I spent two weeks in Tanzania, three of which were on a safari, with a Canon R6 and a telephoto zoom. I went in with a wish list. Cheetahs were nearly at the bottom of it. They are elusive, easily lost in the long grass, and never guaranteed. By the time we set off, I had more or less stopped expecting to see them. Then, out on the Serengeti, we found them.
You can plan a safari down to the hour, but the animals don’t care about your plans. The shots you remember are the ones you wait for.
The Plains
The Serengeti is big in a way photos struggle to display. Grass ran to the horizon in every direction. There was no fence, no building and no obvious boundary—only the track beneath us. That is no accident: 38% of Tanzania’s land is set aside for conservation, one of the highest shares in the world.
Some of the wildlife numbers are good news. Tanzania’s latest national census, published by TAWIRI in June 2026, counted about 17,200 lions, more than any other country, and over 320,000 buffalo, the most in Africa.
Others are harder to read. The same census counted 66,714 elephants, roughly half the 134,000-plus recorded in 2005, and officials blame most of that on ivory poaching in the 2000s. Even the Great Migration is up for debate. For years the figure was 1.3 million wildebeest, but an Oxford-led satellite survey in 2025 found fewer than 600,000 in the northern Serengeti and Maasai Mara. The researchers say the methods differ and it needs more study. Still, that’s a big gap.
Against those numbers, seeing cheetahs felt less like luck and more like a privilege.
Into the Crater
Nothing ever prepares you for Ngorongoro. You come over the rim and the whole crater floor is suddenly laid out below you, grassland and water boxed by steep walls, like a world of its own. I was mesmerised. I sat there taking it all in before I picked up the camera.
Down on the floor we saw lions; so many I lost count. We also saw black rhinos. There are only 302 black rhinos in all of Tanzania, according to the latest census. In 1968 the crater alone had 108. By 1977, after years of poaching, it was down to 25. The ones you see today are there because they have been under protection for decades.
That is also why park rules exist, and why they are worth sticking to. You are limited to 25 km/h on the crater floor and 50 km/h in the national parks. You stay on the marked tracks and only drive between 6 am and 6 pm. No calling to the animals, clapping, banging on the vehicle or throwing things to get their attention. Drones have been banned in the national parks since 2014, partly because of fears that poachers could use the footage to find elephants and rhinos.
A few other things I would tell any photographer heading out there:
Let the lens do the work. At 300mm, you will not fill the frame with every animal. That is often a good thing. If one changes it’s behaviour or moves away, you are too close.
Never bait or call. Food and recorded sounds change natural behaviour and can make animals dependent or aggressive.
Don’t crowd. When the vehicles gather around one animal, ask your guide to give it space.
Think before you geotag. Precise locations on photos of rhinos can help poachers. Tag the region, not the spot.
Photos like these matter more in Tanzania than you might think. Tourism brought in $4.4 billion in 2025 from just shy of 6 million visitors, around 17% of the country’s GDP. Plenty of those trips started with someone seeing a picture of the Serengeti and deciding to take the plunge and go.
The lens does not only record the perfect moments. It also records empty space, fewer animals and vehicles pressing in around a sighting. I think those photographs matter too.
The Final Frame
My photos will not restore the animals that have already been lost. But a photograph can make a distant place feel immediate. It can make someone pause over a cheetah in the grass or a rhino below the crater rim and understand that these animals are not just symbols.
I am still thinking about those cheetahs. I had stopped expecting to see them, which made the sighting feel even more improbable. The photographs are what I brought home, but the responsibility is what stayed with me: keep your distance, do not interfere and record what is really there.
