Meet The Pro: Wildlife Photographer - Sabine Stols

In his episode, host Toby Jermyn welcomes Pangolin Photo Host Sabine Stols, a German-born wildlife photographer who transitioned from cruise-ship people photography to a full-time nature career with her husband, Charl. The couple have spent the last 10 years hosting with Pangolin Photo Safaris. 

Here is a link to a gallery of Sabine's images: https://pangolin.smugmug.com/SmugMug-Website/Pangolin-Podcast/Sabine-Stols/Meet-the-Pro-Sabine-Stols

CONNECT WITH SABINE
https://www.instagram.com/sabine_stols/
https://www.pangolinphoto.com/sabine-stols

Sabine shares four favourite images chosen for the praise they received from fellow photographers. She discusses balancing stills and video, the growing demand for video, and selects Hannes Lochner’s backlit lion-breath image as her admired “guest” photo. 

GUEST IMAGE
Roar by Hannes Lochner
www.hanneslochner.com
https://www.instagram.com/hannes_lochner/

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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's a link in the description to a gallery. On today's show...

Sabine Stols: Yeah, I have a lot of conflict. It's like, man, this would be a really great video, but then it would also be a very great photo. And I keep on switching between the two. And sometimes I can get both, but sometimes I also mess up and, in the moment that I'm actually switching, miss the moment altogether.

Toby Jermyn: My guest today was born and raised in Germany and once considered herself a bit of a city girl. But a chance summer job on a cruise ship led her to meet her South African husband, Charl, and together they travelled the world as a photo and video team before turning their passion for nature into a full-time career in wildlife photography—and for the last 10 years as photo hosts with Pangolin Photo Safaris.

Her incredible creative use of light, slow shutter speeds, and bold compositions has inspired thousands of photographers around the world. For those of you who've watched her tutorials and destination films on our YouTube channel, she will certainly be a familiar face. Welcome to the show, my good friend and colleague, Sabine Stols.

Sabine Stols: Hi Toby, nice to see you.

Toby Jermyn: Very nice to see you too. How are you doing?

Sabine Stols: I'm great. I just came back to the Chobe, which is really very nice to be back here after a very long break. I had a good time—good quality time—with my family in Germany. So yeah, it was good.

Toby Jermyn: Excellent. And yeah, you're back in the Chobe now, but not for long, are you? Because where are you off to next?

Sabine Stols: I'm off to a whole month of India visiting the tigers together with Charl. So I'm very much looking forward to that. That will be two back-to-back trips, which are two weeks each. So yeah, a nice long stint in India.

Toby Jermyn: You and I are sort of ships in the night. I was in the Chobe last week, then you've arrived. So maybe at some point we'll end up in the Chobe together. Now, in the show, we asked you to select four images from your very extensive portfolio. How difficult was it to choose the four images that you ultimately chose?

Sabine Stols: Obviously, very difficult, like anyone else has told you before as well. But in the end, what I've tried to do is not be too emotional about the images. Actually, for me personally as a wildlife photographer, the biggest applause—or, I don't know the right words, but you know what I mean—is when another wildlife photographer comments on my picture and gives me good feedback about it.

Basically, what I've done is I've chosen four images where that has happened, and that makes me very proud. Often I might be out in the field and I thought, "Oh my god, I nailed this shot," but then to get backup from another wildlife photographer who himself knows how difficult it might be to get that specific shot is what I really appreciate. That's the reason I've chosen these four images.

Toby Jermyn: Brilliant. Without further ado, I think we're going to start with the first image. This is an image I've always loved of yours. Can you please tell the viewers and the listeners about this image—where it was taken, for example?

Sabine Stols: So it's an image of a lioness chasing some vultures, and it was taken right here in the Chobe back in 2018—so quite a while ago—from our photo boats. I just love this shot because it is so abstract. Panning shots are very much hit-and-miss. It's one thing to get a nice panning shot where you maybe get the face of the subject in focus and have a bit of motion blur, but I think it's a more difficult thing to create an image that makes someone stop for a moment and look a little bit closer to see what's going on. I think that this is one of these images which I got this feedback from other photographers, and that's why I've chosen it.

