Over the last year, photographer Will Burrard-Lucas set himself a mission: to capture the nightlife of African animals, and in particular, lions.
"Lions are primarily active at night so I wanted to photograph them in a way that showed them in their true element," he says. "The low-light capabilities of modern cameras allows me to photograph wildlife in ways that would previously have been impossible."
Teaming up with African Parks and Norman Carr Safaris, Burrard-Lucas was able to undertake two expeditions to Liuwa Plain, a remote part of western of Zambia. It was on one of the national park's flat, open plains that he stumbled upon this pack of lions.
"The African night sky is spectacular so I set about trying to capture a shot of the pack under the Milky Way," he says. Burrard-Lucas used a remote-control BeetleCam to position his camera on the ground in order to capture the lions with the sky behind them, lighting the lions with a wireless off-camera flash.
"I relied on the abilities of my modern-day digital camera to work at high ISOs," he says. Nevertheless, he still needed an exposure time of 15 seconds to expose the stars. In the end, he only had a few moments to get the shot before the male lion picked up the BeetleCam, running off into the distance.
Fortunately, because the landscape was so flat and open, it was easy to follow the lion in a 4x4. Once the lion dropped the camera, Burrard-Lucas was able to recover the memory card. "It isn't the first time I have had to do it," he says. "I only use BeetleCam in open areas where I know I can follow in my vehicle if it does get carried away".
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
