Eleven Days of Dust

• The Mara Triangle, before sunrise
• 05:50
• 14°C, cold, clear

Out of camp at half past five in the dark, and the next fourteen hours are spent in a metal box with the roof up and a beanbag on the sill. Joseph drove standing half out of his seat when he was looking for something. I want to be honest that this is most of what a wildlife trip is — sitting down, being driven, and the light coming up on the inside of a windscreen.

• Above the Mara River
• 08:15
• 19°C, clear, warming

By eight in the morning there were perhaps six thousand animals packed onto the shoulder above the water and not one of them moving. This is the part nobody films. They stand, they turn around, they go back up, they come down again. Joseph switched the engine off and said we should be comfortable, and we were there for four hours and forty minutes.

• The crossing point
• 12:55
• 27°C, hot, still

One animal goes and the decision is made for all of them. The noise is the thing — hooves and grunting and water, and under it a sort of low roar from the ones still coming down the bank. I shot at 1/2000 and most of it is dust. This one is the only frame where you can see individual animals rather than a brown weather system.

four hours forty of nothing, eleven minutes of that

• Near Topi Plains
• 06:40
• 15°C, clear, cold early

Cheetah brothers hold territory together and this group had been together for years, and they came up onto a termite mound at about half past six and sat in a row like a school photograph. I had maybe ninety seconds of usable light and I spent thirty of them changing to a wider focal length because 200mm could not hold all five.

• Central Mara plains
• 06:55
• 16°C, clear, no wind

Balloons go up from three or four camps and they are over you before you hear the burners, which is the odd part — a very large object arriving silently. The zebras have obviously seen it every morning of their lives and did not lift a head. I took this because I had been photographing animals for six days and had almost no frames with the sky in them.