WILL BURRARD- LUCAS

First of all, congratulations on being the overall winner in the Natural World category of the 2017 Sony World Photography Awards. What inspired you to shoot those images?

One of my main focuses for that project, which I undertook in Liuwa Plain, Zambia, was to document the nocturnal side of the plain. It came at a time when I was realising the new low-light capabilities of modern digital cameras were really opening up nocturnal wildlife for the first time. I wanted to seize on this opportunity to try to get some shots that maybe people wouldn’t have seen before – using high ISOs and particularly combining that with wildlife.

How did you take these images?

I shot them over two different trips in 2015 and they were made possible by a lot of technology. It started with the low-light ability of the cameras. I was almost always shooting at ISO 3,200 or 6,400, because I needed a reasonable depth of field and shutter speed. I also wanted to get the stars behind the subject so needed a close-up, ground-level perspective. For that I used BeetleCam, the