In Search of a Lion: Wildlife Photography in Kruger National Park

At 7:14 in the morning, on the last safari of the trip, the lion turned its head, found my eyes across fifteen feet of open air, and held the look for just long enough that I forgot I was holding a camera. Then I remembered, and pressed the button.

A young male lion standing a mildly terrifying fifteen feet from me in the wild. © Greg Purnell

We landed at Hoedspruit Airport on the afternoon of November 23rd, 2022, and by 4pm we were already out on the bush in an open-air safari vehicle, squinting into the low afternoon light. Morgan Forman, a friend and photographer who had traveled with me first from Seattle and then from Cape Town, was in the seat beside me. Neither of us had been on a safari before. I had looked at enough safari photography to understand what the work asked: patience, long glass, good light, the willingness to sit with conditions you can't control. What I hadn't accounted for, what no photograph had quite prepared me for, was what it feels like to be fifteen feet from a wild animal with nothing between you and it. That is not a photographic problem. It is a physical one. The adrenaline arrives before the camera comes up, and for the first drive or two, managing that response was its own challenge.

Sausage Tree Safari Camp sits in the middle of Kruger National Park, surrounded by bush on every side, accessible only by unpaved tracks that the camp's drivers navigate all too easily. You are not permitted to leave camp on foot. These are not the terms of a zoo, or even a managed reserve. You are a guest in the animals' space, operating by their rules, and the vehicle is both your access and your only real protection.

The Vehicle, the Guides

The safari vehicle was a modified Toyota: completely open, no canopy, no walls, no roof. If it rained you got wet. If a branch was at face level you ducked. There was nothing between us and the environment except the option to stay seated, which, given what we were occasionally fifteen feet from, we exercised without argument (which, it turns out, is easier when the alternative is a lion).

Two guides accompanied us on every outing. The driver navigated. The tracker sat in a purpose-built chair mounted to the front of the vehicle, out over the hood, positioned ahead of the bumper with an unobstructed view of the road and the terrain on either side of it. This is where animals are found: not from inside the vehicle, but from that exposed forward position, reading the ground.

Our expert tracker perched out ahead of the vehicle in his special hood-mounted seat. © Greg Purnell

There was no technology involved in any of this. No GPS tracking of collared animals, no radio telemetry, no app. Our tracker found wildlife using decades of accumulated knowledge: the shape of a footprint in the dust, a bent stem of grass, the direction a bird had flown. Between themselves, tracker and driver communicated through a combination of hand signals and their native language: efficient, practiced, and largely invisible to us. We were observers in the fullest sense of the word, watching expertise we couldn't access and didn't need to.

Along for the Ride

The first drive made one thing immediately clear: I was out of my element in the bush, and that was okay. In the time I had, I was not going to learn to track. I was not going to develop an instinct for where the animals were or what the bent grass meant or why the tracker's posture changed before I had registered anything at all. That gap was not going to close in three and a half days.

What shifted, slowly, was my relationship to not knowing. Early on I kept scanning the treeline, looking for movement, anticipating the next sighting. This was natural, and not entirely useless, there was plenty to see if you kept your eyes open. But the bush has layers, and the deeper ones weren't available to naive little me. The encounters that mattered most on this trip were entirely thanks to our expert guides, and I knew it.

The drives went out twice a day, before dawn and in the early evening, bracketing the midday hours when the heat made the bush inhospitable to both wildlife and humans. That middle stretch belonged to the camp: shade, rest, and the slightly humbling process of reviewing the morning's shots while the afternoon light hammered the ground outside. By the time the evening drive rolled around, I couldn’t wait to get back out there and discover the next offering.

The striking patterns of a zebra. © Greg Purnell

What the Bush Offered

Over the course of six drives we we were lucky enough to see: giraffes, kudu, hyenas with young, elephants and a calf, hippo, warthog, a beautiful lilac-breasted roller, a hornbill, both black and white rhinos (one with a kiddo), an elusive leopard, zebras, baboons, and and so many more.

