I’m a photographer who writes to paraphrase Austin Kleon. Therefore, my blog combines posts on books (reading, writing, musing over), lots of photos (all taken by me, unless otherwise stated), culture and arts in general, some astronomy and space (I’m a Science-Fiction fan), and cats as cats rule the internet.
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Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Irish poet considered one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
To read more poems, click here.
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This lion cub had claimed a dead tree limb at Tswalu and wasn’t in any hurry to move. The morning light was coming through the branches in broken bars, and for a few minutes it landed across the cub’s coat almost exactly matching its own natural striping.
I had maybe two minutes before the light shifted and the moment closed. Field photography is mostly waiting through long stretches of nothing for windows like that one, and knowing enough about light and behavior to be ready when it opens.
This lion cub had found a piece of bark and was not about to let it go: claws dug into the trunk, teeth locked on, eyes fixed somewhere past the camera. I photographed him at Tswalu, with his mother, three siblings, and another lioness with her own four cubs all resting just out of frame. What struck me was how much concentration he brought to something so small. No prey in sight, no real stakes, just a stick and the full attention of a growing predator. His mother kept glancing over now and then, the kind of watching that lets a cub get away with a little mischief.
This lioness had a kill to herself when we found her at Noka Camp in South Africa, and she was making the most of it. Every minute or two she’d raise her head, scan the grass, and check on us, a quick, unhurried look before returning to her meal. I caught her in one of those pauses, tongue mid-lick, blood still fresh on her muzzle, eyes straight into the camera.
There’s nothing pretty about a kill site. The sounds alone are something you don’t forget. But sitting quietly nearby while a predator simply gets on with her life is one of the most honest experiences the bush offers.
This is one of those Kalahari mornings that started slow and ended fast. Five African wild dogs surround a lone gemsbok (Oryx gazella, the ones with the long straight horns), and for a while, nothing happens beyond circling and posturing. Then the oryx makes a break for a stand of bush nearby, and the dogs go from testing distance to a full sprint in an instant, yelping the whole way as they close in. The oryx made it to cover. The dogs didn’t get there first. I sat with this scene for a long stretch, not knowing which way it would break, and then it broke all at once.
I went out early that morning and found not one but four roe deer moving through Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof: a little family sharing one strip of morning light.
This cemetery keeps surprising me. It’s one of the largest in Europe, and between the old trees, the quiet, and the lack of foot traffic before mid-morning, it’s become a real refuge for wildlife: deer, squirrels, crows, kestrels, even the occasional wild hamster if you know where to look.
Mornings like this are the reason I keep coming back to this cemetery with a camera: the light, the quiet, and animals that have made this ground their own.
Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof isn’t where I expected to spend an afternoon photographing squirrels, but the old trees and thick ivy along the paths have made it one of the more reliable places in the city to find them undisturbed. This red squirrel climbed a trunk a few feet from a headstone, stopped to get its bearings, and gave me maybe four seconds before it disappeared into the canopy.
Working in a cemetery changes how you move: slower, more deliberate, aware you’re a guest in someone else’s quiet place. It’s also taught me to look past the obvious subjects. The wildlife here isn’t hiding from the city; it’s found a corner of it that nobody bothers.
It’s strange how often the animals show up somewhere you weren’t looking for them. I’ve had more luck with squirrels, foxes, and deer in cemeteries and old parks than in places actually set aside for wildlife.
📸 All photos were taken with Canon R5 Mark II & Canon RF100-500mm F4.5-7.1 L IS USM, except the deer family, taken with Canon R5 & Canon RF70-200mm F2.8 L IS USM.
To view all my favorite photos archive, click here.
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Child of the Jungle: The True Story of a Girl Caught Between Two Worlds is a memoir by German author Sabine Kuegler. It was first published in Germany in 2005 as Dschungelkind, with the English version released the same year and the US edition in 2007. In 1980, when Sabine was seven, she moved with her parents, who were linguists and missionaries, to a remote river settlement in West Papua, Indonesia. They went there to live among the Fayu, a tribe of about four hundred people who had only recently come into contact with outsiders. The book tells the story of the ten years she spent growing up in the rainforest and the confusion she felt when, at seventeen, she left for boarding school in Switzerland.
