“We’ve just one minute remaining” said our guide when I took this photo, the last and one of my favourites of a one hour session. Then, just as I’d taken the picture and become distracted while securing a footing, he came quickly forward, surprising us and nearly knocking me sideways. Stepping shin deep into mud to avoid him, he brushed by, splitting our group of eight on the way through. He didn’t look back. We were ignored, but then he knows that the mountain belongs to him.

This was a previsualised picture, from the water to his pose. Before we’d arrived in Rwanda to visit mountain gorillas, I was already hoping for rain. The rain would bring in some texture to his fur and brighten up the colors as water can do. Sure enough, on nearing the group after a two hour hike, it began to rain lightly. At a minute short of the hour, we found Kigoma some four metres in front, and all I needed was to move a little way to my right, and found myself with the picture I’d envisioned a few weeks earlier. Sometimes, luck pans out well if you look for it.

Kigoma is the second silverback of the Kwitonda Group, in the Parc des Volcans in Rwanda, which we visited in March 2008. Park rules stipulate that the maximum time spent with any one group is one hour per day.

Taken using a Nikon D300 with a 70-200mm f/2.8 lens at 95mm, f/3.3, 1/125 and ISO 1250.
It was protected with an Op-Tec rain sleeve.