Giraffes

We saw giraffes on the first drive and on nearly every drive thereafter. Gentle, unhurried creatures, moving through the bush at their own pace and largely indifferent to our presence. One low-angle portrait, neck filling the frame against the open sky, captures the form of the animal perfectly.

Must be nice to poke your head above the canopy to see where you’re going. © Greg Purnell

Elephants

The elephants came close. Closer, in some encounters, than felt entirely reasonable from inside an open vehicle. A family group crossed a road ahead of us one morning, adults and a young calf, moving with the particular self-possession of animals that have no natural predators. We stopped and waited. They moved through at their own pace and paid us almost no attention whatsoever. The close up face portrait I captured in that encounter is easily one of my favorites from the trip, but the experience of sitting still while several tons of elephant moved around the vehicle is not something the images fully convey. Some things are for being in, not for capturing.

I love the textures of this elephant, one of my favorite shots from the trip. © Greg Purnell

Black and White Rhinos

We encountered both black and white rhinos over the three days, in separate sightings. The black rhinos came remarkably close to the vehicle, close enough that I reached for a wide angle rather than the 100-500mm. A mother and calf, standing side by side, apparently unbothered by us entirely. The white rhino encounter was quieter, the animal half-hidden in the brush with a pair of oxpeckers perched on its back.

Both species are critically endangered, pushed to the edge by decades of poaching driven by demand for their horns. In response, conservancies across South Africa have taken to proactively dehorning their rhinos, removing the horn before poachers can. It is an imperfect solution to an unconscionable problem, but it is saving lives. Knowing this while sitting just a few feet from a mother and calf gave the encounter a weight that the photographs alone don't convey.

A severely endangered white rhino with two oxpeckers along for the ride. © Greg Purnell

This black rhino mother and young came so close to us, I had to go for the wide angle lens. These two are also endangered, but conservationists have trimmed the adult’s horns to dissuade poachers and hopefully help to preserve this species. © Greg Purnell

Hyenas

The hyena group we found one afternoon had young ones with them too. Hyenas read, in the popular imagination, as the villains of the savannah, but I learned that that’s not nearly true. The young ones were endearing in a way that felt incongruous with everything I thought I knew about hyenas. At one point, a couple of the cubs wandered over to another safari vehicle parked nearby and began gnawing on its tires with what appeared to be genuine commitment. The guides were unbothered. Apparently they are extremely curious creatures and this is something hyena cubs do.

Two hyena pups explore the tire of a safari vehicle for the first time. They’re genuinely curious creatures. © Greg Purnell

An adult hyena watches over two of her pups in the evening sun. © Greg Purnell

The Supporting Cast

A lilac-breasted roller perched on a bare branch in the evening light and I was able to just barely catch it before the safari vehicle started moving. It is, in my opinion, the most photogenic bird on the continent, and it knows this. A southern yellow-billed hornbill did much the same thing shortly after, apparently operating on the same philosophy. A pair of waterbuck antelope stood at the edge of the treeline one evening, horns catching the last of the light. Zebras came close enough that the 500mm was suddenly too much lens. Warthogs with piglets, kudu in the grass at dusk. The drives between marquee sightings were full of encounters like these. In such a rich ecosystem, there are no shortage of spectacular subjects on safari.

A lilac-breasted roller graced us with its presence. © Greg Purnell

This southern yellow-billed hornbill was a striking find. © Greg Purnell

Into the Brush: The Leopard

It was dusk, almost dark, on one of the evening drives. We were not searching for anything in particular. That is usually the condition under which the most interesting things happen in Kruger.

Our tracker's hand went up, and we stopped abruptly.

He motioned silently, and the driver turned the vehicle hard left, off the track and directly into thick brush. Immediately, branches were scraping the sides of the vehicle. In the open air of the cab, Morgan and I were ducking and weaving to avoid the foliage coming at face height. The vehicle swerved right, then left, then right again, weaving between trees and through undergrowth so dense that visibility dropped to a few feet in any direction. I had no idea what we were following. Our tracker kept pointing, and we kept going.