In the second part of the book, a seventeen-year-old girl stands by a Swiss road, unable to cross because the cars are too fast, too many, and too loud. This is the same girl who once swam in crocodile-filled rivers, hunted with a bow, and knew which snakes to avoid and which grubs to eat. Yet here, she is overwhelmed by traffic. The real twist is that she sees the jungle as home and Europe as the wild, and this idea is what drives Child of the Jungle.
When Sabine Kuegler was seven, her parents, who were linguists studying an unwritten language, moved the family to live with the Fayu in West Papua. The tribe had only recently been contacted, and the Kueglers were the first outsiders to live with them. What follows is a childhood very different from most, and Kuegler never exaggerates her experiences. She chews dried bat wing like other children chew gum. She learns archery from Fayu boys. She observes a culture where revenge killing is not rare but part of daily life, and she describes it with the calm, clear perspective of a child who sees it as ordinary.
The book’s main strength is its childlike clarity. Kuegler writes in short, simple sentences. At first, I thought this made the book weaker, but I later realized it was intentional. She doesn’t describe the jungle as an outsider. Instead, she writes from the perspective of a child who grew up there. Some memoirists try to sound poetic, which can feel like an adult correcting the child’s story. Kuegler avoids this. She keeps her writing at the child’s level, which makes her story believable.
I spend much of my life waiting quietly in the forests of Sweden, so I noticed something in her descriptions of learning to read a landscape. She shows that sounds have meaning, certain movements matter, and the river changes from one day to the next. This kind of attention isn’t magical; it comes from experience. It seems ordinary until the moment it becomes useful. Kuegler had learned this by age ten. Most of us spend our adult lives trying to gain even a little of that skill.
But the real focus of the book isn’t adventure, it’s grief. The person closest to Kuegler is Ohri, a Fayu boy who becomes like a brother to her. His death from tuberculosis, an illness brought from outside, is the turning point in the story. The book lets you notice this without making it dramatic. Only after Ohri’s death does she decide to leave. The Swiss sections that follow are some of the most unusual descriptions of culture shock I’ve read, because the shock goes in the opposite direction. Escalators frighten her. Small talk feels like a ritual she can’t understand. Money makes no sense to someone raised in a sharing culture. She says she learned fear in Europe, not in the jungle.
My main reservation is about the book’s structure. The European sections are much shorter, while the jungle gets the longer, more detailed middle part. The harder, more personal part of the story, rebuilding yourself when your old world is far away, gets fewer pages. I understand why, since the jungle is what the book highlights. Still, the real theme is displacement, and I would have traded one crocodile story for twenty more pages about Switzerland.
The book also raises a question it doesn’t fully explore: even though her family was loving, their presence was part of the long process that changed the Fayu forever. Kuegler mentions this (the title’s ‘two worlds’ has a double meaning) but since she was a child, the story stays in the child’s perspective. When the book became a bestseller in Germany, some readers thought this was evasive. I found the book honest about its limits, but I would have liked more of the adult’s reflection.
What stays with me most is a sense of homesickness. Kuegler misses a place that, as she knew it, no longer exists. Not because it was destroyed, but because of contact, time, and her leaving. This is a special kind of loss: not losing a place, but losing a version of the world. Anyone who has changed countries, careers, or even their sense of self will know what I mean. I do.
Sabine Kuegler (b. 1972 in Patan, Nepal) is a German author. Dschungelkind spent months on the German bestseller lists and was adapted into a feature film in 2011; her sequel, Ruf des Dschungels (Call of the Jungle), appeared in 2006.
Translator Note
The English edition was translated by Christian Kuegler, the author’s brother, who grew up among the Fayu alongside her, a rare case of a translator who lived the story he was translating.
To read more book reviews, click here.
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I went to Vienna in July to photograph wildlife, and I spent three days doing it in a cemetery.
