Close encounters of the wild kind in Serengeti

When Anup Shah set out in 2007 to photograph the wild animals and birds of the East African plains, he wanted to show them as they’d never been seen before. He camouflaged his camera with mud and even elephant dung and put it on the ground. Then he waited in his car 50 to 100 m away, and watched, trying to determine just when to trip the shutter by remote. He spent four months of each of the next four years travelling, and considerable money in replacement cameras, to get the photographs for his new book, Serengeti Spy, where the images take the viewer right into the centre of the stampeding herd.

Elephants dusting themselves

Olive baboon

Juvenile male Cheetah on bonnet of a vehicle

Black-backed jackals feeding on a wildebeest carcass

Mature male lion

Thomson’s gazelles

Lappet-faced vultures

Eastern white-bearded wildebeest

An adolescent lion