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Today is a day for jaguars.

We have been in the Pantanal since Monday and the last 5 days have not left much time for reviewing images nor for posting. Our days have started with an alarm set for 4:00, with a quick breakfast at 4:45 and off in the boat at 5:15 sunrise.

There are 5 of us in a 5 metre long boat, self and Rob, our two guides and the boat driver. We stop in for a quick lunch at our floating hotel at 11:30 and are off again at 12:00 and stay out until sunset at around 18:00, so 12+ hours in the boat. Temperatures coolish in the morning and the late afternoon but 35-37C from about 7:00 until about 18:00.

Dinner at 19:00 and in bed by 21:00, not much time for image review.

And time is definitely needed. I mentioned last year, when we were in Patagonia, that my hands have been developing an age-related shake which makes fine motor control increasingly more difficult when trying to keep the camera steady. The Pantanal shooting environment has raised the camera-steadiness stakes considerably.

I’m using a 150-600mm super telephoto which is more than 33cm long and camera and lens weigh 2.5kg, so keeping it steady in ideal conditions is a challenge but in a small boat in a river with a swift current and many waves it becomes a herculean task. My solution is to ‘spray and pray’, That is try and grab focus on the subject and set the shutter to ‘burst-mode’. Normally when you press the shutter the camera takes one image, in burst-mode it takes 7 images a second. Before sitting down to review my images I had no idea how well my shots would work, there were lots of great shooting opportunities but I did not know how well I had managed to capture what I was trying to capture. And at 7 frames a second I had over 9000 images to review,.

Over the course of 5 days we have had 21 encounters with jaguars and with 8 different individuals, an embarrassment of riches! Yesterday, our first free-ish day, I spent about 5 hours scrolling through images looking for keepers. The ratio of good ones to discards or duplicates is very small but hardly surprising. If I can make 5-10 good shots over the course of a trip I’m more than pleased. The first batch follows below; by no means great shots but they a give a good sense of the animals and their habitat.

More to come!