That needs some explaining, so here it is: Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof is one of the largest cemeteries in Europe, and it has quietly become one of the most reliable places on the continent to see a critically endangered mammal. It also holds roe deer, red squirrels, kestrels, jays, foxes, and — according to researchers who have been counting since 2021 — around 170 animal species in total. None of this was planned. The cemetery was designed for the dead. The living moved in on their own.
I was there from July 6 to 8, 2026, entering at Gate 2 each morning. This post covers what lives there, where I found it, and how to plan a visit of your own.
The short answer is that large old cemeteries offer what most of the surrounding landscape no longer does: continuity.
Across Central Europe, farmland has been consolidated into larger fields with fewer hedgerows and margins. Forests have been fragmented by roads. Grassland is mown early and often. For species that need undisturbed ground, mature trees, or a few square meters that stay the same from year to year, a lot of the countryside has stopped working.
A cemetery like the Zentralfriedhof, by contrast, has been left more or less alone for 150 years. It opened on November 1, 1874. It covers 2.5 square kilometers (about 620 acres, or just under one square mile), which makes it a green space larger than many urban parks. It has old trees, dense ivy, watered plantings, no traffic, no pesticides on the scale used in agriculture, and — critically — humans who move slowly, stay on paths, and go home at closing time.
Since 2021, a citizen science project run by the University of Vienna together with Friedhöfe Wien, called Biodiversität am Friedhof, has documented roughly 170 animal species and around 200 plant species at the Zentralfriedhof alone. Vienna’s cemeteries together hold an estimated 70 to 100 European hamsters, a species now classified as critically endangered.
The wildest section is the Alter jüdischer Friedhof — the old Jewish cemetery — in the eastern part of the grounds, roughly between Gate 1 and Gate 11. Large parts of it have been left unchanged since 1916. The grass grows tall and is not mown. Stones lean and sink. Ivy covers everything. It is, without much competition, the best wildlife habitat inside the walls, and it was where I spent most of my time.
I found deer almost exclusively in the old Jewish cemetery, in the stretch between Gate 11 and Gate 1. The tall unmown grass gives them cover and food, and the density of old headstones means there is always something to step behind. However, they can be found here and there in other parts of the cemetery as well, especially if there’s (noisy) maintenance work being done in their favorite spots.
They are used to people, but not indifferent to them. Walking with obvious purpose sends them off; drifting slowly, stopping often, looking at graves rather than at the animal, and they will carry on browsing.
This is the species that put the cemetery on the map for wildlife watchers. The European hamster — also called the black-bellied hamster — is a genuinely wild animal, unrelated to the pet species, and it is far larger and more strikingly marked than most people expect: rust-brown above, black underneath, with white patches. It was reclassified as critically endangered in 2020 after steep declines across its western range.
The Zentralfriedhof is one of the few places where it can be seen reliably. It appeared in the BBC’s Seven Worlds, One Planet, and Friedhöfe Wien now runs guided hamster tours.
I found them in groups 22, 23, 28, and 29 (see map at the bottom of this post) — the open, mown grass squares in the western half of the cemetery, not far from the Park der Ruhe und Kraft. They dig burrows in the grass between graves and are most active in the early morning and again in the afternoon. I also saw one running through the old Jewish cemetery, well away from the usual squares, so they are clearly not confined to the known spots.
Common throughout the wooded and older sections. Unlike in much of the UK, red squirrels here face no competition from grays, and the cemetery’s mature trees suit them well. They are noticeably relaxed around visitors.
Kestrels were hunting all over the cemetery; I found them in several different sections rather than one reliable spot. The Church of St. Charles Borromeo (the Luegerkirche) at the center of the grounds is a known nesting site, but the birds range widely, and the open mown squares give them exactly the kind of short-grass hunting ground they need.
Present everywhere, and worth photographing rather than dismissing. The gray-and-black plumage against pale stone is a gift, and hooded crows are alert enough to make good behavioral subjects: caching food, mobbing the kestrels, working the paths after the maintenance crews have been through.
