Most images of migrating wildebeest are hackneyed and offer little to excite. The river crossings during the summer months have been endlessly documented by scores of tourists who gather along the riverbanks with their telephoto lenses and shoot away on their motor drives from the first leap to the last. There is no serenity in the content here and no originality in its photographic execution.
In my mind, the scores of crossing images in stock libraries have two specific aesthetic drawbacks: firstly they tend to be taken when the sun is quite high – never the best lighting conditions and secondly, the chaos that unfolds in the crossing can make the wildebeest appear ungainly, generic and rather marginal. They are not animals that tend to elicit huge emotion and I think part of the reason for this, is that they are so often photographed at these well established river crossings where their behaviour suggests fear rather than freedom.
One late afternoon in Amboseli it became increasingly clear that a tremendous storm was building up above the lower slopes of the Kenyan side of Kilimanjaro. This is not that unusual and on many occasions I have worked with dark clouds in the afternoon of the dry lake. On this day, however, the sky had an almost biblical menace with its haunting deep blacks full of foreboding. The heavy rain was localised and painted downward waves in the sky – almost akin to a flock of starlings.
I was conscious of the fact that the animal behaviour on the flat and elemental canvas of Amboseli appeared more skittish than normal and around 5.30pm I started to photograph panicked zebra herds charging off in all directions.
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