'It all started with a close encounter with a penguin' – the story behind Briton's historic black leopard photo

With modern TV documentaries offering impossibly intimate access to the rarest of animals, it’s easy to assume no species hasn’t been snapped time and again by wildlife watchers. Not so for the black leopard.

So uncommon and elusive is the big cat, whose striking colour is due to melanism, that there has been no scientific documentation of one in Africa since 1909. Until last week.

Will Burrard-Lucas, a British photographer, had heard rumours that the mythical creature had been spotted at Kenya’s Laikipia Wilderness Camp. So he hopped on a plane, followed leopard tracks with a local guide, and speculatively set up a camera trap. After three fruitless nights he began to doubt the rumours, but his luck changed on the fourth.

“I don’t think it sank in immediately what I’d managed to achieve, it was such an unusual subject,” he said. “Usually with the flash you can see the animal very clearly. But as [the leopard] blended in so well with the black night all I could see was these eyes staring out of the picture.”

Burrard-Lucas described the historic photographs as “the culmination of a decade of experimentation and efforts to push the frontiers of wildlife photography”. Here he chooses five more of his favourite images and explains how they shaped his methods.

“I guide photographic trips to Antarctica and the subantarctic islands every year, but this image from the Falkland Islands, taken in 2009, is my all-time favourite from the region. It shows rockhopper penguins washing salt from their feathers after emerging from the sea. To capture the wonderful scene, I exchanged my telephoto lens for a wide angle and crawled as close as possible. This allowed me to bring in more of the surrounding environment. The perspective really appealed to me and thereafter I aimed to capture close-up images of other wild animals around the world.”

“I visited the island of Komodo in 2011 and wanted to capture a close-up, wide-angle image of a legendary Komodo dragon in its forest habitat. These are the largest lizards on Earth and they are ferocious predators, so simply crawling up to them was not an option. Instead, I decided to mount my camera on some wheels stolen from a desk chair, and use a long pole push the rig around. I was thus able to push my camera close to the dragon while giving myself a couple of metres of breathing room just to be safe!”

“What I really dreamt of was capturing close-up images of iconic wildlife in Africa – the sort of wildlife that might maul or trample me to death if I even left my vehicle. To achieve this, I created BeetleCam, a remote-control buggy for my DSLR camera. Today I use a fifth-generation BeetleCam to capture ground-level images of animals across Africa including lions, leopards, African wild dogs, hyenas and elephants. The above image shows a young leopard and her mother that I photographed with BeetleCam in 2013, while living in Zambia for a year.”

“By 2015, digital cameras had come a long way and their low-light performance was making it possible to photograph animals at night in ways that simply weren’t possible previously. I decided to undertake a project to photograph African wildlife at night in Liuwa Plain, Zambia. I wanted to capture the animals under the starry night sky and so I again used BeetleCam to achieve the ground-level perspective. For this image, I lined the lions up with the Milky Way and illuminated them with an off-buggy flash.”

“BeetleCam has a limitation in that it can only be used to photograph quite bold animals such as the big predators; most other animals will run away if an unfamiliar object approaches them. To capture close-up images of shier creatures, I started developing my own Camtraptions camera trap system. These are stationary high-quality cameras that I leave on a game trail for days or weeks at a time, with a sensor to automatically trigger the camera when an animal passes. This is an image taken with one of my camera traps in the UK in 2017. I used invisible infrared flashes to avoid blinding the barn owl as it landed on the stump.”

For more of Will Burrard-Lucas’s images, follow him on Instagram and Facebook.