Meet The Pro: Wim van den Heever

Host Toby Jermyn welcomes South African photographer Wim van den Heever, who won Wildlife Photographer of the Year with a haunting brown hyena image made over 10 years using a difficult camera-trap setup in Namibia’s abandoned Kolmanskop.

Connect with Wim:
WimvandenHeever.com
https://www.instagram.com/wim_van_den_heever/

The Pangolin Podcast was produced and edited by Bella Falk: https://www.passportandpixels.com

View a gallery of the images discussed in this episode:
https://pangolin.smugmug.com/SmugMug-Website/Pangolin-Podcast/Wim-van-den-Heever

Wim also shares the technical challenges of camera trapping, including balancing distant security light with flashes, working at 15-second exposures, and enduring sand, lost gear, and countless failures before seeing the winning frame. He also discusses predicting behaviour, his shift from stock photography to hosting and fine-art print sales, and a shot made with a submerged wide-angle camera triggered remotely.

Listen out for a very special giveaway from Pangolin Photo Safaris and Wim van den Heever.

GUEST IMAGE
Polar Reflections by Paul Nicklen
https://paulnicklen.com/
https://www.instagram.com/paulnicklen/ 

Timestamps:

• 00:00 Welcome to Pangolin Podcast
• 03:31 First Image - Ghost Town Visitor
• 14:23 Second Image - The Final Leap
• 24:06 Third Image - A Leap of Lechwe
• 30:42 Fourth Image - Craig
• 35:46 Guest Image - Polar Reflections
• 39:20 Dream Home

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https://link.pangolinphoto.com/Pod-Community

We are Pangolin Wildlife Photography, based in the Chobe, Northern Botswana. When we are not making videos for our channel, we host our guests and clients from all over the world on our Wildlife Photography safaris throughout Botswana and the rest of Africa—and sometimes beyond!

Learn More about our safaris here: https://link.pangolinphoto.com/BZ-Safaris

Transcript

Toby Jermyn: Hello and welcome to another brand-new episode of the Pangolin Podcast. I'm your host, Toby Jermyn. Thank you very much for joining me. In each episode, I've invited a professional wildlife photographer to imagine themselves in a remote location along with their camera gear. They're allowed to bring five photographs to hang on the wall of their humble dwelling. Now, four of these must be their own, and the final image is one they admire by another photographer.

If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see the images as we talk. But for audio listeners on other platforms, there is a link in the description to a gallery on today's show. My guest today is an internationally acclaimed wildlife and landscape photographer from South Africa. His work blends fine art and natural history, using light, atmosphere, and meticulous fieldcraft to tell powerful conservation stories from Africa's savannahs to the Arctic and beyond, inspiring a deeper emotional connection with the natural world.

In what must be the peak of every wildlife photographer's career, he was awarded the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year title by the Natural History Museum last year for his haunting image of a brown hyena moving through a Namibian ghost town—a photograph that took him 10 years to create. He is, of course, Wim van den Heever. Wim, welcome to the podcast.

Wim van den Heever: Thank you very much, Toby. Thank you for having me on the show.

Toby: I'm glad we managed to catch you because you've been kind of busy recently, haven't you?

Wim: Yeah, I've been running around. Last year was bumper-packed and going into 2026 is just as busy. Lots of adventures, lots of great photography opportunities, but it obviously leaves a very little window to actually get some stuff done while you're not traveling. So, I'm happy we could make this work. It's really nice to be part of the show and it’s nice seeing you again, my friend.

Image 1: The Brown Hyena (Wildlife Photographer of the Year)

Toby: It's very nice to see you as well. Just tell everybody—okay, you won the biggest photographic competition out there. How many times have you entered Wildlife Photographer of the Year?

Wim: 2011 was my first time. I’ve been entering it every year, including this year. So, it's 15 years that I've been entering the competition. I've been a runner-up in categories and I've placed as "Highly Commended," etc., but I've never really won a category and I've never walked away with anything like I did last year.

Toby: Right. So that was very unexpected and certainly a huge honour. You don't know until you're there at the event at the Natural History Museum, do you?

Wim: That's right. I can promise you, you do not know anything beforehand. In fact, I was completely shocked when the announcement came up—so shocked that I was completely dumbstruck. In my mind, I’d already resigned myself to the fact that I had not won. When they mentioned my name, it was such a shock. I was like, "No, no, no, guys, you’ve got the wrong guy! It's not me!"

Toby: I want to talk more about this, but let's look at the image. Tell us about it.

