Photographing Elephants in Amboseli: A Wildlife Photographer's View

By Johan Siggesson Few places in Africa bring elephants and landscape together the way Amboseli does. The park is known for its large herds, its wide open plains, and, on the mornings when the cloud lifts, the unmistakable shape of Kilimanjaro rising above them. On paper it sounds simple enough: elephants, good light, an iconic mountain behind them. In practice it is anything but. Bringing those elements together in a single frame takes patience, a working understanding of how elephants behave, and above all a willingness to wait for a photograph rather than chase after one. I went to Amboseli with elephants specifically in mind, and I arrived with more than one image already forming in my head. It did not take long to learn that the elephants, not me, would decide which of those images actually became possible.

Watching before you shoot

One of the most valuable skills in wildlife photography has almost nothing to do with equipment. It is the ability to watch. Elephants make rewarding subjects precisely because their behaviour tends to signal what comes next, if you know how to read it. The direction a herd is heading, the pace they keep, whether they are grazing at leisure or moving with clear intent, how individuals within the group behave toward one another, all of it tells a story. A herd feeding unhurriedly will often stay in roughly the same area for a good while, whereas a group walking steadily in a single direction is usually heading somewhere specific, water, shade, or the next feeding ground. The more time you spend among elephants, the easier these small signals become to recognise, and that recognition is what lets you anticipate a moment instead of merely reacting to it.

That distinction, between anticipating and reacting, matters a great deal to me. React only to what an animal is doing in the moment and you are permanently one step behind, by the time you have registered the moment, worked out a composition and raised the camera, it has usually already passed. Predict, even roughly, where a herd is likely to move, and you buy yourself time to think the photograph through before it happens, the light, the background, whatever else might enter the frame, and above all where you would rather be standing. The elephants, naturally, prove me wrong often enough. They double back, stop to feed, or simply do something I had not accounted for. I have come to think of that unpredictability as part of the job rather than an obstacle to it, and honestly, part of what keeps me coming back.

Which is why positioning usually matters more than gear. People tend to ask wildlife photographers about camera bodies and lenses, but the newest camera on the market will not save a photograph if the light is wrong, the background is a mess, or you have ended up trailing an elephant and photographing the back of it as it walks away. Where roads and park rules allow, I would rather work out where a herd seems to be heading, get ahead of that line, and then simply wait. That plan falls apart plenty of times when the animals change direction, but when they do keep coming, the whole encounter changes character. Rather than following them, you are the one holding still, and the elephants are the ones deciding whether to approach, pass at a distance, or veer off elsewhere. Beyond the better photographs this usually produces, I prefer it for a simpler reason too: the elephants stay in charge of the encounter, not me.

Camera height is another thing that can change the entire feel of an elephant photograph. Shot from high up in a safari vehicle, even an enormous elephant can end up looking oddly small and unremarkable. I prefer to shoot from as low a position as I safely can. That does not mean climbing out of the vehicle and getting down at elephant level, safety and park regulations come first, always. But even a modest drop in camera height, still from within the vehicle, changes the relationship between the elephant, the horizon and whatever sits behind it. A lower angle tends to give the animal more presence and separates it more cleanly from its background, which matters enormously in Amboseli, where you are often trying to hold Kilimanjaro or that vast open plain in the same frame.

Letting the landscape into the frame

Wildlife photography carries a natural pull toward the longest lens you own and a frame filled entirely with the animal. I enjoy that too, elephant skin, eyes, tusks and ears hold more character and detail than almost anything else I photograph. But Amboseli is somewhere I often want the opposite. The landscape is so central to the experience of the place that leaving it out means leaving out much of what makes Amboseli what it is. The open plains, the dust, the distant hills, Kilimanjaro itself, all of it gives an elephant photograph a sense of scale and location that a tight portrait simply cannot deliver.

So when the elephants are close enough to allow it, I often shoot at medium focal lengths and deliberately leave room around them. An elephant does not need to dominate a frame to make a strong photograph. Making the animal smaller within its landscape can actually say more about where it lives, and about what it feels like to stand there. It also changes how you think about composition. Instead of focusing purely on the animal, you start paying attention to the shapes the herd makes as a whole, the gaps between individuals, the horizon line, the balance of the whole frame.

One photograph from that trip shows how these elements can come together, and how long that can take. I had an image in mind of elephants moving in a line across open ground, not a herd scattered loosely through the frame, but something closer to a clean, rhythmic procession, each animal still distinct, forming a natural line across the landscape. I spent eight days looking for that exact photograph. Elephants were never in short supply, and there were plenty of chances to make perfectly good images along the way, but the one I had pictured demanded far more than that. The herd needed to be moving in the right direction and spaced out enough that no two animals merged into one shape. The background needed to stay uncluttered, the first elephant needed a decent set of ivory, the first elephant needed to flap its ears, the light needed to be right, and the vehicle needed to be positioned somewhere the park rules actually allowed.