This continued for several full minutes. We drove deeper into the brush, the track behind us already invisible, the light failing. There was nothing I could identify ahead of us. And then the driver turned hard left and stopped, and there, not twenty feet away in a small clearing, was a solitary leopard lying in the tall, dark grass.

A solitary leopard we discovered thanks to the incredible tracking skills of our guides. © Greg Purnell

I still don't fully understand how our tracker found it. From way back at the road, at dusk, through all of that dense brush, he had detected something—a sound, a track, a disturbance in the vegetation, something—and then navigated to it through minutes of seemingly directionless weaving, and arrived at the exact location of a spotted cat lying motionless in the grass at the edge of darkness. That this is possible through experience alone, without any assistance from technology, is one of the more remarkable things I have witnessed.

We stayed quiet. The leopard rose and began to walk, and we followed slowly, weaving again between trees, the driver managing the vehicle over roots and through channels in the brush that I could not see from where I was sitting. The light was nearly gone. I shot the best I could given the conditions but the images were beside the point. What mattered was being there at all: watching one of nature's most elusive animals move through its own world, completely on its own terms, indifferent to our presence. A few minutes later the leopard moved off into the dark and was gone, and we found our way back to the road.

The photographs from that encounter are not technically strong. The light was gone, the animal was half-hidden, the contrast was too low to resolve much detail. I keep them anyway. Some photographs are records of an experience rather than expressions of it, and the leopard in the dark grass is exactly that: evidence that something extraordinary happened, even when the image can't quite show you what.

The leopard moved off into the dark and was gone. © Greg Purnell

The Last Morning

By the end of the fifth safari drive, we had seen almost everything: rhinos, elephants and a calf, hyenas with young, giraffe, zebra, a leopard in the dark, baboons, birds, warthogs, hippo. Everything, that is, except lions.

The lion is the animal I had wanted most. By the morning of November 26th it had the quality of an unresolved question that I was running out of time to answer. We were scheduled to leave that afternoon and had one last morning drive to hope for a sighting.

We left camp at 5:38am. The sky was overcast, a slight suggestion of a storm that wasn't going to arrive. Within the first twenty minutes, we had seen giraffe, then elephants, then zebra. It was a good morning. But by 7am, with no lions and a flight ahead of us, our guides were beginning to navigate back toward camp.

Then the radio came to life. Another safari vehicle, twenty to thirty minutes out, had found a female lion. Our guides looked at each other. Breakfast could wait.

We turned around and accelerated. The road in Kruger is rough on a normal drive; at speed, it is something else, and we were really moving. The math was simple: twenty-five minutes of driving, maybe less if we pushed. We had just started on our way, not three minutes into that drive, when we rounded a bend and the driver hit the brakes.

At the side of the road, not fifteen feet from the vehicle, were two male lions, asleep.

We were fifteen feet from a pair of young male lions in their prime. © Greg Purnell

We pulled off the track and stopped in disbelief. For about twenty minutes we sat in complete silence, fifteen feet from two wild cats in a completely open, exposed vehicle. They were young males, our guides explained: brothers, recently forced from their birth prides. Male lions are eventually expelled. They must establish their own territory, fight for it, and hold it. These two were in the early stages of that process, and the evidence was entirely legible on their faces. Both bore the scars of recent confrontations, healed and healing injuries that mapped a history of battles won and lost.

They were, in that moment, entirely inert. Giant, battle-marked, magnificent house cats, asleep in the early morning light. There is a limit to the photographic possibilities of a sleeping lion, and I had reached it inside the first ten minutes. I wanted them to move. To lift their heads, or make motions toward rising. Wildlife photography is often a waiting game, but I was hopeful.

Then they heard something.

Both heads lifted. The lions rose together, moving in the loose formation of animals that know each other's habits, and walked up a slope to look toward the sound. For the first time, I could see their faces fully and clearly. The scars were more visible upright, across the muzzle, above the eye, and along the jaw.

