Impala DK

We were driving through Savute. That's not quite redundant, certainly not as much as we did when we visited Namibia. There, the country feels like one long gravel highway that never ends, never arrives. You're just always on it. Here, Savute is Botswana's desert terrain, but by comparison to Namibia, it's lush, full of the tall grass, predators, and prey one hopes to see in Africa.

And some of the prey are just stunningly beautiful, especially the members of the antelope families. Here, we came upon a small herd of impala, easily identifiable by their beautiful lyre-shaped horns, just as the afternoon golden light was breaking through the clouds. I imagined an image where he might be staring right back at me. And eventually, that image would present itself. But not today. Today, meet Impala DK, who made it abundantly clear he had no interest in us. 

But as I watched through my lens, noticed his eyelashes and the fly dancing on his horn, I thought to myself: "don't miss this one." The light and the animal.

This image breaks the rule about capturing the animal's eye(s) in your shot. So be it. The image is about the absence of eye contact.

Provenance: Nikon Z7 • Nikkor 80-400mm

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Warm afternoon light on an impala in Savute, Botswana.
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Impala DK

In Savute — the remote corner of Botswana's Chobe district where the dried Savute Channel has made this floodplain one of Africa's most concentrated predator territories — the impala occupies a precise and not enviable position in the food chain: the most numerous antelope in southern Africa, and therefore the primary prey of nearly every large carnivore in the ecosystem. "DK" designates the photographic treatment: dark key, a low-key rendering in which the animal emerges from deep shadow, the light defining form rather than illuminating it wholesale, the background dropping away into black. In this treatment, what you see is the impala's structure — the arc of the horns, the set of the ears, the particular alertness of an animal that has learned to treat stillness as survival. The dark-key approach removes the landscape and the context and leaves only the animal's presence, which turns out to be considerable. Savute has been photographed for decades; this image finds its register in the shadow rather than the light.