No animal has tested my patience quite like the leopard. Solitary, silent and endlessly cautious, it is the cat you sense long before you see — a flicked tail in a tree, an alarm call moving through the forest, a rosette-patterned shape dissolving back into shadow.
I have photographed leopards in two very different worlds: the teak and bamboo forests around Kabini in southern India, and the open, acacia-dotted plains of the Masai Mara in Kenya. In India the challenge is the dense cover and the leopard's genius for stealth; in the Mara, the reward is often a cat draped along a branch in the open, unbothered and watchful.
What I look for now is not just the animal but the way it wears its landscape — dappled light across its coat, the tension held in its stillness, the sense that it could vanish at any second. A leopard rarely gives a second chance, which is exactly why the encounters stay with me.