Then, finally, a group fell into single file. The elephant leading them was one I had come to know by name, Gigabyte, and as her family crossed the plain the line they formed curved beautifully across the ground. For a few seconds, everything lined up: the spacing held and Gigabyte lifted an ear away from her body just enough to separate her outline from everything around it. That instant is now the photograph I call At the Foot of the Mountain. Making the exposure took a fraction of a second. Reaching that fraction of a second took eight days. That, to me, is a fair summary of wildlife photography as a whole. The finished image can look effortless, but nobody sees the days spent waiting, the mornings the mountain vanished into cloud, the herds that walked off in the wrong direction, or the near-misses that almost worked and then didn't.

That image now belongs to my elephant photography collection,still titled At the Foot of the Mountain . It has become one of my best-selling photographs and is the most internationally awarded image in my portfolio.

Patience is not the same as doing nothing

Waiting in the field looks, from the outside, like doing nothing at all. It rarely is. While I am waiting for a photograph I am reading the light, watching the animals, checking what is happening in the background, and constantly reassessing where the herd is likely to go next. I am weighing up whether to hold our position, move further ahead, or give the scene another twenty minutes. I am watching for another elephant about to walk into frame, or one in the background about to create separation, or clutter. In my opinion, more often than people expect, the right call is simply to stay put.

That is a genuinely difficult discipline on safari, where there is always somewhere else to be. Someone radios in that lions have been spotted a few kilometres away, or word comes through of a cheetah elsewhere in the park, and staying put with the same herd of elephants for another hour starts to feel like missing out. More often than not, photography rewards the opposite instinct. If the elements of a photograph are already assembled in front of me, I would rather give them time than go chasing something new on a rumour. Several of my strongest images have come out of long stretches where, on the surface, almost nothing appeared to be happening.

It also matters not to get so fixed on the one ambitious photograph that you overlook the quieter behaviour unfolding right in front of you. Elephants offer an endless supply of smaller moments worth photographing, a calf reaching up toward its mother, two animals touching trunks in greeting, dust thrown across a back to cool it, a youngster hurrying to keep pace with the herd, a big bull pausing to investigate something with the tip of his trunk. None of that looks as dramatic on first glance as a herd framed beneath Kilimanjaro, but it often says more about elephants as animals. Their trunks are in almost constant use, feeding, exploring, communicating, and the way individuals position and move within a family group reveals relationships you will miss entirely if photographing is all you are doing.

That is part of why I regularly put the camera down and simply watch. Some photographs are lost because we were not ready for them. Just as many are lost because we were too busy photographing to notice what was actually happening. Time spent observing an animal without a viewfinder in front of your eye makes you a better photographer of that animal, not a worse one. It builds an understanding of the subject that eventually works its way into the photographs themselves.

Letting the elephants set the terms

Giving elephants room matters for obvious reasons of safety and ethics, but I have also come to believe it produces better photographs. An animal that is constantly reacting to your presence is not showing you the natural behaviour you came to photograph in the first place. I would always rather let an elephant close the distance on its own terms than force an encounter just to get a nearer shot, especially around family groups and young calves. If the animals' behaviour changes because of the vehicle or where you are sitting, take that as information rather than an inconvenience, and give them more space.

Once elephants are genuinely at ease around you, you start to see behaviour that simply disappears the moment they become wary, feeding, communicating, playing, resting, moving through the landscape without a second thought for who is watching.

Amboseli also tempts photographers into fixating on the one classic image, elephants with Kilimanjaro behind them. There is nothing wrong with wanting that photograph, I wanted it too, and I am still drawn to the relationship between those animals and that mountain. But once you have that shot, keep looking. The photograph that ends up staying with people might be a single elephant fading into a cloud of dust, a small herd dwarfed under an enormous sky, the graphic silhouette of a trunk, or a quiet exchange between a mother and her calf. The images that last are not always the ones we set out to make.

That, I think, is the real lesson Amboseli has taught me. Arrive with ideas, but hold them loosely enough not to be trapped by them. Watch more than you shoot, think about where an animal is heading rather than only where it is standing, pay real attention to backgrounds, and do not be afraid to wait. Above all, let the elephants set the terms of the encounter. Wildlife photography is unpredictable by nature. You can travel thousands of kilometres, return to the same spot day after day, and still leave without the photograph you came for. Then, every so often, it all lines up for a second or two. You can prepare, anticipate, and position yourself as carefully as the conditions allow, but nature always gets the final word. When the photograph does finally happen, every hour of waiting turns out to have been worth it.

You can see more from this trip, and others across Africa, at www.johansiggesson.com .

About the author

Johan Siggesson is a Malta-based fine art wildlife photographer specialising in limited-edition prints, with a particular passion for Africa's elephants. His work has won international recognition in wildlife and fine art photography and sits in private collections worldwide.

References & further reading

1. Sinclair, A. R. E., et al. (Eds.) (2015). Serengeti IV. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2. Estes, R. D. (2012). The Behavior Guide to African Mammals. Berkeley: University of California Press.
3. Kingdon, J. (2015). The Kingdon Field Guide to African Mammals (2nd ed.). London: Bloomsbury.
4. IUCN (2024). The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Version 2024-1. www.iucnredlist.org.