Toby Jermyn: Well, I think that's what it is, because you really have to look. It looks almost wispy, like it's some smoke or something like that, like it's running through a fire. It's only when you look really clearly you can see the wingtips of the vultures. Talk me through the thought process when this was happening, and obviously you've got to change all your camera settings and things. Talk me through the moment.

Sabine Stols: So, the moment was an early morning on the Chobe River. We knew about a dead elephant, so we went straight there, and there was a whole pride of lions feeding on that carcass. Later, as the carcass was finished, the lions started to move off. A very typical behaviour of lions, which I've witnessed many times, is that when they walk off a kill and the vultures start coming in, lions tend to turn back around and chase them a couple of times. That gives you the opportunity to get these chasing shots.

What had happened is that morning I borrowed Charl' 500mm prime lens. As the lioness was chasing the vultures, I first shot with a fast shutter speed. But having the 500mm fixed lens, most of the shots I basically clipped off the wings or parts of the vultures. I thought, "Okay, I don't have any wider lens with me, and I'm not going to be able to move the boat further because other guests have zoom lenses, and I don't think they would have appreciated it if I said, 'Oh, let's move a bit back.'"

So I thought, "You know what? I think if I try something with motion blur, then it doesn't really matter if I cut off the vultures at some point because it's anyway going to be all a blur." I first got my couple of shots with a sharp lioness and partially some vultures flying away, and then I slowed the speed down quite considerably. That one was shot at 1/13th of a second. Because the ambient light was by then already quite bright, I had to stop down my aperture to f/22 to compensate because I was already shooting at the lowest ISO of 100.

Basically, I just tried to match her speed as she ran with my camera and lens and clicked away. Actually, I didn't do all that much to be honest. There were not many attempts, and I got it very quickly. I admit it, I'm really not a good photographer when it comes to panning, but that's why I also love this shot so much—it felt so easy. I think it just works, and I think to this date I have not done a better panning shot, sadly.

Toby Jermyn: But yeah, I think you've nailed it. Stop now. Don't do any more panning shots! I know we'd like to point out this was 2018. So at that point, you'd been with us at Pangolin for three years by that stage. But take me back to before Pangolin. You were working on a cruise ship and you met Charl and you were doing lots of photography, but not photography like this. Tell me about your photographic journey before you came to Pangolin. Did you use any of the skills you learned there?

Sabine Stols: So on the cruise ship, we mainly photographed the guests that are on board because that essentially is what sells. People, people, people! Lots of studio photography, shore excursions, dinner at night when people are dressed up, the captain's handshake—you know, all the typical cruise ship style photography.

And of course, we did learn a great deal. I mean, all the basics about photography: the shutter speed, the aperture, the ISO. When we started, it was still film days. We learned on film, which I think helped a lot to really concentrate on what you were doing rather than just, with digital, firing away and hoping there's something there. There was a lot of pressure to not waste a good film roll, so we had to make the shots count. In between, we also got lucky. We went to destinations like Antarctica, the Arctic, and Greenland. So there was also a bit of wildlife, and we photographed penguins and the sorts, which we found very quickly was way more fun.

Toby Jermyn: Shooting penguins rather than people in penguin suits. That's how you move from one to the other.

Sabine Stols: That is well put, Toby.

Toby Jermyn: There we go. It was a natural progression from penguin suits to penguins. Did you study photography as an academic study or did you learn as you went along?

Sabine Stols: No, I did not formally study it sitting in a classroom, but obviously when I started working on the cruise ships with Charl, I got taught all I know right there, and obviously had to teach myself a lot as well by just being out there.

Toby Jermyn: It's a real testbed for learning photography properly. Especially, you know, people talk about shooting on film and only having 36 shots, but the pressure on you to get shots that people then want to buy—every shot's got to count. Do you ever find yourself going back to that and thinking, "Okay, I've got to stop shooting so much. I don't have enough hard drive space"? Do you think your mindset is more selective sometimes by going back to a film-shooting mentality?

