June 2024 Wildlife Photography Contest Advanced Winner

One of my favorite encounters in Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda, was watching a leopard use a large cactus tree as a lookout to survey the savannah. We first spotted her in the early evening, resting on the outer limbs. Waiting to see if she was comfortable with our presence, we watched her from a distance. She elegantly moved from limb to limb, often stopping to look out over the African grasslands. She then moved into the interior of the tree, making herself almost invisible, cloaked in the entangled limbs of the cactus. Our driver slowly moved us around the tree, allowing us to capture different images of this beautiful cat.

The sun kept poking in and out of the clouds, challenging me to continually adjust my settings. I wanted to ensure I did not blow out the white in her fur and minimize the shadows, so I underexposed the image. Fun fact: did you know the spots on a leopard are called rosettes? Wildlife SOS has a great article on understanding feline fur.

Back to the story. Coming out of the shadows, she would lock onto something in the distance with the most intense stare. The cactus tree was massive, providing the perfect camouflage for this stealthy hunter. To showcase the perspective and scale of the cactus tree in relation to the leopard, I backed off my zoom lens to 100mm, capturing this image called Vantage Point.