Some of the strongest frames from this trip have almost nothing to do with behavior — they're about what the light is doing to the sky and the trees in the last twenty minutes before dark, gathered from several different stops along the route rather than one single place.
A little later in the evening, deeper into the colour change — a bare, long-dead tree doing more work as a silhouette than most living ones manage, its own shape laid out again in what's left of the water beneath it.
Elephants don't stop for the light the way photographers do, which is exactly what makes a shot like this — two of them still browsing, sun setting directly between them — feel unposed. It wasn't posed; they simply hadn't finished eating.
By the time the light turns properly gold and the dust starts catching it, the cats are usually just getting started for the evening — a lioness on the move, backlit, throwing up her own small cloud with every step.
And the one I kept coming back to — a lioness settling in for the evening with a lone tree standing over her, the sky gone the deep pink it only holds for a few minutes. Less a wildlife photograph than a place photograph that happens to have a lion in it, and the reason this set gets its own entry rather than being split across the galleries.