Sabine Stols: Yes, I think so, especially lately since I have my Canon R3. Mirrorless cameras have even more frames per second now. I obviously make use of that technology because it can get you moments that you would otherwise not get. But lately, my hard drives are filling really quick, and I spend a lot of time having to sit and delete photos. It does make me think lately if I should not shoot on lower frames per second again and just be more concentrated on that perfect shot rather than just firing off like a maniac and hoping to get something in there.

Toby Jermyn: That's a good technique to describe it: firing off like a maniac at several frames per second! So then you were on the cruise ship. Remind everybody how you stumbled across Pangolin Photo Safaris. How did you find us?

Sabine Stols: We basically, like I think 90% of the employees at Pangolin, probably stumbled across Guts, just as you did. Basically, what happened is Charl's brother, who lives in South Africa, invited us to a barbecue at his house and also invited Guts, whom he knew via a friend. He knew that Guts was a photographer, and he was basically telling us about this great idea about Pangolin Photo Safaris and what he would like to do here.

That was really in the start-up phase, and he did invite us to come up and visit him here in Kasane. We took the offer, of course, and we loved it. He took us out on a photo boat—one of the first edition photo boats. He didn't have any guests yet, but we really enjoyed it, and we expressed that it would be something we would love to do. Guts just said, "Look, at the moment it's impossible. As you can see, there are no guests yet. I first have to make a bit of money." But we simply stayed in contact. That was actually back in 2011.

Toby Jermyn: That was year one.

Sabine Stols: And then 2014, that is when he told us that he had this new amazing girlfriend from Germany, and we had to come and visit and meet her. Obviously, I think he already made a plan in the back of his head that "Janine is German and Sabine is German, and Charl is South African and I'm South African—that's perfect."

Toby Jermyn: That's his recruitment policy right there: nailed it! If you're a German-South African couple, send in your CVs—that would probably work.

Sabine Stols: Yeah, no! But obviously he knew we were photographers, we had the knowledge and the equipment, and all that helped. Then basically, just half a year later after we visited, that is when you guys got the first houseboat. The workload got too much for the two of them, and that's when we started with Pangolin in June 2015.

Second Image: Elephant Eye

Toby Jermyn: June 2015. So, yeah, it's almost 11 years, isn't it? 10 and a half years. Wow, that's flown by. Obviously, as I said, most people know you from YouTube now, which has been extraordinary for us. But before we carry on, let's go and do the second image. Please tell everybody about this image.

Sabine Stols: Yeah, the second image is of an elephant eye. This is taken in the Maasai Mara in Kenya. Why I've chosen this image is because I've worked in the Chobe now for 10 years, being surrounded by elephants all the time. You would think that this should be an easy shot to get, but in reality, it is actually a very difficult shot to get because so many things have to come together.

First, the right lighting conditions so that you actually get some detail and light in the eye of the elephant. Secondly, having the right angle and height. Elephants are huge creatures, and often in the Chobe on the boats we might be a bit too low for this kind of shot, whereas on the vehicle in the Maasai Mara, I was basically on eye level with the elephant. Thirdly, elephants often have this white substance in the corner of their eyes, and then the shot doesn't come out as nicely.

All these things came together in this shot. I feel the equipment counts a lot as well. Having a big prime lens, like a 600mm or 800mm fixed lens, is quite important to capture all the detail while still getting that really shallow depth of field to pull the viewer's eye towards the eye of the elephant.

The funny thing is how I got to use that 600mm on this trip. It was actually because of one of our guests, Celia—if you're watching, thank you very much! He really wanted to test my 200-400mm Canon lens with the built-in teleconverter that I was shooting with at the time because he was thinking of getting one himself. He asked me if he could shoot with my lens for one activity, and in turn, I got to shoot with his lens. I will never say no to a 600mm prime! That lens enabled me to get this shot.

Toby Jermyn: Another aspect of this photograph I really enjoy is your choice to photograph a part of an animal. This part of an animal is instantly recognizable. Is this something that you try to encourage your guests to do as well? To look at the bits instead of the whole animal?

