Good Morning Siberia

In this conservation area, there is no chance of using a remote as
it is forbidden to step foot on the ground for obvious reasons. The
only possibility, therefore, was to shoot from my caged vehicle,
with our camera window about 4 feet off the ground. This means
that good shooting locations would be very limited, as I never
really want to be above the eye of an animal – that angle
of view immediately kills a sense of a real encounter. In our
reconnaissance, there was just one small hill that the vehicle could
get close to in the deep snow. The topography in this part of
northeast China can be extremely flat, and we had to hope the
tiger would work his way to our vantage point. It was complicated
further by the fact that the light also becomes too stark by about
10am in the winter – we were asking for a great deal to come right.
The clock ticks on a cold, clear Siberian morning in January. It did,
however, happen and the bonus was that the tiger was
enormous, maybe 50 pounds and I was working from just 5 feet away.
It was a high-energy moment – this is surely one of the world’s most
ruthless killers.