Will Burrard-Lucas

I’m a Wildlife Photographer

I split my time between my home in the UK and my photography projects in Africa.

When I was young, my family spent several years living in Tanzania. My earliest memories are of being on safari and from those seeds grew a lifelong fascination with the natural world and a connection with the continent of Africa which continues to draw me back today. In 2012, my wife and I moved to Zambia for a year, and since 2017 I have predominately focused on projects in Kenya.

Photographing Meerkats in 2014

I endeavour to capture intimate portraits of animals that convey a sense of awe and wonder. To achieve this, I often prefer to get close and use a wide-angle lens. In the early days, I would crawl up to animals whenever possible, but there were limited subjects were this approach was feasible. I therefore built “BeetleCam”, a remote control camera buggy, which I use to capture close-up, ground-level photographs of potentially dangerous African wildlife. I have also developed an ecosystem of camera trap equipment, which I use to photograph shy and nocturnal wildlife.

With the first BeetleCam in 2009

When I first published my BeetleCam photographs, other photographers and filmmakers asked me to build similar devices for them. This led me to establish Camtraptions Ltd in 2013, through which I produce a range of products for remote and camera trap photography. Camtraptions equipment has since been used to take photographs which have won awards in numerous prestigious international photography competitions and to capture video footage for many high-profile natural history television programmes of recent years.

Setting up a camera trap in 2019

In 2017, I started a project to document the last of Africa’s iconic elephants with tusks reaching down to the ground, in collaboration with the Tsavo Trust and Kenya Wildlife Service. In 2019, this culminated in a coffee table book, “Land of Giants”.

In 2019, I used my Camtraptions system to capture rare high-quality camera trap images of a melanistic leopard in Africa. My new book, “The Black Leopard”, was released in March 2021.

In the talk below, I tell the story of my 10-year journey that culminated in the black leopard project, and reflect upon the successes and failures that I experienced along the way.

Since 2020, I have been working on a new book project focusing on lions.

Follow the links below to learn more about me. 

Before you go…