Sabine Stols: Oh, yes, all the time, especially when it comes to elephants. I think elephants make for some amazing close-up shots—not just the eye, but the tail, the trunk, the feet, even the wrinkled skin. They're just so interesting. I feel you can almost crop them in any way and it still looks good, especially if the background is very cluttered. In the case of elephants being herd animals, you often have other subjects in the background. By getting in close, you can get rid of these disturbances and create some really nice detail shots.

Toby Jermyn: And the advantage we have in the Chobe is that the elephants are incredibly relaxed, aren't they? Especially when there's lots of food and water around. They are very, very tolerant, much more so than anywhere else in Africa, I would suggest. Would you say that's correct?

Sabine Stols: That's absolutely correct. That's the beauty about the Chobe: the elephants are so accustomed to the boats and vehicles. They know there's no danger. I mean, they sometimes literally walk right up to our game viewer. I've had elephants put their trunks on the bonnet, sort of feeling us. That is something very exceptional, and you don't easily find that elsewhere in Africa.

Third Image: Leopard Cub

Toby Jermyn: There we go. And on that note, I think we should take a break. But before we do, I want to encourage you, if you're enjoying this episode and the other episodes, to sign up for our Friday Focus newsletter and join our growing community of wildlife photographers. There'll be a QR code on the screen right now, which you can scan with your phone to quickly join. There's also a link in the description down below.

Okay, let's take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about your third image.

Welcome back to part two of the Pangolin Podcast with my guest today, Pangolin photo host Sabine Stols. Let's go on to your third image. Please, would you like to tell the viewers and listeners all about this photograph?

Sabine Stols: This is a photograph that I've taken in the Okavango Delta. It is of a leopard cub that is peeking out of a tree trunk, and we have some amazing evening golden glowing light with it. I've chosen this image because of the light conditions and the different textures. I feel that this is a very beautiful image; I just keep going back to it all the time.

Toby Jermyn: So is this early morning or late afternoon? What sort of light conditions are we having?

Sabine Stols: It's late afternoon. What had happened is there were two leopard cubs in that little tree hole. The amazing guides had found them for us in the early morning on the game drive already, but the light wasn't very good and they didn't come out much because the mother was presumably out hunting.

We knew they were there, and because that is a very special sighting, we decided to go back in the afternoon. It was quite a long drive from camp but obviously very worthwhile. We just sat there quietly waiting, and eventually the leopard cub started peeking its head out. We never really got them both together nicely, but we saw each of them individually. There were many shots where they looked straight down my lens, but there was only one moment where the light was this perfect and the cub was looking up, having perfect light in the eyes. I just love this one the most out of the whole series.

Toby Jermyn: It's a really difficult photograph to expose for, I would have thought, because you've got so much shadow and then you've got the dappled light. If you're talking to your clients, what would you suggest for metering or exposure to help them?

Sabine Stols: It would be to adjust the exposure for these bright parts where the sun is coming through, because they can easily get blown out if you try to expose for the cub, which is more in the shade. For this one, I belief it was a minus one and a third exposure. Then in post, I basically brightened up the part where the leopard cub is a little bit.

Toby Jermyn: Well, that was going to be my next question: was there a lot of editing required?

Sabine Stols: No, actually, there wasn't. Besides what I just told you, there was really not a lot of editing. Small adjustments like a bit of contrast and a bit of colour here and there, but nothing I would call an extreme edit. That is also what I love about this picture and the other ones I've chosen—all of them needed only minimal editing. That is when you know it's a good shot: if the conditions are right and you took it right, there doesn't have to be a whole lot of editing.

Toby Jermyn: So now that you do more video, how do you balance the urge to do stills photography and video? Do you go, "I've gotta get the stills and then I'll do video"? Or do you sometimes sit at a sighting and go, "This is just better for video"? Is there a conflict?

Sabine Stols: There is definitely a conflict, and it changes all the time, really. There was a time where I really concentrated a lot more on video for a while and probably neglected the photo side of things. Also, because I'm often together with Charl on a trip, I know he takes the pictures while I concentrate on the video so we have teamwork going on, especially if we have to produce a video for Pangolin. That is just easier because then we can both give a hundred percent.

