Posted on Monday, August 19th, 2013 by Uri Halevi
Venture into the wild with the National Geographic photographers as they capture The Serengeti Lion, AKA the Vumbi pride, with the help of a robot tank, night-vision goggles, and tons of love and dedication.
The Serengeti Lion project allows you to enter the world of the Vumbi pride. Photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols and videographer Nathan Williamson were determined to break new visual ground when they made several extended trips to the Serengeti between July 2011 and January 2013. A remote-control toy car and a rugged robot tank gave them an unobtrusive way to make images up close and at low angles. They took their time, letting the pride get used to these little machines. Night-vision cameras and goggles were used to capture images of the lions stalking prey. But most of the images and videos here were made using old-fashioned, camera-in-hand technology.
In this multimedia presentation Nichols and Williamson re-create the feast and famine of the plains; the purring, bleating, and roaring of these cats; the fragile balance of lion survival. Nichols shot 242,000 images and Williamson recorded 200 hours of video, often while lying on the floor of a specially outfitted Land Rover. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that Nichols learned to think like a lion, to game their moves, and to photograph them with an intimacy that comes from an undisguised feeling of kinship.
The National Geographic Society’s Big Cats Initiative is dedicated to halting the decline of lions and other big cats around the world. Lions have disappeared from 80 percent of their African range. Where once they presided over vast ecosystems, now their roars are silenced, their prides dispersed, their fierce grandeur dimming into memory. The extinction of lions is likely but not inevitable. Preventing it will require action. The more we understand about lions, the more likely we’ll be able to save them. Find out how you can support the Serengeti Lion Project.