Shyer than the crows and harder to photograph, but regular in the wooded sections and the old Jewish cemetery. Listen first — the harsh call gives them away long before you see the blue wing patch.
Foxes, European hares, and hedgehogs are all documented residents, along with a long list of insects including the endangered Alpine longhorn beetle. I didn’t photograph any of them on this trip, which is a reasonable argument for going back.
The cemetery sits in Simmering, Vienna’s 11th district, on the southeastern edge of the city. Despite the name, it is not central — count on 25 to 30 minutes from the city center.
Route planning and tickets: Wiener Linien. A 24- or 48-hour pass is worth it if you’re visiting more than once.
Gate 2 (Tor 2) at Simmeringer Hauptstraße 234 is the main entrance and the one I used every day. It has the Infopoint (free printed maps — take one, the grounds are enormous), a shop, audio guides, the funeral museum, e-bike rental, and Café Oberlaa.
Official opening hours are seasonal: April through September, daily 7:00 to 19:00, with Thursdays until 20:00 from May through August; 8:00 to 17:00 in midwinter. Check the official Friedhöfe Wien page before you go. Two practical notes: side gates open up to an hour later and close up to an hour earlier than the main gate, and in practice Gate 2 was already open when I arrived at 6:45 each morning — worth trying if you want the early light.
Admission is free. A free electric shuttle bus runs through the grounds from 10:00, stopping at 19 points, and e-bikes can be rented at Gate 2. The cemetery is 2.5 km (1.5 miles) end to end, so some form of transport is genuinely useful if you want to cover ground between sessions.
There are restrooms scattered throughout the grounds, which matters more than it sounds when you’re walking a site this size.
Early morning is best. Animals are more active, the paths are empty, and the light is better. I arrived at 6:45 and stayed until 3 p.m. each day, which was more than the wildlife activity strictly justified but gave me time to explore.
The thing nobody warns you about is maintenance. On Monday there was work going on across large parts of the cemetery — mowing, tree cutting, and watering with small machines that have surprisingly loud engines. It moves the animals out of whole sections. If you can, plan more than one visit so a noisy day doesn’t cost you the trip.
Weather during my visit was mostly overcast with the sun breaking through occasionally, which suited the subject well: soft light on pale stone, no harsh shadows between the graves.
Photographing wildlife here is unproblematic, and nobody bothered me over three days. Photographing graves, funerals, or mourners is a different matter entirely — this is a working cemetery with burials taking place daily. Keep your distance from anything that is clearly private, and stay off the graves themselves.
I worked with two bodies:
If I had to bring one lens, it would be the 100–500. If I could bring two, I’d bring the same two again.
Café Oberlaa at the main entrance is really good, everything you would expect from a Viennese café. I had breakfast and lunch there on all three days, and the cakes are worth the detour on their own.
There is a version of this post that ends on a note about beauty and stillness. I’d rather end on the arithmetic.
A roe deer buck living out his life inside a walled cemetery in the 11th district of Vienna is not there because the cemetery is ideal. He is there because a burial ground on the edge of a city of two million people offers better habitat than a great deal of the countryside beyond it. The same goes for the hamsters, which have declined so severely across France, Germany, and Eastern Europe that a Viennese cemetery now counts as a stronghold.
That’s a useful thing to know when we talk about conservation. Protected habitat doesn’t only look like national parks. Sometimes it looks like ground that nobody has plowed, sprayed, mown, or built on for 150 years — and the reason nobody has is that we set it aside for something else entirely.
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I’m so excited to announce that two of my photographs are finalists in the Swedish photography championship 2026 (SM i Fotografi 2026 in Swedish) in the nature and wildlife category. This means they’re among the top ten wildlife photos in Sweden this year. I still need to pinch myself!
I would love to show you the pictures, but unfortunately, I’m not allowed to yet. All images are kept under wraps until the results are announced on October 3rd. Until then, I’ll be the person cheerfully going on about two pictures I can’t let you see. This may be the least visual post I’ve ever published: an announcement with nothing to look at. I’ll post the photos as soon as I can afterward.