But if I'm by myself, I have a lot of conflict. It's like, "Man, this would be a really great video, but it would also be a very great photo." I keep on switching between the two. Sometimes it works out perfect and I can get both, but sometimes I also mess up and, in the moment that I'm actually switching, miss the moment altogether. It's painful, but it's part of it. I've yet to come up with a proper solution, but in the end, I feel I just need to be dedicated and say, "This is now a video moment," or "This is a photo moment."

Toby Jermyn: Do you see the clients that you're hosting doing more video? Is it something that people are more interested in?

Sabine Stols: Slowly, though not to the extent that I would expect already. I think it's also a bit of an age thing. Younger guests are often way more into video because of social media—Instagram, Reels, TikTok. Whereas the older generation is not that much into that, but it is coming more. There are more requests for me to teach people video settings and all that. But I think the reason people don't do both is exactly what you said: they are afraid that if they do video, they might miss the photo moment. I can understand it. For me it's easy—I can maybe miss that moment and I'll get it next week again. But for those guests, they may come to Africa once, and if they miss it, it would be a lot more painful.

Toby Jermyn: If you were to give any advice to any budding photo hosts who want to get into wildlife photography guiding as a career, how important would you say learning video and photo is going to be going forward?

Sabine Stols: Very, very important. Video is now an integral part. It doesn't even just mean video in the sense of traditional filming, but even making videos out of stills has become so popular. In the marketing part, it is very important to have these animated photos or video clips in your portfolio. So it is important to learn that if you want to start out now.

Toby Jermyn: Sabine's got an amazing video on the basics of getting into video for wildlife photography, so I will link that in the description down below. I'm hoping to persuade her in the near future to help me develop a step-by-step multi-module video course for the Pangolin Photo Academy. At this point, Sabine, you can just nod and say, "Yes, absolutely, we'll do that."

Sabine Stols: Yes, absolutely.

Toby Jermyn: There we go, you heard it here first!

Fourth Image: Jaguar in Tree

Toby Jermyn: Okay, cool. Let's move on to your fourth image, please.

Sabine Stols: So, it's an image that I've taken last year in the Pantanal of a beautiful female jaguar lying in a tree in the early morning with the sunrise. The reason that I could not not choose it is because I used quite a difficult technique to get this image: panorama stitching.

Toby Jermyn: Oh wow.

Sabine Stols: Basically, what happened is Charl and I were in the Pantanal for the first time last year. Before the trip, I did a bit of research and looked up a lot of photographs of jaguars. What I found is that there were lots of great tight shots of the cats, but I didn't find many shots that included the landscape. I had this thought in the back of my head, but obviously you also have to have the right setting.

Then this one early morning, we were super lucky. Our two boats were alone in this channel and found this beautiful jaguar up in the tree—no other boats around, so we could position ourselves exactly the way we wanted it with the sun rising behind. My first thought was to shoot wide. I took my wider angled lens, the 24-105mm, and I got a couple of shots, but then I was not really happy with the amount of detail. I also got some beautiful tight shots of the cat with my 400mm, but then all I could fit was the cat and a little bit of warm background.

So I thought, "Let me try and get a whole row of shots and then later stitch them together in post." The difficult part here really was, as you take the row of shots, knowing if you got it all in because you have to overlap each shot roughly by a third. Also, we heard over the radio that boats were coming, so I was under time pressure and I just tried not to mess it up. Being out in the field, I had no clue if I managed it or not. When I actually did stitch them and it worked out, I was so happy.

I shot it at f/2.8 specifically to get this really razor-thin depth of field where the viewer's eye is really drawn to the jaguar. I feel on a wider lens you just don't get that variation of depth of field, and I wanted this kind of effect. I'm super happy I got it.

Toby Jermyn: And so when you're doing this, are you just shooting single shots? You do a single shot, move slightly, single shot, move slightly?

