in this article.

The full image on the right and a 100% view (Actual Pixels), absolutely no problem with sharpness.(c)Manus Van Dyk

Canon 1D MkIV with EF 400 2.8 IS USM Lens and EF 1.4 II Converter at 1/350 sec, f8 and ISO 1600(c) Manus Van Dyk

Canon 1D MkIII with EF 400 2.8 IS USM Lens and EF 2.0 II Converter at 1/250 sec, f11 and ISO 400. (C)Manus Van Dyk

Canon 1D MkIII with EF 400 2.8 IS USM Lens and EF 2.0 II Converter at 1/250 sec, f11 and ISO 400. The full image on the top and a 100% view (Actual Pixels) on the bottom, and again absolutely no problem with sharpness. (C) Manus Van Dyk

The full image on the top and a 100% view (Actual Pixels) on the bottom, and again absolutely no problem with sharpness.

Lighting

Leopards move around mostly in the late afternoon, through the night and in the early morning.  During the day they will sleep either in a tree (especially during the summer months) or in riverbeds close to, or under shrubs.  If they have a kill they will only leave it to go and drink water.  Kills either get hoisted into a tree or dragged under thick shrubs to hide it away from other predators or scavengers.  This obviously give us, as photographers, some serious challenges, not only the vegetation but also lighting issues!!  You can be lucky and get a leopard laying on a termite mound in full morning sun as the one below, but this is fairly rare, as they are usually in the shade.

Canon 1D MkIII with EF 400 2.8 IS USM Lens at 1/1000 sec, f5 and ISO 200 (C) Manus Van Dyk

To overcome the lighting issues you can use two different techniques, either flash or – our preferred option – Spotlight.

Pro tip: When using flash in wildlife photography you have to have the flash off-camera.  The longer your focal length, the further away the flash needs to be.  I’m not referring to a few centimetres or inches here, sometimes it needs to be at least one metre or three feet from you!!  See the images below, in both cases the flash was off-camera, the left image using a Wimberley Telephoto Bracket (that works very good if your subject is fairly close to you but not effective when you try to photograph distant subjects).  The right hand image uses Canon’s Speedlite ST- E2 Transmitter with the flash one metre (three feet) from the camera.

Canon 1D MkIII with EF 400 2.8 IS USM Lens and EF 2.0 II Converter at 1/125sec, f8 and ISO 400 plus 580 EX II flash without any compensation. (C) Manus Van Dyk

Canon 1D MkIII with EF 400 2.8 IS USM Lens and EF 2.0 II Converter at 1/125sec, f8 and ISO 400 plus 580 EX II flash without any compensation (C) Manus Van Dyk

Once the leopard’s pupils are blown out, as in the image above, or even slightly diluted, there is no way of correcting them.  Red eye removal tools don’t recognise this as red eye and therefore can’t correct it.  Obviously, if you want to spend hours in Photoshop correcting it or cloning other eyes in you can, but rather photograph the image correctly in the first place!

Due to the fact that you have four photographers on the vehicle it is nearly an impossible task to have flashes off-camera and, as I’ve shown above, also at a distance of at least 50cm (18 inches) to 1meter (three feet) from the camera. Therefore we use a spotlight to replace the flash.

There are advantages when using a spotlight; firstly, the spotlight is operated by the tracker who sits in a special seat mounted on the front of the vehicle. This allows the light to be taken far away from the photographers, thereby preventing any “red-eye”.  Secondly, the spotlight has a warm cast, balancing the natural warm light of the background, and, lastly the spotlight is usually much less harsh than a flashlight.  The disadvantage of using the spotlight is that you need to photograph at fairly high ISOs, but with most of the new DSLRs, noise is becoming less and less of a problem.

Canon 1D MkIV with EF 400 2.8 IS USM Lens at 1/90 sec, f4 and ISO 1600 with spotlight. (C) Manus Van Dyk

Canon 1D MkIV with EF 400 2.8 IS USM Lens at 1/90 sec, f4 and ISO 1600 with spotlight. (c) Manus Van Dyk

