Photographer captures majestic wildlife

Dhir Jakharia scans the savanna for the perfect shot. Photos of Dhir submitted, wildlife photos by Dhir

By Tom Victoria

Dhir Jakharia takes wild pics. The wildlife photographer also shows others the sights in East Africa by conducting safaris.

His spectacular photos would make wildlife experts Marlin Perkins and Jack Hanna envious.

Dhir, 21, explained his passion for wildlife photography.

“I am a city boy, and I love the quiet break that the wild gives me,” he said. “It is beautiful and calming to spend time with animals in their natural habitats. Watching animals closely and realizing that they too have emotions, desires, relationships and a purpose was quite mind-boggling for me.”

Dhir, a Kenya resident formerly of India, also enjoys the resulting interaction with others.  

“Photography allows me to meet people from all over the world, which helps make meaningful connections over the shared love for wildlife and art,” he said. “Alongside that, my entire photography journey has given me a new sense of purpose. It has inspired me to inspire.”

Dhir gets near the animals at times.

“Sometimes, we're quite close,” he said. “For example, lions, the ones in Maasai Mara are accustomed. They've grown up around vehicles, tourist vehicles, so they're pretty comfortable with cars. But when it comes to animals such as leopards, who are more shy, they never get close. Some of them do, but some of them don't get close to cars, so you're pretty far away from them. It also depends on the shot you're getting. If you want a close-up, then you might prefer to be closer. If you're getting a landscape like a silhouette with the sun, then you prefer to be much more far back.”

Dhir has been in a vehicle chased by a charging animal.

“There was this lion who was mating with a lioness and obviously was high in testosterone,” he said. “This was just around 6:15 a.m. Sunrise changes at different times of the year. So this particular day, it was quite late when we saw it. We actually had to use our car's headlights to see it. While I was taking the picture, my settings were preset for last evening. I was taking time to redo the settings because of the new light. While I was doing that, I was focused on my camera. All of a sudden, my guide just switched on the car and just accelerated. I looked at him. I'm like what happened? He's like, look behind. I'm just in slow motion, just looking behind. There's an outline of a lion just coming right at me. And the windows are open. So that was pretty scary that time.”

Fortunately, Dhir hasn’t been chased by the savanna behemoths.

“I've never heard of any elephant charging or rhino charging the last five years,” he said.

Dhir has seen people foolish enough to exit a vehicle during a tour.

“During the migration, there were a couple of people, not in my car,” he said. “It gets very crazy during the migration, and at that time, they were misbehaving. Some of the guides there, they don't know how to respect the animals exactly while some do. During the migration, they got off the car and it was crazy. It was not a nice scene to watch. That entirely blocked the migration scene. But thankfully, later action was taken and they were suspended or banned. Hopefully, they learn from that.”

Dhir’s favorite animal to capture on film is down to a spotted cat or a pachyderm.

“It's between leopards and elephants,” he said. “Leopards, because it's human psychology to appreciate something that you don't get often because of their elusiveness. They're just so difficult to photograph, find and stay with them. I love leopards because, first of all, they're so beautiful. It's just being in the presence of a leopard is truly something magical. For elephants, on the other hand, they're just so gentle. I love to call them gentle giants. It's so easy to compose pictures with them because they're not ever moving fast. If you want them somewhere, you know that you're going to walk a straight line. You just go there before they do and wait for them, and you get your perfect alignment with whatever you want.”

Dhir is attending college working toward a business degree.

Currently, photography is part-time,” he said. “I'm actually a student. I'm starting business admin. Sometimes, I work with brands such as Sony,  Adobe. During my holidays, I conduct tours. I have clients from all around the world who want to learn photography and come to Kenya, and that's where I guide them.”

Dhir started conducting safaris as a means to offset the cost to shoot in a wildlife reserve.

“It just started very slowly about three years ago,” he said. “Wildlife photography is quite expensive. I was always looking for people to split the costs with. So on Instagram, I would just put up on my story: does anyone want to join me? We can split those costs. Then, some people were interested. And then slowly, slowly, I got more experience with that. I realized that maybe I can start actually charging for this and doing the photos properly.”