Sabine Stols: No, I take single shots and I try to orientate myself and fix on tree branches or something where I can make out if I have it all in. But again, more often than not, if I go very wide like this, it fails and there is a little piece missing. Talking about AI, of course, you could fill that in, but that would not be as satisfying as actually getting it right.

Toby Jermyn: Regular viewers of this podcast will know that Villiers Steyn chose this as his guest image. How do you feel about that?

Sabine Stols: Yes, that was very nice. After I watched the episode, I wrote him a message and thanked him. As I said, for me the biggest compliment is if another wildlife photographer says, "Well, that's a great shot." That's the all-time tap on the shoulder. So yeah, it felt great to have one of my photos chosen.

Toby Jermyn: I know that Guts has a technique when he does stitching shots. Very difficult to do with a 400mm lens, but he takes a photograph of his left foot and then does all the photographs and then takes a photograph of his right foot so that when he goes to edit his images, he can see the sequence. Do you have a tip to know where you start and end?

Sabine Stols: Okay, Guts uses his feet weirdly, but most people use their hand—take a picture of their hand before and after to know the series. I must admit I am pretty lazy with that. In the moment I get flustered and I'm under time pressure, I just want to get it done. It would be wise to do it, because sometimes I might do it multiple times and then it gets really messy if you don't have a start and ending point.

Toby Jermyn: How do you take a photograph of your hand with a 400mm lens? If you've got Charl there, you can say, "Charl, can you just hold up your left hand, please? Thank you. Now do the stitching... and now your right hand." That'd be great.

Sabine Stols: That's exactly why that technique doesn't work for me anyway! But you could just point at the floor or take an empty sky picture—anything that tells you, "This is the beginning or the end."

Fifth Image: Guest Image

Toby Jermyn: That's a very roundabout way to find a top tip! Thank you very much. And on that note, we're going to take a quick break. But before we do that, a gentle reminder if you haven't done so yet, please subscribe to the channel, like this video, and let us know in the comments if you have enjoyed any one of these images in particular.

When we come back, we are going to discuss Sabine's guest image. So we'll see you in a second.

Welcome back to the final part of the Pangolin Podcast with my guest today, Pangolin Photo Host Sabine Stols. This is the part of the show where we've invited Sabine to choose an image taken by another photographer that she admires—and maybe she wishes she'd taken herself. So, Sabine, would you like to introduce this image? Tell us who took it and tell us all about it.

Sabine Stols: So, the image I've chosen is from my friend and colleague Hannes Lochner, a South African photographer. For those of you that don't know him, you should check out his work—he's amazing. And although Hannes has so many incredibly creative shots, I chose this one because for some reason I have had this shot in my head for years and I want to get it, but I just don't seem to achieve it.

So that's why I've chosen this exact shot of a big, beautiful male lion lying in the grass—early morning, I presume—roaring or simply breathing, and the breath is backlit by the rising sun. And funny enough, I'm not myself a very "visual" photographer—meaning that I envision shots before I take them. There are lots of photographers, especially Hannes, but there's lots of other photographers that do that too. They even have little sketchbooks where they sketch down the shots they are hunting, basically.

I'm more a person that is like "take the moment as it is" kind of photographer. But since I came to Botswana, and especially since I've been to the Okavango Delta for the first time, for some reason I've always had this shot of a big male lion in my head where the breath comes out of his mouth and it's backlit by the sun. I can just appreciate how difficult it is to get because, in the 10 years that I've been here, it has just not happened yet.

I believe Hannes mentioned that it had also taken him a couple of years to actually get it, because you can only really get this image on a very cold winter's morning. And although we do have nice cold winter mornings here in Botswana, I think you need temperatures that are really quite low, around zero and so on. That doesn't happen all that often. And then to find, exactly on that winter morning, a lion lying there with a nice dark background at the time that the sun rises... I think, again, there are so many things that have to come together. But it's still a shot I'm hunting, so one day, hopefully.

Toby Jermyn: Hannes was a guest on the podcast, quite an early guest, actually. But you're right; I love the way that he visualises. It's almost like he's manifesting what's going to happen to him in real life. He is one of the most innovative photographers around—he just sort of sees things differently.

