a camera mounted on four wheels on a green background
Steve Winter took this custom-made camera car on assignment to document tigers in a new way.
Photograph by Mark Thiessen

How this ‘camera car’ captured the perfect tiger close-up

It took intimate pictures of big cats—until a curious female got too close.

ByCatherine Zuckerman
2 min read
This story appears in the September 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Every photographer has a dream shot. For Steve Winter, that shot was a tiger’s face seen from below. The challenge, says Winter—who has long covered big cats and other wildlife for National Geographic—was getting that perspective in a way that didn’t end with his own face inside the animal’s mouth.

Enter this apparatus, a camera mounted on a four-wheel, remote-controlled vehicle. The “camera car” had been built by the National Geographic Society's Exploration Technology Lab engineers but never used. Winter saw its potential to capture that looking-upward view and asked if he could take it to India for a project on tiger conservation.

a tiger standing at the edge of a forest with his mouth wide open
a tiger standing at the edge of a forest touching a robotic camera with her paw
a tiger's face with trees behind her
In Bandhavgarh National Park in Madhya Pradesh, India, male tigers ran from the camera car, but this one paused long enough to be photographed.
Photograph by Steve Winter

In the field, the contraption didn’t last long. Though male tigers “ran away” from it, Winter says, a curious female batted it with her enormous paw. That probably did the camera in—but not before it caught the shot Winter was after.

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