Up from their nap, these two brothers wandered to the top of a perch to investigate their surroundings. © Greg Purnell

They considered the sound, whatever it was, decided it was not worth pursuing, and relaxed. And in the moment just before that relaxation became stillness again, one of them turned its head and looked directly at me.

Fifteen feet of open air separated us, and its eyes found mine and held them.

I have been asked to describe what that moment felt like, and I am not sure I can do it fully. Exhilarating is accurate. Terrifying is also accurate. What I remember most clearly is the specific quality of the attention: the sense that the animal was not registering me as a threat or a curiosity but was simply seeing me, with a completeness and a calm that had nothing diminished about it.

After what felt like several seconds and was probably just one, I raised the camera and pressed the shutter.

The resulting image is my favorite from the entire trip: a close portrait of a young male lion, scarred, composed, looking directly down the lens. In wildlife photography, eye contact is not a prerequisite for a strong image, and often it is a distraction from behavior. But when you get it from a wild animal at close range, in clean light, it produces a different kind of image: one where the viewer is implicated in the encounter, where the animal appears to be seeing the person looking at the photograph as much as the photograph is showing the animal. That specificity of connection is not something you can manufacture. You can only be in the right place at the right moment and have a camera ready when the moment arrives.

A few minutes later, the lions curled up and went back to sleep. We watched for another few minutes, then made our way back to camp. They were the last animals we saw on the trip. Forty-five minutes with two sleeping male lions on the final morning, and one moment, one look, that made everything before it feel like the setup.

Eye contact. It has a way of making you, the viewer, a part of the scene. © Greg Purnell

An Honest Assessment

The photos from Kruger are uneven, which is appropriate. I was a first-time safari photographer in an unfamiliar environment, working from a moving vehicle, at the mercy of conditions and timing I couldn't control. Some of that shows.

The 100-500mm was the right lens for the trip. Versatile enough to handle the giraffe silhouettes and tight enough to isolate the lion portraits, it gave me a working range that I could adapt quickly. What I underestimated was how much of safari photography is about vehicle position rather than focal length. You cannot reposition on foot, so where the vehicle stops determines your angle, your background, and often your light. Learning to read that in the moment is a skill I was still developing at the end of the last drive.

The leopard photos are among my favorites from the trip. Difficult conditions like fading light, dense cover, and a moving animal made for challenging conditions, yet the images capture something true about the encounter: the animal in its element, doing exactly as it pleased.

Traveling with another photographer made the midday review sessions genuinely valuable and offered a second set of eyes on the same encounters, different decisions, and honest conversation about what worked and what didn't. Looking at Morgan's frames from the same moments and seeing where our instincts diverged told me as much about my own shooting as the images themselves did.

On our endless search for incredible experiences. © Greg Purnell

Final Thoughts

There is a version of this post where I describe patience as a virtue I possessed going into Kruger, and the wildlife encounters as the reward for having it. That version would be substantially untrue.

I am not naturally patient. Anyone who knows me will confirm this without hesitation. But Kruger does not care about impatience. The bush operates on its own timeline, which has no relationship to yours, and the animals appear when they appear and not before. The only correct response to this is acceptance, not because acceptance is easy but because there is no alternative.

On the last morning, sitting mere steps from two sleeping lions for twenty minutes while they did absolutely nothing, I was practicing acceptance in a fairly direct way. I wanted them to wake up. I couldn't make them wake up. I sat with that, and waited, and then they woke up.

I don't think this is a metaphor for photography broadly. I think it is specifically true about wildlife photography: you cannot force the moment, you can only be present and prepared when it arrives. The lion that looked at me did so because I was still there when it looked up, and that’s the whole of it. Patience is not a virtue in this context; it is a precondition. Everything else (the technique, the lens, the instinct for composition) operates inside the space that patience creates.

The only question is whether you can hold that space long enough.

— Greg

In Search of a Lion: Wildlife Photography in Kruger National Park

The Vehicle, the Guides

Along for the Ride