The benefit of being able to set up calmly and ease yourself gently into your photography session – that’s what you imagine you’d be able to do on a night hide session on Zimanga private game reserve in South Africa, especially given that you arrive at the hide in the early afternoon, well before dark.

Once you’ve bumped your head on the low roof a couple of times (despite repeated warnings from the guide – we both still forget in the excitement on occasion) and once you’ve recovered from the shock of just how close you are to the drinking edge, where Africa’s Big Five and other assorted critters could be staring directly into your lens (four metres seems much further away on paper than in practice) you imagine the next 19 hours will stretch out like an eternity. Surely the one thing you’ll have in bucketloads is time?

You’d be surprised. Night hide sessions tend to go much faster than you’d imagine – even the quiet ones – and you need to be in position and ready to photograph as soon you can, just in case something memorable stops by. In the dry season plenty of animals and birds come down to drink in the mid-to late afternoon, well before we switch the LED lights on for the night-shift. So expect the unexpected.

That was certainly the experience of guests on our most recent visit to the reserve, when their night-hide action kicked off fast and furious, even before they’d got through the door. Pitching up at 2.15pm they found a welcome committee of 15 elephants already lined up at the water’s edge. The race was on to retrieve wide-angle lenses from their kit bags fast enough to swiftly bag some shots.

Turned out these obliging elephants were just for starters. Not long after they’d finished drinking one of the guests whispered in Steve’s ear that she could see a leopard coming – just round the corner from his angle of view.  It was still mid-afternoon, and he thought she was perhaps teasing him, but no, moments later a beautiful young male leopard was at the water’s edge. Perhaps because it was so early he was very nervous, didn’t drink, and only hung around briefly.

We were convinced he’d come back later, under cover of darkness, but he didn’t return. There was no time to feel disappointed, though: almost certainly the reason for his no-show was that the waterhole was teeming with thirsty big game all night, with never a dull moment he could usefully fill.  The grey hulks of elephants, big bruising Cape buffaloes, delicate nyala antelope: the place was pumping.

The elephants came back not once, but several times, and even brought their cute babies. And alongside the usual steady stream of buffalo bulls, there were three separate visits from large breeding herds, with their little brown calves. Suffice to say little sleep was had that night in the bunk beds provided!

On this nine-night trip on Zimanga our two small sub-groups each had the opportunity of three overnight hide sessions. All were taken up hungrily and we were treated to some excellent photographic opportunities including a white rhino bull, several antelope species, a scrub hare at perfect range (under the lights it looked for all the world like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland) and a very obliging group of six buffalo bulls that turned up in the blue hour and posed in a perfect and powerful line.

Thrilling photographic opportunities weren’t just confined to the wee small hours. We had many memorable and special sightings on our game drives, including a whole morning spent following the lion pride from before sunrise to when they stalked a giraffe, which they eventually downed and proceeded to eat it in a thicket too dense even for our intrepid guide Calvin to drive into. We found the lions many times – one morning in the mist for moody shots and again towards the end of the trip in the riverbed where there’s always a chance of something special with them crossing the water.

The cheetah males came up trumps once again: on several mornings we tracked them down early, when the light was warm and still very useable.  ZImanga’s elephants showed well in daytime as well as at night, with one particular afternoon featuring the breeding herd feeding, drinking and mud-bathing around the big dam for several hours. We had a rare chance to photograph a puff adder that our guide was re-releasing onto the reserve after capturing it in the staff quarters the night before. And in between all the big mammal photography we honed our flight shots multiple times on secretary-birds, martial eagles, vultures and the ever-popular lilac-breasted rollers.

Smaller birds were plentiful at the two bird bath hides, with a constant flow of visitors including colourful waxbills, barbets and finches. A highlight at the Bhejane small bird hide was the rare opportunity to get shots of crested guinea fowl. These birds are a local specialty and unlike their better-known helmeted cousins, tend to favour thickly wooded areas.

Our groups each had two sessions at the Scavenger Hill hide, one of our favourite Zimanga hides for action and flight photography. The theatrics did not disappoint. Hyenas turned up and briefly bossed the place; we had mating vultures as well as flight and fighting shots, on one session a couple of lappetfaced vultures, and on another a fast flying lanner falcon entertained us with multiple fly-pasts. The cheeky, ever-present pied crows were also clearly perfecting their pestering techniques when hassling the vultures, this time jumping off the ground to peck the tail feather of some perched whitebacked vultures – a new trick they seem to have mastered since our last visit.

As always on Zimanga it was an intense, busy and hugely enjoyable time on the reserve with lots of photography and lots of laughs. We’re sure our guests would all join Steve and me in a big round of applause for the whole of  the Zimanga team, led by Charl and Mariska Senekal. Big hugs to the staff at Doornhoek homestead which was our base for the trip. Thanks to Alice for putting up with us all for so long and modelling the outfit for your son’s graduation for us, it’s a winner. Thanks to Blessing too for all the scrumptious food and belt-tightening puds, and thanks to Bongi for the great housekeeping. We’re sorry we gave you so much laundry, but then good photography does mean getting down and dirty sometimes.

Special thanks to lodge manager Ester Kotze too, for keeping everything seamlessly on track, including your invaluable help measuring woven baskets with a well-travelled piece of string! Last, but by no means least, thanks to her husband Calvin, head ranger and our guide throughout, for finding us brilliant wildlife to photograph on all our game drives, sharing his passion for photography with us and enthusing us with positive energy, especially after tiring night hide sessions. The off-roading was a thrill, if a bit ‘bumpy-bumpy’. When we weren’t busy enjoying the photography we were certainly busy chuckling/groaning at his humour.

Finally, our guests deserve a big thumbs up and lots of smiling emojis for their contribution to the trip’s success. So thanks to Mr & Mrs MB for your continued support of our photo adventures; it was great to have you both on board again, to AB for the great leopard spotting, we reckon D  has good reason to be worried about you nipping at his heels when it comes to future photo competitions, thanks to DB for the idea of that call button for the night hides, you can be sure we won’t be mentioning that one to Charl next time we see him!  Huge thanks to JR, hope Jeanne appreciates the lengths you went to for her with that string and to resident jazz-man SR for being the only person so far on our safaris to catch Calvin out at his own game.