Wim: Like you said, it took me 10 years to get the picture. It's a brown hyena in the desolated, abandoned streets of Kolmanskop with this eerie building in the background, the fog rolling in, and eerie lights.

Toby: And it took you 10 years from conception to actually managing to get it. You go to Namibia and Kolmanskop a lot, and you had this vision. This was uniquely a camera trap, right? These animals are incredibly shy; they aren't going to come near you if you’re sitting there. Tell me how you got it together.

Wim: I find myself in Namibia quite often, and a lot of the groups I'm leading love photographing Kolmanskop. It’s not necessarily a place I enjoy photographing a lot, mainly because it has human aspects in it. I like the real wild places where I feel away from anything man-made. But that also brings the wildlife photographer out in you. While walking those streets, I saw droppings and footprints of brown hyenas. I realised there must be an opportunity to photograph one in this magnificent setting.

Initially, I tried to get into the area pre-dawn or wait in the evenings, but those animals are just too elusive. They can smell you and hear you. Fast forward a few years, and then came Will Burrard-Lucas with the Camtraptions system. I had various versions of that, and I had several ones that eventually got tossed and lost in the desert because they take such a beating.

Camera trapping is by far the most difficult thing I've ever tried to do. You need to know where the animal is going to be and exactly what the lighting will be at 2:00 or 3:00 AM. It’s a massive desert. There are no fence posts to put a camera on. I lost a lot of equipment—cameras, flashes, lenses, tripods—messed up by the easterly winds that dump sand on everything. To get this one picture after literally 10 years was absolutely amazing.

Toby: We’ve had Will Burrard-Lucas on the podcast as well. He mentioned the same thing: so much can go wrong and you can miss the perfect shot without even knowing it. Tell me about the moment you took the memory card out.

Wim: I woke up at 3:00 or 4:00 AM to drive back to Kolmanskop to fetch the cameras before the guests arrived. I had two or three camera traps out. The first few had nothing. I picked this one up, pressed play, and saw the camera had triggered three times. Two were blank, and then this picture came up. I got goose pimples. "Oh my god, I did this."

Toby: Most famous photographs of Kolmanskop are of the sand dunes coming through the windows. This is completely unique. Hyenas are often unfairly associated with scavenging and death; a ghost town is the perfect juxtaposition. When you saw the image, did you immediately know you were entering it?

Wim: I was actually reluctant to enter it because hyenas don't have a good reputation in wildlife photography. I didn't think people would understand the effort behind it. In 10 years, I have exactly one picture of a hyena and one picture of a jackal pointed the wrong way to show for it.

Toby: Tell us about the lighting. You can't predict fog—that's the cherry on top.

Wim: Initially, I wanted to photograph it with the stars and the Milky Way. The light on the building is actually spill from a security light about 500 meters away. I had to balance that with two flashes placed way off to the side to light the subject without overexposing the building.

Toby: What was your shutter speed?

Wim: My ideal setting for the Milky Way is 30 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 3200. But with the light spill, anything more than 15 seconds blew out the building. So I used 15 seconds, ISO 3200, f/2.8. That gave me a very shallow depth of field, so the subject had to be in exactly one plane to be in focus.

Toby: And you used the Camtraptions sensor?

Wim: Yes. I closed the sensor door down to a very narrow gap. I realised the subject had to walk exactly across one specific spot for the camera to go off. That’s how I set it up.

Image 2: The Leopard and the Springbok

Toby: Let’s move on to the next amazing shot.

Wim: The next picture is of a leopard catching a springbok, taken around 2015 or 2016. These aren't necessarily the pictures I’d hang on my wall, but they mark important chapters in my photography. This moment taught me how important it is to know animal behaviour.

I’d been following this leopard for three days. She was very hungry and trying to hunt everything from squirrels to birds without success. The springbok were rutting, and they were so preoccupied with fighting that she could lay in ambush. She eventually became so comfortable with my vehicle that she’d lie underneath it to escape the heat.

On the day it happened, another photographer named Hendrik was nearby. He thought the cat was too inexperienced and was going to leave. While he was talking to me, I saw a group of springbok rams 300 meters down the road, walking straight toward us. I realised they had to pass the leopard. I told Hendrik, "Come park right next to me and watch the kill." I planned everything: new battery, fresh memory card, maximum frame rate, and a fast shutter speed. It worked exactly the way I said it would.

Toby: Two things strike me. The body shape of the leopard looks like a "small leopard person" doing a rugby tackle. Also, there’s blood on the leg—did she grab it there first?

