Some animals are so afraid of humans that it’s nearly impossible to photograph them up close. In 1993, I first experimented with remote cameras triggered by the animal breaking an invisible beam. The trick is to have the animal make the kind of image that you would do if you were there.

In that first foray, after months of trial and error, we only had one publishable image (of a leopard with half his face out of the frame). Since then, we’ve refined the process, with much better results, as you’ll see here.