The fee to enter the Maasai Mara reserve varies according to the time of year.

“For January to June. It's $100 per day, just the fees for you to enter the park,” Dhir said. “That lasts 12 hours. And from July to December, that's $200. They recently increased their park fees significantly just this year.”

He isn’t realizing a longtime love of nature.

“It's not like a typical wildlife photographer's story where I've always been into wildlife and nature,” Dhir said. “It’s nothing like that. I have always been a city boy. I have always been into photography, not that seriously, since I was at the age of 10. At the age of around 16, this was back in 2019, we went to Vietnam, my family and I, for a holiday trip. I had my small camera then. It has beautiful scenery, so I started taking pictures of that and my family would compliment me, saying you're really good at this. When I came back home to Kenya, all of a sudden, it dawned on me that we have so much wildlife. People from all around the world come just to Kenya for that. And this is literally my own backyard, so why just let me just try it out. Now, this is what I do.”

He learned to wait for just the right moment before taking the shot.

“When you've just started photography and you don't have that much experience, you just shoot,” Dhir said. “You've spent so much money, so you just want to get 1,000 shots per day to try and make it worth it. But then after some time, you'll get familiar with everything, like the lighting, what works and all that. Then you become much more calm, and then you become patient. Once you analyze the animal behavior, you will be able to know that, okay, this cat is going to do this. So let me just wait. Sometimes, I miss the shot. Sometimes, I get it. I used to regret not getting the shot so much because it used to be very painful, but now I've kind of developed a tendency to just let it go, even if I miss it.”

He isn’t interested in taking pics of people.

“I've had people ask me for wedding photography and I've just said no because I'm not experienced,” Dhir said. “I don't want to spoil your wedding. It's a lifetime thing. I'll always prefer wildlife. A lion is never going to tell you please take this picture again, I was not smiling. Another thing is for lighting and positioning, you can't tell a lion please go here and I'm going to flash a light at you and I'm going to take the picture like this. No, it's you who has to move and you who has to work around the sun, the entire environment. So it really pushes your creativity best.”

He hopes to keep photography part of his post-college career utilizing the business administration degree.

“Hopefully, I'd be able to mix that up with photography,” Dhir said. “Looking towards the future, I do look forward to having a photography business, maybe in tours. Something like that if possible. That would make me the happiest.”

But the most important thing for him is being entrepreneurial.

“I've grown up in a business-oriented family,” Dhir said. “I'm originally Indian, but my parents moved here for business, which is Nairobi. I've grown up watching the entrepreneurial lifestyle that my dad lived. I would always want to venture into something that's beyond photography. If it's related to photography, that's okay. But I've always wanted to do something more than that on the entrepreneur side.”

Although he’s been inspired by books relating to business such as Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, it’s not famous businessmen who inspire him.

“There's a lot more athletes that I look up to because of their mindset, like Kobe Bryant,” Dhir said. 

Social media is good for his safari business.

“I'd say 100 percent of the clients I've gotten are from social media, Instagram,” Dhir said. “All of my clients are coming from abroad. I don't really do local clients. It's usually pre-planned. Before, when I used to get one client or two clients in four or five months, when it was much smaller at that time, it was usually last minute. They've already booked the flights, everything. And then they came across my Instagram. But these days, it's usually pre-planned. I have dates fixed and I market it online, and that's how people figure it out and that's how we do it.”

He said adapting a vehicle for safaris is more important than which model is used.

“For Maasai Mara, which is the reserve that we usually go to, most of them, I'd say 90 percent of the vehicles are Toyota Land Cruisers,” Dhir said. “But what matters is the modification of it. What I usually go with is there are no windows. There's no glass. To cover up the windows, it's just like a piece of cloth that you zip it up. We have big lenses and all, and it's essential to have big spaces so that you can freely move around your lenses to photograph the animals. So it depends on the modification.”

