After fleeing its perch high in the Sausage Tree, the leopard darted through heavy brush and burst into the open a good distance away. I made this image by extending my zoom to nearly 700mm. The big cat, about five feet long, could be clearly seen plodding deliberately across Luangwa's fields, heading deep into an awaiting forest, probably to emerge again only at night. This prowling leopard must compete for its food with a lion pride that claims the same territory. This image points up an important principle of expressive wildlife photography. This is not a picture of leopard – instead I have made a landscape that happens to features animal behavior. In this case, the animal is much smaller than its context, yet because of the contrast in color, and the shock of seeing this rare, nocturnal animal in full daylight, the image stimulates the imagination of the viewer, and asks it to fill in the details.

(Shortly after writing this caption, I read the comments of Michael Reichmann, who runs the well known photography website The Luminous Landscape, in an interview on page 9 of issue #4 of Pbase Magazine. His comments reinforce the very principle I am demonstrating with this image of the distant leopard. Reichmann says “I guess any wildlife photographer needs to ask himself: ‘Does the world need another photograph of a lion?’ The answer is probably not. We really do have enough, and yet to me the challenge is to find a new way to interpret what already is a clichéd subject. If you look at my wildlife work, what you will frequently find is the animal itself tends to be relatively small in the frame and I tend to show it in context of its environment. So to me, I guess it’s landscape with creatures rather than just a photograph of the animal. I am not interested in animal portraiture.”)