Year in Zambia

In 2012, my wife Natalie and I moved to Zambia to embark on a year-long adventure that would change our lives. Nat is a doctor and would spend the year working in a rural hospital near the border of Mozambique and Malawi. You can read more about her experiences in her blog from the year. I bought a 4×4 vehicle so that I would have the freedom to explore and take photographs.

We were a four-hour drive from South Luangwa National Park, a place that would come to feel like my second home. I witnessed the incredible seasonal transformation that the Luangwa Valley underwent, from the parched dry season to the verdant “emerald” season and back again. I was stunned by how quickly the Valley changed from week to week – no two visits were the same.

The prolonged time I was able to spend in the field, allowed me to work towards some long-term goals. Firstly, I wanted to use BeetleCam to capture an intimate perspective of leopards and African wild dogs – two species that the Luangwa Valley is rightly renowned for.

During the course of the year, I got to know one particular female leopard and her cubs very well. The cubs were about 9 months old when I first met them. One of the cubs was particularly bold and would often try to play with BeetleCam. The time I spent with those leopards, watching the cubs grow up over the course of the year, are some of my fondest memories from the period.

I had never photographed African wild dogs and so I was keen to track them down in South Luangwa. It took around 3 months of searching before I finally bumped into them. It was at the end of the dry season, and they were in a flat, open area, perfect for BeetleCam. I deployed the buggy and took one of my favourite images, capturing the dogs’ inquisitive personalities. Later in the year, I would also have the opportunity to photograph wild dogs in North Luangwa and down in Zimbabwe.

In addition to using BeetleCam, I also had the goal of getting to grips with DSLR camera trap photography once and for all. I had previously experimented with equipment that was available but found nothing that worked the way I wanted. I therefore started developing my own camera trap sensors, based on the Passive Infrared sensors used in security devices. After much tinkering and testing, I settled on a design that was effective and I started to capture my first decent camera trap photographs. It was the start of my journey into a field of wildlife photography that I am still exploring today.

In between trips to the Luangwa Valley, I also found time to explore other parts of Zambia, such as Victoria Falls, Lower Zambezi National Park and Busanga Plains in Kafue National Park.

I also visited Kasanka National Park to photograph the fruit bat migration and witnessed the awe-inspiring spectacle of 10 million bats descending on a tiny patch of forest. Apparently, it is the largest migration of mammals anywhere on the planet.

I didn’t find time to visit Liuwa Plain National Park during the year, but was able to return to Zambia twice in 2015 to spend a total of around two months there.

The amount of time I was able to spend in the Zambia’s National Parks was only possible thanks to the generous support of the safari operators that I partnered with, in particular, The Bushcamp Company in South Luangwa and Norman Carr Safaris in South Luangwa, Lower Zambezi and Liuwa Plain.

Explore More