Exodus

David Yarrow:

“One late afternoon in Amboseli, I started to capture the tremendous storm building up above the lower slopes of the Kenyan side of Kilimanjaro. Wanting the vast sky in the picture, I laid flat on the ground, shooting directly into any shafts of evening light and leaving the foreground up to sheer luck. To achieve a dynamic spectacle, my guide Juma Wanyama used our vehicle to coerce the wildebeest herd in the right general direction.

Exodus was the last picture I took that day with the light gone minutes later. There is nothing I would change about the image, including the blurred blades of grass, hinting at my position flat on the dustpan. I had no preconception of how much visual information there would be in the sky, but the new Nikon D810 is a high-performance camera body and will pick up more than my naked eye. The dead tree to the right adds to the Mad Max-like atmosphere of the image.

Unlike at river crossings, the wildebeest look gamely and free. Despite its apparent ominousness, there is a great serenity and soul to this picture. Exodus is Africa at its most incomparably evocative”.