(In the meantime, here are the announcement e-mail and the finalists list in the Wildlife category.)
This is the first year I entered this prestigious competition, organized by the Swedish Portrait Photographers Association. My goal was to score well on all photos (a few points above the professional photographer level) and, as a stretch goal, have one photo in the print final. Above all, I was going to participate to learn the ropes and be better next year. So, I’m pleased with the results since I’ve already reached my goals. Anything beyond these is a bonus. I may have had more photos in the final, actually, since every photographer is allowed only two photos in the print final in one category. I had submitted six. (I’m going to allow myself a small, undignified moment of pride about that.)
In the print final, photos are judged by looking at the actual prints, mounted on a wall and lit the same way as everyone else’s, not by how they look on a screen. That means the next few weeks are all about the careful details: picking the right paper, making test prints, measuring everything exactly, and checking every corner for tiny flaws a judge might spot up close. It’s not as exciting as taking the photos, and honestly, it’s not as fun either. But I’m looking forward to the prize ceremony and the party afterward!
If you’re so inclined, please keep your fingers crossed for me. Thank you!
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A long time ago
I went on a journey,
Right to the corner
Of the Eastern Ocean.
The road there
Was long and winding,
And stormy waves
Barred my path.
What made me
Go this way?
Hunger drove me
Into the World.
I tried hard
To fill my belly:
And even a little
Seemed a lot.
But this was clearly
A bad bargain,
So I went home
And lived in idleness.
Tao Yuanming (365–427) was a famous Chinese poet and politician. He was one of the best-known poets who lived during the Six Dynasties period.
Translated from the Chinese by Arthur Waley
To read more poems, click here.
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July has been a quiet month, and thank God for that! I know it’s such a blessing to be able to travel as much as we do, but it is tiring, too; it felt so good just being at home this past month, and enjoying the wildlife in our garden, or on our little island. (As a side note, I’ve learned that green areas cover 72% of our island; there are three nature reserves here, and we’re neighbours with one. Way to go, Lidingö!)
I enjoyed the quiet time, listening to music while I edited photos from our May safari trip. (I try to match the music to the images, it helps set the mood when editing, so there was a lot of African music. Right now, there’s a lot of Ismaël Lô, a Senegalese musician. I listened to this track on repeat, closely followed by this one.)
“Cheetah don’t climb trees”, the guide had just told us. Next thing you know, we stumbled over this handsome teenage cheetah posing nicely on a tree (albeit a low one). Cheetahs are not built for climbing (their claws don’t retract like a leopard’s), but give them a sloping, weathered trunk like this one and they’ll take the high ground gladly. Better view, better odds. Better photos, too.
This one sat for a good while in the early light, watching something far off in the bush. I like that about cheetahs: they always seem to be paying attention to a world slightly beyond the one I can see. I took my photos and mostly just watched it watch.
This image has become one of my absolute favorite photos, one of the highlights of this trip. His intense gaze, the soft light, that fluff on its’ back telling you he’s still young… I love it so much, I may print it and hang it on my wall, in fact.
Another day, another cheetah. Green bokeh behind it, morning light catching the gold in its fur: this cheetah just stood there for a moment, sizing up whatever it was watching. Cheetahs rely on vision more than scent, and it shows in how much time they spend simply looking. Those black lines running from its eyes down to its mouth aren’t decoration; they cut the glare, so the cat can keep watching straight into the midday sun.
We spent the whole afternoon tracking this pride at Tswalu Kalahari Reserve. We knew the lions were lying under bushes and trees somewhere in that area, most likely sleeping and completely invisible in the tall grass. Lions are champion resters: up to twenty hours a day, if you let them.
Then the light started to drop, and the mood shifted. This lioness got up, stretched, and set off down the red sand track, her cubs following at their own pace behind her. Two adult males and another lioness with her cubs were nearby, outside the frame. She’d picked the track for a reason: lions use cleared paths like this one to move quietly at dawn and dusk, without the crunch of dry grass underfoot. The evening hunt had begun, and we watched them disappear into the grass as the mountains turned blue behind them.
