Ian Dawson x XF400mmF4.5/ FUJIFILM

The thing with wildlife is inevitably patience. Most of my life is spent waiting for a picture. What I'm waiting for is to do something different, something unusual, something that speaks of the animal's character and its daily life. I've got a young hippo just in this knoll cabbage here. He's buried in this very vibrant green weed and it's quite colourful. My name is Ian Dawson. I'm a photographer and throughout my career I have been through several disciplines as a photojournalist. But now I spend my life travelling the world, photographing wildlife, people and landscapes in some of the most spectacular locations on our planet, from the Arctic and Antarctic to where we are here in Zambia. The beauty about being in the park here is you never know what you're going to see from one minute to the next. And it harks back to my career as a photojournalist, that you'd be sent somewhere and you're never quite sure what's going to happen and you have to be flexible, you have to roll with it and that's where the excitement lies. On this trip I'm using the new Fujinon XF 400mm f4.5 and I've got that on my usual workhorse which is the X-H2 with a battery grip on the bottom. I'm hugely impressed with it so far. I find the autofocus is very, very quick on it and that's a real bonus when things are just coming out of left field from a bush or up a riverbank. You get very little warning. And this lens is coping with it phenomenally well. I'm really, really enjoying using it. As I mentioned I'm working on a fixed 400mm and that makes you look at things differently because having a fixed lens makes your brain work differently. You've got to find new compositions. It can throw up some wonderful results. It's wonderful when we get these quiet moments in the day where we're out in the bush with all these wonderful animals surrounding us and we get the chance to just really observe a species and that is incredibly helpful for anyone's photography because you get to understand a little bit about their behaviour and what they may or may not do. And because you've visualised that beforehand you've got all your settings right. You're prepared to move quickly. Look at these two here and this wonderful interaction between this young one back there with the sun going behind them on this mother's head. But the important thing is that we're not disturbing them that they're behaving naturally and we don't affect the behaviour of the animal. That's far more important than getting a shot. What we're photographing is unbothered by us and we don't affect its behaviour. And that's really important to me and the people we work with in the park like my guide here, Peter. This is an area where animals are not disturbed. Most animals are there for us to see but we make sure that we go to the animals and give them some space. You see the natural beauty and leave them as you find them to make sure that the animals are not disturbed. And the history of the National Park began in the 50s when people started thinking of protecting the giraffe that we have here. We have a unique species of giraffe here that's endemic to this area only the thorny-cropped giraffe. Norman Carr used to bring people here to hunt with a camera as opposed to a rifle. So the park was formed shortly after that and they haven't been hunted for that period of time and that really shows in the behaviour of the animals here. They're very relaxed around people and when they're travelling in jeeps and it means you can get really close and you're getting very, very natural behaviour from these animals not affected by the fact that we're here photographing them or viewing them. Oh, lovely. Yeah, when we get further over here there's some nice open areas you never know. She might go up into a tree but I'm speaking to Peter here. She's marking her boundaries. The sun is just rising so I'm hoping she's going to get into a clearing where that lovely golden African morning light is going to start lighting her up a bit. We've had people say, oh, I'll take that off if we can go in there, but you never know what they're going to do. The more patience you have, the more luck you get and the more it pays off. Regarding my photography, I'm in a really fortunate position where I get to visit some extraordinary places around the world. Far flung, they're quite often at the forefront of climate change. Even here, you know, we're getting fluctuations in the seasons in Zambia. For me, photography is a means to change at its best and giving something back to these projects for us is really important, not just to come somewhere and take pictures away, but to give something back or help where we can, and that has involved using our images to support change, creating a body of work that can affect policy even internationally or at a local or a national level is really important, and that doesn't happen in isolation. It happens with scientists, with conservation organizations, with other photographers. But being involved with that gives some drive to your photography and gives some meaning to it beyond the fact that you're creating hopefully something, a beautiful image. That's why patience pays off. She came up out of the bush eventually and into the light. She had just beautiful backlight and she was centering around her area. And the additional, that extra few stops of lower aperture, that down at 4.5 is really helpful because quite often behind animals you're getting long grass, you're getting trees, you're getting foliage, and it's just to separate the subject from that background just a little bit by getting that nice, shallow depth of field. And she reached up and looked up into the light and was smelling the leaves on this plant and it's hopefully made a really nice frame. Sometimes you get lucky, but as I say, the harder you work, the luckier you are. And that just paid off there hopefully. As for other people to judge, not me. It's always a challenge and it's always a thrill when you get that image. I just have this childlike excitement when I get a good picture and I never lose that. And you never know when it's going to happen. It can happen in the most unexpected moments. Oh my God! I've never seen this. I just found this female lion. She's unbelievably got five cubs and they're all just following her really well camouflaged amongst the grass here, the scrub. I've never seen anything like this. Got that lovely morning light just starting to catch them. You'll have noticed that I'm always hand-holding my camera and that's a throwback to when I was a photojournalist. We'd rarely use a tripod, if ever, in the bush. You need that flexibility to move quickly. Historically, you'd never hold a lens this long hand-held, but the image stabilisation on this lens is exceptionally good. It never gets boring. The minute it gets boring, you should hang up your camera. But I've never reached that point yet in all the years I've been a photographer. You know, photography can generate such a range of emotions in people. It's got a life beyond the photographer at its best and it can benefit the places we go to, but also it's a mutual, symbiotic relationship between the people we work with here, the place we work at, and what we can contribute back to them. The nice thing is to pass that on because we're only here for a short space of time. An image sitting on a hard drive or on your wall at home is only doing so much good. So pass it on, share it.