“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.” – Helen Keller

We went out on our morning drive and it was just before sunrise when we got tracks of a big male leopard. My tracker got off the vehicle and showed me how fresh the tracks were and that he could not be too far away from us.

Tracking took us about 20 minutes and we found the male leopard walking across the road in front of us. It seemed like he was on quite a mission, staring at something in the distance and doing fast walks. Eventually I realised that it could be that he saw a warthog going into its hole as the male walked straight towards a big termite mound. We made a big circle around him and watched as he approached the termite mound. At that stage it was obvious that the warthog was gone and the male gave up on the hunt, he went and lay down on top of the mound with a beautiful sunrise behind him.

It was clear that this would make for a great photo.

I played around with the settings because of the strong light coming from behind the leopard. I got it right and took a photo that showed the beauty of both the leopard and the sunrise in the background.

Equipment used

• Camera – Canon 7D Mkii
• Lens and Focal length – Sigma 150-600mm F5 – 6.3 DG @200mm

Settings used to capture this image

• ISO – 640
• Aperture – F 5.6
• Shutter – 1/400

In Lightroom I didn’t do much - just pushed the Whites up with +10 and dropped the Blacks to -15.