This lioness stepped out of the thornveld and stopped right in front of us, front paws neatly together on the red sand, and simply looked. Not aggressive, not nervous, just checking. Lions do this accounting constantly, and once you’ve been on the receiving end of it, you understand how little of the bush you actually notice compared to what notices you.
I liked the restraint of this moment more than any action shot from the trip. The soft overcast light kept her eyes that deep amber, and the dark green scrub behind her did the rest. Sometimes the best photograph is the animal doing almost nothing.
This is the same lion pride, a different day, in the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve. The sky had turned that pink and violet color you sometimes get right after sunset, with the mountains going dark blue behind them. The pride had already made a kill on a zebra, and by the time I caught this moment, cubs and adults were all crowded in around it, with the dominant male moving in to claim his share. Feeding order in a pride isn’t always what people expect; proximity and appetite matter as much as rank in the moment.
It’s one of those scenes where the drama has already happened and what you’re watching instead is the quieter part — who eats where, who waits, who pushes in. I find that almost more interesting than the hunt itself.
This is the male lion from the photo above. While popular media often portrays the “Lion King” as a benevolent father, the reality at a kill site is much more tense. In a pride hierarchy, adult males usually eat first, using their size and intimidating facial expressions (like the snarl seen here) to maintain their position. This snarl serves as a visual warning to others to respect the patriarch’s space.
Despite many trips to Africa, I have never seen wild dogs, unless you count some white tails disappearing into the tall grass. So, imagine my joy and happiness when our guide and tracker not only found them for us but also managed to stay with them for four hours.
We set out at 5:30 in the morning to look for them before they became active. When we finally found them, we watched as they searched for prey, sizing up gnus and oryxes and nearly catching a young oryx that managed to get away. Afterward, they played and socialized before resting in the shade as the day grew hotter. It was an experience I’ll never forget.
*
The African wild dog, or painted wolf, is one of the world’s most endangered mammals. According to the IUCN, only 3,000 to 5,500 remain. African wild dog numbers are notoriously hard to pin down, and estimates vary quite a bit by source. However, they all agree they are endangered.
Human expansion and habitat loss have limited them to small areas in southern and eastern Africa, though they once lived across the continent. To witness African wild dogs in the savanna is a rare privilege, as they are notoriously elusive and require massive home ranges.
There’s a colony of habituated meerkats at Tswalu Kalahari Reserve, and I was looking forward to watching them in the morning as they start their day sunning, grooming themselves and each other, and foraging. They didn’t disappoint, and I spent several hours low on the ground, trying to keep pace with these oh-so-fast small animals. I have so many photos from that morning, they’re likely to become a fixture in my favorite-photos series for a while.
This is one of my favorite meerkat photos, because it’s not doing what you usually expect from a meerkat photo — standing sentinel. I wanted to show something different; you’ve probably seen thousands of meerkats standing at attention before. Lying flat like this is mostly about temperature: they press their bellies to the cool sand to shed heat once the day warms up, or sprawl out to soak up the sun early on when it’s still cold. The sand on its’ face is from digging; meerkats have non-retractable claws built for excavating insects and larvae out of the ground, and they’re immune to some scorpion and snake venom, which is a really useful trait when that’s most of what you eat.
📸 All photos were taken with Canon R5 Mark II & Canon RF100-500mm F4.5-7.1 L IS USM, except the third one (linoess with cubs at dusk), taken with Canon R5 & Canon RF70-200mm F2.8 L IS USM.
To view all my favorite photos archive, click here.
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I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and yellowing Autumn, so
To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,
And you’ve been everything.
Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack
In these soul-deadening trenches—pictures, books,
Music, the quiet of an English wood,
Beautiful comrade-looks,
The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,
And Peace, and all that’s good.
Robert Graves (1895 – 1985) was a British poet, historical novelist, critic, and classicist.
To read more poems, click here.
