The Watcher

Maasai Mara, Kenya 2023

Cheetahs are beautiful animals but they are also vulnerable. They are not the top of the food chain. They have to stay alert — for lions, for hyenas, for anything that moves on the plain that could be a threat. This cheetah was scanning the area from the top of a termite mound, her body upright and still, watching for whatever she needed to watch for.

The sky did the rest. Heavy clouds had moved in and the light had turned moody — not beautiful light in the usual sense, but the right light for this scene. The drama in the sky matched the tension in her body. I wanted the horizontal frame so the sky could spread out on both sides of her and the plain could sit beneath the mound. She is small in the frame. She is also the center of it. Nothing in the image can pull your eye away from her.

This is the same cheetah, same mound, same day as another image in this collection. But this is not the same photograph. In the other frame she was lying down, calm, unconcerned — I wanted to show the quiet. Here she is sitting up, reading the plain, doing what her species has to do to stay alive. Same animal, same hour, two different truths. Both are real.

The dramatic landscape shot is not what I usually go for. I am more often pulling in tight, working the face and the eyes. But sometimes an image asks to be framed against the whole world, and the whole world is what gives it weight. This was one of those.