When the Light Fades

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📍 Serengeti National Park, Tanzania Third Place, International Wildlife, 2026 Australian Photographic Prize (Silver with Distinction) We had been waiting with them for some time. T hree siblings motionless on ancient granite, still deep in the boneless sleep that lions carry through the heat of the day. The light had been changing around them for an hour, the sky slowly draining into that blue that is not quite dusk, not quite dark, pressing down over the plain with a kind of held breath. And then, almost imperceptibly, something shifted. Two still carried the looseness of sleep in their bodies. The third had already crossed into something else. Her gaze lifted toward the plain below, reading it in a language she was only beginning to understand. They are young. The confidence is inherited, not yet earned. But the instinct is already there, written into them at a depth no amount of youth can touch. What the photograph cannot show is what came next; the slow, inevitable stirring of the other two, the first steps taken down from the kopje, twenty hours of absolute stillness about to become something the plain had every reason to fear. I made this image understanding that I was witness to a threshold. The warmth of the day still held in the gold of their coats. The dark was already waiting. Show more