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This is the fourth of four posts about shooting and editing wildlife photos for different creative results on safari. We’ll look at high-key, low-key, black-and-white, backlit & silhouette. Each style offers a unique way to see and a different set of choices, both when you’re out in the field and when you’re editing. While I’m focusing on a South African safari, these ideas work anywhere you’re photographing wild animals.
I use Canon equipment for all my photos, but I’ve tried to avoid using brand-specific terms wherever possible. My main post-processing tools are Lightroom Classic and Photoshop, and my guide starts from there, but I kept the details general, and they would apply to most post-processing software.
Today, we’ll look at backlit & silhouette photos.
On almost every safari, there’s a moment near sunset when the vehicle stops, the guide turns off the engine, and everyone falls silent. The sun sits low in the sky, shining straight ahead. Whatever animal stands before you, maybe an impala, maybe a warthog, appears outlined by the light in a way that takes your breath away. The animal’s edges seem to glow. Behind it, the world looks like fire. In front, everything is in shadow.
At that moment, you need to make a quick decision.
The question isn’t whether to take the shot; you will. The real choice is what kind of image you want, because backlit wildlife scenes give you two very different creative options, each needing its own exposure approach. If you pick the wrong exposure, you’ll end up with the other type of image. Sometimes that’s fine, but usually it isn’t.
You have two options: a backlit portrait that keeps detail in the animal’s face, or a pure silhouette where the animal becomes a dark shape against a bright sky. Both are valid and striking. They start with the same scene (the animal, the low sun, the glowing sky), but split at the moment you choose your exposure.
This post explains how to do both.
Before talking about exposure, let’s look at the light itself. Backlighting, where the light source is behind the subject and facing the camera, does several things at once, some helpful, some not.
Backlighting creates rim light. The edges of the subject (like fur, feathers, thin ears, or a mane) are outlined by light passing through or around them. This rim is often the most beautiful part of a backlit photo. It separates the subject from the background with a glow that editing can’t fake if the light wasn’t there in the first place.
Backlighting also causes flare. When sunlight hits the front of your lens, it can lower contrast, shift colors, create ghosting, and soften your image, sometimes badly. Always use a lens hood in backlit situations, and keep your lens clean. These steps are essential.
Backlighting creates a big difference between the bright sky and the shadowed side of your subject, more than most cameras can handle without losing detail. You have to decide what to let go, and that’s what your exposure choice is about.
Getting a backlit portrait that keeps detail in the subject is harder. You’re asking your camera to capture both the bright rim light and the much darker front of the animal at the same time, which is tough for most sensors.
Use Manual mode. If you rely on automatic metering in backlit scenes, the camera will expose for the bright sky and your subject will be too dark. Take control of your settings.
Spot-meter the shadow side of the subject’s face, the part facing you that only gets reflected or ambient light. This is what you want to expose for. Set your exposure so this area looks right, and accept that the sky and rim light will be overexposed. The sky will blow out, and the rim light may clip at the edges. That’s the right trade-off.
Use ETTR (Expose To The Right) based on your shadow-side reading; raise the exposure as much as you can without losing detail in the subject’s face. Watch your camera’s highlight warning and make sure it only shows in the sky or background, not on the subject. If the subject’s face blinks, lower the exposure until it stops.
Here’s a helpful tip: most new mirrorless cameras have a real-time highlight alert in the viewfinder, like a zebra pattern, that shows which areas are overexposed as you shoot. In backlit situations, this is more useful than checking the histogram later, since the light changes fast and each shot is a bit different.
When editing, focus on recovering shadows on the subject’s face. RAW files from modern mirrorless cameras hold more shadow detail than you might expect from the LCD preview. Pull the Highlights slider back a lot, sometimes to -70 or -100, and raise the Shadows. Use Lightroom’s Subject mask to adjust the subject and background separately. The Dehaze slider, used gently, can bring back contrast lost to haze from backlighting.
For subjects with complex edges, like fine feathers or the hairs of a rim-lit mane, use Photoshop’s Select and Mask tool with the Refine Edge brush along those areas. This gives you more precision than Lightroom’s AI mask sometimes can. If an image is worth editing, it’s worth doing it right.