What else have you learned from Hannes? I mean, you've mentioned it in the past that you study a lot of images of other photographers, especially when you're going to a new destination. Is that a technique that you use to scope out a new place? Is that something you would advise people to do, say, for example, before they're going on their first safari to a destination?

Sabine Stols: Definitely. I think it is a very important part of your photography. If you travel to a specific location, get an idea of what kind of shots are possible to get and get ideas. If you have never been to the place, then it is very hard to imagine certain shots, and once the opportunity arises, you might not be ready to take that shot. So I feel it is very important to do a bit of research about the places that you go and visit and study photographers' shots from these places. Not in the sense that you have to copy those photographs exactly, but it just gives you an idea of what shots there are to get. And then when it happens, you're ready for it.

Toby Jermyn: And is there another shot that you're chasing that's in your mind? What do they call it? The "bogey" one—the one that got away, or the one you haven't seen yet in your mind's eye? What is it?

Sabine Stols: No, my bogey shot obviously would be the one of Charl's leopard falling out of the tree, because I was right there with him. I just missed it. Well, I didn't miss it; I just had a very different angle. We didn't know beforehand in which way the cat would fall down the tree, right? So it was all about luck for him in that moment, being in that right vehicle and having that specific angle. I got other shots from the side which, if Charl's shot didn't exist, would have been amazing. But since I know what exists, they don't qualify anymore! So that is my bogey shot.

Toby Jermyn: I cannot wait to get Charl on the show then, and we're going to ask him his side of the story when he talks about this one. Do you find—you know, you obviously have a real sense of teamwork, you're a married couple—is there still a competitive edge that drives you forward sometimes?

Sabine Stols: Yes, of course. There is always a bit of competitiveness between us, but friendly. We are happy for each other whoever gets a nice shot, but there's a competition going on as well. But usually Charl wins, so you know...

Toby Jermyn: Some might say that! We'll have to see when we get Charl on the show. We're going to engineer that soon when we can track him down.

Brilliant. Okay, Sabine, thank you so much. We're going to run out of time in a minute, but the last thing we have to ask you before we go: we said at the top of the show that these images are going to be hanging on the wall of your humble dwelling, but you get to decide where that humble dwelling is going to be. So, have you decided? Tell us where and why.

Sabine Stols: I have decided. Originally I would have chosen a small island in the Okavango Delta, but then I realised Janine already lives there, so I don't want to be on her doorstep!

So, the next best thing—I think I can say that I'm very lucky having spent the last 10 years extensively travelling Africa and all the wild places here—so my humble dwelling actually is going to be on the opposite side of the world. I would love to be down in Antarctica for a bit and photograph animals in the snow.

Toby Jermyn: Not even for a while; it's going to be forever, Sabine! But you've said it now, so we are banishing you to Antarctica. You'll be fine. We do have plans to go to Antarctica probably around 2028. Sabine will be there.

Tell you what, Sabine, we'll just leave you there, shall we? Maybe we'll get a discount because it's only a one-way ticket. Perhaps that's an idea. You'll be with the penguins, and long may you enjoy being with the penguins. Brilliant, Sabine. Thank you so much for making time; I know it's super busy for you at the moment. Really appreciate it, and I hope that we end up in the same country at some time soon to catch up.

Sabine Stols: Yes, hopefully. Thank you for having me.

Toby Jermyn: Thank you for joining me on another episode of the Pangolin Podcast. We really hope you enjoyed it. As always, we'd love to hear your comments and feedback, so please leave them in the comments down below. If you're an audio listener, we'd love it if you could give us a star rating or even a quick review.

And if you don't want to miss the next episode or any of our other wildlife photography videos, make sure you subscribe to the channel. Finally, don't forget to sign up for the Pangolin Photo Safari's Friday Focus newsletter. You can do that by heading over to pangolinphoto.com or you can scan the QR code on your screen now. Very much looking forward to seeing you on a Pangolin Photo Safari soon.

All that's left for me to say is that the Pangolin Podcast was hosted by me, Toby Jermyn, and produced and edited by Bella Falk. Thank you.