The springboks were playing. That was the moment — the moment I’d been sitting there for, and suddenly it was happening right in front of me.
So I started shooting.
The photos were terrible. Not blurry or badly exposed — just unreadable. Two animals mid-leap, limbs tangled, neither one fully in frame. A kicked-up puff of dust where a head should have been. In the chaos of the action, everything that makes a good image — subject separation, a clear line of sight, a readable frame — had simply vanished.
I was in Mountain Zebra National Park, mid-morning, watching a group of springboks in a clearing. I’d noticed them circling each other, the way they do when they’re building toward something. And then when the pronking started, I did what felt completely natural: I hit the shutter.
The instinct makes sense. The action is happening, so you shoot the action. But behaviour photography doesn’t quite work that way.
What I came to understand — slowly, and after a lot of chaotic, unusable frames — is that the best shots don’t happen during the behaviour. They happen just before it, and just after. In the moment of anticipation, when the animal’s body is already telling you something is coming but the chaos hasn’t hit yet. And in the few seconds after, when the energy is still there but the frame has settled — a posture held, a look given, a stillness that carries the weight of what just happened.
You still shoot through the action — you keep going, because occasionally things line up perfectly and you’d never forgive yourself for stopping. But during the behaviour itself, you’re fighting too many things at once. The animals move unpredictably. They overlap. The composition that existed a second ago doesn’t exist anymore. The odds are against you, and you know it.
So the real lesson isn’t to stop. It’s to extend the window in both directions. When I notice the behaviour building — restlessness in the group, body language shifting, ears up — I start shooting before anything dramatic has happened. And when the action breaks, I stay on the animal longer than I think I need to. The moment after the pronk, the moment after the chase, the moment after the display ends — that’s often where the frame actually is.
It’s counterintuitive enough that I still have to remind myself. The brain sees action and wants to respond to it. But in wildlife photography, responding to the action is usually too late. What you’re actually doing is anticipating it.
Mountain Zebra is a small park — you run the same routes, you see the same species repeatedly. That kind of repetition turns out to be useful. It gives you time to make the same mistake more than once, and to notice what you’re doing wrong.
The springboks are still out there somewhere. I get better frames every time.
