Hyena Under Stars

To truly show hyenas in their element, I decided to photograph them at night. The stars in African night sky are so beautiful that I also wanted to try to include them in my image. I used a remote-control buggy to position my camera at ground-level so that I could photograph the hyena with the beautiful starry sky behind.

This is a single exposure. I lit the hyena with two wireless off-camera flashes and used a relatively long shutter speed to expose the stars. Because there was no moon to cause ghosting, it didn’t matter if the hyena moved after the initial flash.