10-Day Serengeti Shadows & Light: Signature Photo Expedition

Met at Kilimanjaro International and driven to Arusha Coffee Lodge, set among the rows of a working estate. Dinner is a welcome and a trip briefing, followed by a gear review with your photography guide: a check that everything works, everything is charged, and that you know what is going into the vehicle each morning.

Ten days is a long expedition covering four very different environments, so pack with that in mind. You will want reach for the cats, something wide for the crater and the baobab country, and a plan for keeping dust out of the camera between the Serengeti and the Mara.

A morning drive south to Tarangire and an afternoon session in the park, which in the dry season means elephants moving through hanging dust with the sun behind them. The day finishes with sundowners and a landscape session among the baobabs as the light goes.

Tarangire is the best backlit park in Tanzania. The dust that irritates everyone else is the photographer's material. It separates the herd from the background, catches the low sun, and turns a straightforward elephant frame into something with atmosphere. Underexpose slightly and let the shapes do the work.

A full day, out early and back late. The morning tends to go on raptors: Tarangire has an exceptional list, and birds of prey in flight are a genuine technical challenge worth spending hours on. The afternoon works the elephant herds for social behaviour, and leopard in the acacias if one is located. An evening Lightroom session covers editing and feedback.

Flight photography is where most people's technique gets exposed. Too slow a shutter and the wingtips blur; too small an aperture and the autofocus struggles; the wrong tracking mode and nothing is sharp. It is the most useful thing you can practise on a trip like this, and Tarangire supplies the subjects to practise on.

A short drive north to Lake Manyara, which offers something none of the other parks do: high-contrast light beneath a dense forest canopy. You work the forest, then come out onto the floodplain for tree-climbing lions if they are showing and for the flamingo flocks strung along the shallows. Overnight above the lake.

Manyara is technically the hardest park on this itinerary. Dappled forest light will destroy an automatically exposed frame, so this is the day to work in manual, expose for the highlights on the animal, and accept that the background will go dark. The flamingos are the opposite problem: flat light, huge distances, and a subject best treated as pattern.

The long drive west through the Ngorongoro Conservation Area and down onto the Serengeti plains, arriving in time for an afternoon session focused on predator activity around Seronera. The transition through the highlands and out onto open grass is worth shooting from the vehicle as you go.

Seronera is where the trip's serious cat work begins. The permanent river holds resident lion prides year-round, leopard use the riverine acacias and sausage trees, and the open ground either side is cheetah country. Your guide spends the afternoon establishing where the current subjects are so that tomorrow starts productively.

A full day tracking the big prides, the resident leopard, and any cheetah in the area, using off-road permits where they apply to get down to a low angle for close-up work. A slide review and feedback session follows in the evening.

Getting the lens low is the whole game with cats. From a standing vehicle you are looking down at a lion and the background is compressed grass; drop to its eye level and the animal separates cleanly against something soft. Where off-road positioning is allowed, that is what your guide is doing when the vehicle takes an apparently odd line.

North to the Mara River region, watching the country change from flat open plain into rugged hills and wooded river valleys. You settle into Sayari Camp and head out for a first afternoon drive along the river to find where the herds are and which crossing points are currently in use.

The northern Serengeti photographs completely differently from the centre. There are hills to put behind a subject, riverine forest for contrast, and dramatically fewer vehicles. It is also where the year's most demanding wildlife photography happens, which is what tomorrow is for.

A full day positioned at the crossing points, waiting. When a crossing goes it is fast, chaotic and hard to shoot: wildebeest launching off a four-metre bank, dust, spray, and crocodile moving in underneath. An evening processing workshop follows.

Prepare before anything happens: fast shutter, continuous autofocus, a frame wide enough to keep the action inside it, and a second body ready. The most common mistake is zooming too tight and cutting the animal off mid-leap. Nothing may happen at all (crossings are unpredictable), but if it does you have perhaps ninety seconds and no chance to change settings.

A morning flight from Kogatende to Manyara, then the drive up the escarpment to the Ngorongoro rim, saving the better part of a day on the road. The afternoon is a landscape session, shooting the caldera as the light goes and cloud builds over the far wall.

After eight days of long glass, this is the wide-angle day. The crater gives you 600 metres of depth, weather moving through in the late afternoon, and a scale a telephoto simply cannot convey. Get the tripod out for the first time all trip and take your time over the composition.

An early descent for a half-day session on the crater floor, timed for low light and before the vehicles arrive. The targets are black rhino, hippo at the pools, and pride behaviour among the crater's resident lions. Afterwards you climb out and drive back to Arusha for your departure.

The crater is the densest place on the trip and therefore the easiest to shoot badly. Ten days in, the discipline you have built should show: choosing a subject, working the light, and leaving the rest alone. It is a fitting last morning, and the frames from it are often the strongest of the whole expedition.