Eyes in the Branches

Taken in Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda, while I was working with the Kyambura Lion Monitoring Project. This particular trip took us north from our usual base in Kyambura Gorge to check on the Murchison lion population.

This lioness had escaped the heat of the day by climbing into the branches of a tree, and I worked my way in closer for a tighter crop than the wider version of this same encounter, stripping the frame back to just her face and the branches cradling her. In black and white, all the colour noise of the savanna disappears and what's left is just her eyes, and the strange, almost architectural shapes the branches make around her.

This is genuinely one of my favourite photographs I've ever taken. There's just something about her eyes combined with the unusual behaviour of a lion being in a tree.