Wim: I have about 100 to 150 frames of the story. The springbok literally walked into the leopard. The leopard jumped up, and as the springbok turned, she grabbed that back leg with one claw and swung herself around. That leopard was tiny, but she held on.

Toby: Did you come from a guiding background?

Wim: I was primarily a wildlife photographer, but it's not easy making ends meet. Back in the day, we relied on stock agencies and magazines, but that became difficult. I started offering my skills as a photographic host. I told clients, "If you join me, I will try to put you in the front row to photograph what I’m photographing."

Toby: You once told me that your income used to be 90% stock and 10% guiding, and it switched very quickly.

Wim: A hundred percent. Stock photography isn't lucrative anymore. Most magazines are online or social media-driven, and people perceive photography as "free." What has worked well for me lately is fine art sales—selling wildlife prints. That has picked up the slack from stock photography.

Image 3: Leap of Lechwe

Toby: Let's move on to your third image.

Wim: This is "Leap of Lechwe," photographed in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. It’s three lechwe jumping across a waterway between two islands. The females are jumping right over the camera, which is positioned on the water's surface.

Toby: How did you get them to jump toward you?

Wim: I was working at Duba Plains, where the lions hunt buffalo. When the lions catch a buffalo, nothing happens for the next few days, so you have to think out of the box. I noticed the lechwe slept on the islands and jumped back to the main islands in the morning.

I used a 14mm lens and stuck the camera in the water. Because there are crocodiles and lions, and because lechwe are shy, I had to put the camera down and sit several hundred meters away. I used a PocketWizard (Version 2) because it had the longest range. I couldn't see what I was shooting; I was just watching through binoculars and pressing the button, hoping they were jumping over the camera.

Toby: What camera were you using?

Wim: A Nikon D3S mounted on a ground pod with a ball head. I manually focused about 3 or 4 meters in front of the camera with an aperture of f/11 or f/13 for a healthy depth of field. I set it up pre-dawn and used Aperture Priority (AV) mode so the shutter speed could ramp up as the light came up. It was around 1/8000th of a second when this picture went off.

Image 4: Craig the Elephant

Toby: Onto your fourth image. I think we know who this is.

Wim: This is a picture of Craig. He was probably the most photographed "big tusker" elephant in Africa. I’ve worked with him for weeks on end over the last few years. He’s the only animal I ever felt I had a connection with.

He was a "community elephant" living in the areas around Amboseli National Park. You’d be photographing him while little girls walked to school or guys passed on bicycles. He was incredibly tolerant. Losing him earlier this year was a huge loss for me. This specific picture is important because I used it to commission a bronze sculpture of Craig by Bernie van der Vyver. It sits in my office.

Toby: He died of old age, which is a success story for anti-poaching in Kenya.

Wim: Absolutely. He never showed aggression. I usually used a 70-200mm lens, but in big open areas, Craig would literally walk straight up to me and stand right next to me.

Toby: What I love about this shot is the posture. His tusks are so heavy—over 100 pounds each—so his head is often down when walking. But here, his head is up. It’s regal.

The Final Image (By another photographer)

Toby: This is the part of the show where we ask you to choose an image by another photographer you respect.

Wim: This is a picture of a polar bear submerged underwater by Paul Nicklen. This picture has always haunted me. It’s very old—I think it was a Windows background at one point! I never understood how he did it. The water surface is flat, the reflection is crystal clear, and the posture is magnificent.

Paul subsequently explained he used a pole camera. This image made me feel insecure as a young photographer because I didn't think I could ever compete with that body of work. He spent his whole life in polar regions and knows these animals backwards.

Toby: It was taken a long time ago on film, too, so he didn't even have the luxury of checking a digital screen.

The Humble Dwelling

Toby: We’ve run out of time, but I have to ask: if you were to live in a humble dwelling anywhere in the world and photograph in perpetuity, where would it be?

Wim: It’s a difficult question, but it would probably be the eastern sector of the Serengeti. Those big open plains, the rolling hills, and the magnificent kopjes where the big predators hang out. Every year when I leave that area, I find myself breaking down in tears because I’m so profoundly moved by it. I just want to experience that peacefulness every day.

Toby: Wim, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a joy having you here.

Wim: Thank you, Toby. It’s been wonderful to see you again.

Toby Jermyn: Thank you for joining me on another episode of the Pangolin Podcast. If you don’t want to miss the next episode, make sure you subscribe to the channel and sign up for the Friday Focus newsletter at pangolinphoto.com. See you on safari soon!

The Pangolin Podcast was hosted by Toby Jermyn and produced and edited by Bella Falk.