So, to summarize the equipment section, your ideal camera setup would be two DSLRs, especially those that can shoot at fairly high ISOs (1600-3200) without too much noise (e.g. Canon 1DMkIV or Nikon D3/s). For lenses you need a lens in the range from 24mm – 400mm.  For Canon users, typically the 24-105 f4 IS USM, the 70 – 200 f2.8 IS USM, the 100 – 400 f4.5 – 5.6 IS USM, the 300 f2.8 IS USM or the 400 f2.8 IS USM with 1.4x and 2.0x converters.   For Nikon users, the 24 – 70 f2.8G ED, the 70 – 200 f2.8G ED VRII, the 200 – 400 f4G ED VRII or the 400 f2.8G ED VR with 1.4x and 1.7x converters.  I usually take the 24-105 f4 IS USM for landscape images, the 70-200 f2.8 IS USM on my second body to capture any action that happens close to the vehicle, and the 100 – 400 f4.5 – 5.6 IS USM to help between 200-400mm, rather than adding a converter to the 70 – 200 lens (this lens DOES NOT give good images with converters on, even if you stop down).  Finally, the 400 f2.8 IS USM – my stock lens – with both converters.  I also take the 580 EX II flash with the ST-E2 flash transmitter, just in case.

Technique

First of all (and this will sound fairly obvious, but I have seen far too many photographers not doing it) – SUPPORT YOUR CAMERA EQUIPMENT!!  If you want to capture sharp images, you must support your camera equipment on the brackets we provide on our vehicles and if you are not with us, use a monopod as I suggested earlier.

The next critical step is to understand two basic fundamentals: Depth of Field and correct focusing techniques.   Because we are using long focal length lenses most of the time with our subject fairly close to us (between 8 – 20 meters or twenty five to sixty feet) the Depth of Field is very shallow.

Pro Tip: When you use long focal length lenses the depth of field is measured in millimetres, that’s how shallow the DOF is!  Not only is it so shallow, but the Depth of Field is also 50/50, meaning 50% in front of the focusing plane and 50% behind the focusing plane.  For example, if you use a 400mm lens with your subject 10 meters (30 feet) away from you, (it’s not uncommon to have leopards that close to you), your Depth Of Field is only:

F2.8 – 80mm (40mm in front and 40mm behind)

F4.0 – 110mm (55mm in front and 55mm behind)

F5.6 – 160mm (80mm in front and 80mm behind)

F8.0 – 220mm (110mm in front and 110mm behind)

F11 – 310mm (150mm in front and 160mm behind)

One of the problems you now have is to get a high enough shutter speed to freeze any action, while keeping your ISO as low as you can to minimize digital noise but still getting enough depth of field so that the eyes, nose and ears of the leopard are pin sharp.  F8.0 is, most of the time, a good call, but you are at the limits of your depth of field, and, as you can see in the above example, anything less than f8 and you are in trouble.  If your plane of focus is not in the correct position then you will waste the little depth of field you have, so it is imperative to use the correct focusing point.  Most photographers that shoot models and commercial products will use relatively short focal length lenses (200mm and below), have controlled light, and will work at f8-f11, giving them lots of depth of field.  You will also see that most of them only use the centre focusing point and lock the focus and recompose.  They can do this because of the amount of DoF they are working with.  If you are working with only 200-300mm of depth of field you must select the focusing point manually, and the one closest to where you will get the most out of your limited DoF.  In the images below, the left images shows the focusing point that was used and the two images on the right show the actual pixels (100% view) of the image indicating how little DoF there was. The bottom of the two images show that the nose is not in focus and I should have used f11 rather than f8.  The actual DoF I had was only 50mm and f11 would have given me 60mm but using another focusing point (indicated with the red arrow) I would have been able to get the nose in focus as well as the ears.

A 100% view (Actual Pixels) on the Right top and bottom, showing the nose not in focus due to a lack of DOF(C) Manus Van Dyk

A 100% view (Actual Pixels) on the Right top and bottom, showing the nose not in focus due to a lack of DOF(c) Manus Van Dyk

Canon 1D MkIII with EF 600 f4.0 IS USM Lens at 1/125 sec, f8 and ISO 800.  A 100% view (Actual Pixels) on the Right top and bottom, showing the nose not in focus due to a lack of DOF.

.

.

Yep, this sounds fairly harsh, but if you want to sell your images and your clients are going to make posters out of your images then you need to work at these standards and you can ONLY photograph wide open if your DOF allows you to do so!!!!

.

.

Manus van Dyk is a leading wildlife photographer for the past 10 years, living in Nelspruit, South Africa.  Over and above contributing to several Stock Image Libraries throughout the world he is one of South Africa’s leading photographic instructors in wildlife photography.  He does several workshops throughout Southern Africa for Canon SA and runs The Ultimate Digital Course for Wildlife Photographers in the world renowned Sabi Sands Private Game Reserve in South Africa.

Do you have a technique of travel adventure you would like to share? If so, please send us an email with your idea.

Related posts: The Coyote Project

Wildlife Photography

Good books: