The vast number of penguin chicks in Gold Harbour in the early summer offers an opportunity to play with numbers. My team brought a ladder all the way from London, as I had a preconception that I might need to have a position of raised elevation to give depth. In this photograph, I knew my frame could not have any piece of white other than the father’s chest; that would create a tension point and kill the image. Such are the boundary lines in fine-art photography.

Every late afternoon at the top of these dramatic escarpments in the Simien Mountains, large numbers of geladas gather to catch the last rays of sun before climbing down the almost-vertical cliffs to find a safe place for the night. They feel safe here from predators like leopards; baboons can climb down the cliff face, while leopards cannot.

One-thousand-pound adult male brown bears are apex predators. But for a few weeks every year, sockeye salmon are the easiest meal the bears will get, and they will not threaten photographers as long as their territory is not encroached upon. This image of a massive bear was captured with remote-controlled cameras at a bend in Moraine Creek that I know only too well. 

I have been working with Kevin Richardson’s lions in South Africa with remote-control units for about six years. We have had some good moments, and the front cover of my last book featured this lioness—Meg—coming through the grass with the first rays of sunlight. 

I take most of my elephant images in Amboseli for three reasons, all of which helped make this image work. The first is that the flat and arid topography of the park—and particularly of the dry lake outside it—lends itself not only to clean backdrops but also to good predictive analysis of elephant movement.

We will soon release this 2019 image of the most famous lion in Kevin Richardson’s sanctuary—Vayetse. I hope it will strike an emotional chord with all lovers of the lion and remind us that the eyes are the windows to the soul—whether they be the eyes of a human or the eyes of a cat.

78 degrees north, Svalbard, Norway, 2017. I should start by saying I have generally been disappointed by my own work with polar bears in Svalbard. This is a giant’s kingdom, and my images from previous trips have been too marginal to do neither the giants nor their kingdom justice. Luck evens itself out, but nature can seem cruel in its distribution of content, and in this barren archipelago, I don’t recall many favors until June 2017. There is no doubt in my mind that this photograph of a big male polar bear lends weight to the contention that wildlife photography does not have to be reportage—it can be art.