Silhouettes are easier to expose for, but harder to compose well.
Exposure is simple: meter for the background, not the subject, and let the subject go dark. In Aperture Priority, use minus one or two stops of exposure compensation, or in Manual mode, set exposure for the sky. The subject will naturally underexpose, sometimes a lot. That’s the goal. You’re creating a graphic image, not a portrait. The subject’s surface details don’t matter, its outline does.
That’s where the challenge comes in. A silhouette depends completely on its outline. The shape should be instantly recognizable and look elegant. For example, a warthog from the front doesn’t work well, but a profile with its tusks lit up looks great. A giraffe from the side makes a classic silhouette, but head-on it just looks like a blob.
Before you go for a silhouette, check the subject’s profile. Are the limbs clearly separated from the body, or does everything blend into one dark shape at the bottom? Is the sky behind the subject clear and colorful, or is it messy with branches and distractions? Do you have enough space in the frame to show the whole animal without cutting off its feet or ears?
Shooting from a lower angle often helps, putting the subject fully against the sky instead of the mixed tones of the horizon. On a game vehicle, get as low as you can; even a small drop can make the background cleaner behind a standing animal.
For the sky, set your white balance to a warm setting like Shade or Cloudy before you shoot. This will make the golden and orange tones of sunrise or sunset look richer and more accurate on screen, giving you a better starting point for editing. The subject will be dark no matter what, so white balance mainly affects the sky.
When editing a silhouette, focus on two things: the quality of the sky and making the subject dark and clean. In the HSL panel, boost the orange and red saturation and adjust the blue luminance in the upper sky. Use the Subject mask to make the subject nearly pure black, adjusting Exposure, Shadows, and Blacks as needed. Check the mask edge at 100% zoom. In silhouettes, the border between the dark subject and bright sky stands out most, so any halo or unwanted blur will show right away.
There’s a third option between a backlit portrait and a pure silhouette, and it might be the most beautiful. This is the rim-lit image: the subject’s face is partly visible in shadow, while its edges glow with backlight. It’s not a full portrait or just a shape—more like a subject emerging from darkness, outlined by light.
To get a good rim-lit image, you need the darkest background possible behind your subject. The rim light stands out best against deep shadow or a dark tree line, not a bright sky, which can overpower the effect. The key is to move the vehicle so the subject’s glowing edges are set against the darkest background you can find.
The exposure sits between the two extremes: not as bright as a backlit portrait, not as dark as a silhouette. Spot-meter on the front face and apply minus one stop. The rim will likely clip at its brightest edges; that is acceptable. What you are protecting is the transitional zone between the rim and the shadow — the place where the light falls off across the body — because that gradation is where the three-dimensionality of the image lives.
In my experience, the last twenty minutes of low light on a safari are when you get the most memorable photos; and make the biggest mistakes. The light is amazing, but it changes fast. You need to get your camera settings right straight away, since there’s no time to rethink your exposure from scratch.
It’s worth learning this logic ahead of time. When the engine stops, and the animal stands against the glowing sky, you want to know right away if you’re making a portrait, a silhouette, or something in between. After that, it’s just a matter of adjusting your settings.
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Of the dark past
A child is born;
With joy and grief
My heart is torn.
Calm in his cradle
The living lies.
May love and mercy
Unclose his eyes!
Young life is breathed
On the glass;
The world that was not
Comes to pass.
A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!
James Joyce (1882 – 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic, and one of the most influential and innovative writers of the 20th century.
Mark McGuinness reads and discusses the poem in his podcast, A Mouthful of Air, which features classic and contemporary poetry. Podcast transcription is available.
To read more poems, click here.
Love my work? Support my journey by buying me a coffee or sharing it on your preferred social network. And don’t forget to swing by my online shop to check out my latest prints and gifts. Thank you 🙏 !
Follow me on Instagram | Facebook | Threads | LinkedIn | Tumblr | X | Buy Me A Coffee
