Botswana Photo Tour - Lions and their cubs crossing a river

It was fairly early in the morning as we came across a family of lion who were hanging out along a rivers edge. We were all excited to see the cubs and started taking photos right away. Our guide pulled up nice and close so that we could get some nice shots of the mothers and cubs interacting, and we were treated to some great playful moments.

I was taking photos of the female with the one playing cub when the adult female turned around to check on one of her other cubs. It was great morning sunlight on their faces and I thought I had the best shot of the morning...

...but as I kept shooting with my Canon 1D X Mark II and Canon 100-400mm lens, mom decided to grab onto the tail of the oncoming cub, while the other cub looked with this great expression. This is one of my favorite photos from the Botswana trip.

We sat there photographing the cubs for a while, when all of a sudden, they all started moving towards the water.

I have seen many lions in Africa, but never seen them in the water. I watched as this cub prepared to jump across a small stream of water.

I waited for the jump and fired off a couple of shots.

The large female crossed the larger flowing river and waited to make sure that each of the cubs would successfully make their way from one side to the other.

You can see the one cub climbing up the rivers edge as mom watched on. Our guide told us that the adults were concerned about crocodiles in the water.

These little cubs were so cute.

I watched as this one cub walked towards the flowing river and reminded our guests to shoot wide and include the great reflection in the water.

Many of the other lions came over and joined the one cub, giving us an even better reflection shot. All of us were excited to photograph this scene.

We were driving back to our lodge when our guide spotted this owl in one of the nearby trees. We were happy to get a nice shot of the owl in really nice light.

At the end of the day, we had a sundowner at the edge of this water hole filled with hippos. It was fun to photograph the sunset with the camera in one hand and a cold gin and tonic in the other hand.

After our sundowner, we packed up the vehicles and made our way back towards our lodge. On the drive back, we saw a couple of male lions hanging out.

I reminded our group to increase the ISO of their cameras, since the sun had already set and we did not have a lot of light to work with. Even though we were shooting at ISOs of 6400 or more, the photos came out nicely.

As always, we waited to see if either of the males would yawn, giving us this type of shot. As if on command, this one male did just that. Another great ending to yet another amazing day in Botswana!

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