Having a good driver is a boon.

“The guys, I would say, are extremely important because they are the ones who are knowledgeable,” Dhir said. “It's their home and they're much more knowledgeable about wildlife than I am. Sometimes, I will have to rely on them to direct me. For example, they know all the roads, they know everything. They know exactly what this leopard is called. But I wouldn't know that because I don't spend so much time there as them. They literally keep track of this cub was born a week ago. Now we've called it this. This elephant is specially known because of this. It's literally their home.”

Out in the wild, he first captured a creature more prevalent than a cat.

“It would probably be a common animal, like an antelope or zebra or something like that,” Dhir said.

He said the grazing animals are easier to spot.

“Impalas, zebras, giraffes, elephants, gazelles,” Dhir said. “Those are usually the almost guaranteed sightings.”

He’s witnessed animal deaths.

“There was a cheetah sighting,” Dhir said. “The cheetah was just walking through a huge herd of gazelles. Clearly, it was very hungry. But then we were like, I don't know if it's being wise, because it's not being discreet at all. Why is it just walking through? And then all of a sudden, just within a split of a second, you know how fast cheetahs are, I just blinked, and I see a baby gazelle in its mouth. It was just trying to get closer to a baby gazelle, which wouldn't be that fast. So that's how it went down.”

He hasn’t dealt with a client who became distraught over such an event.

“I personally haven't had that experience, but I keep hearing my guides, who take hundreds of people per year, they've literally had people cry over that,” Dhir said. “Most people, they want to see a hunt, but some of them would say, ‘Oh, there's a hunt happening. I don't want to watch it.’ They just completely avoid it.”

He’s also has seen close calls between animals.

“I'd say the most memorable one was an elephant versus a lion,” Dhir said. “It was a male lion. The elephant was just grazing. They eat very slowly, they move slowly, and the lion was just laying down, being lazy. And then the elephant, when it realized that it's close to a lion, it just chased it away, like it went right towards the lion and the lion had to move. And that got me thinking, who really is the king of the jungle?”

Hunting is not permitted in Kenya and poaching isn’t the problem it was years ago.

“It was 20 years ago when it used to be serious,” Dhir said. “I once spoke to a ranger from there, and he was talking about some serious incidents that have happened within the reserve. But now it's much more quiet.”

However, there can be conflict between the people who live there and the wildlife.

“These days, we still do have problems with lions attacking the local people's cattle,” Dhir said. “When it becomes too much, some of them even injure the lions or even kill them. I don't know how to feel about that because the reserve keeps getting smaller. Their home keeps getting smaller, so it's never them to blame.”

He’s made eye contact with so many animals he can’t remember the first time it happened.

“I've had so many in my photography,” Dhir said. “I have developed this style of eye contact. They're very intimate pictures, so I've had so many, I don't think I remember the first one.”

One species stands out, though.

“That usually happens with leopards,” Dhir said. “There's one called Luluka. She's like a celebrity leopard in Maasai Mara. I've watched her grow over the past five years. It's very comfortable with vehicles, so it would go very close. Sometimes, it would even go under the car if it needs some shade. Sometimes, when you're looking out from the window, especially the window being so open, it just looks at you. And those two seconds feel like an hour.”

He offered advice to aspiring photographers.

“The mistake that a lot of people make is they try to think of photography as a career path,” Dhir said. “But I would say for most photographers, 95 percent at least these days, the ones who are part-time or professional, they never thought of making it their career. It just started as a hobby. So I would say forget about earning money first and just do it as a hobby first. Fall in love with it, and the side effects will come later.”

He suggested those wanting to pursue nature photography in particular start small, literally.

“For wildlife photography, especially being so expensive and not everyone's as lucky as me to be living in such close areas to wildlife, you can always start with birds, insects, pets and nearby locations where there's some sort of wildlife,” Dhir said. “As a 16-year-old photographer, obviously, I couldn't be making the trips that I'm making now. But then how I tried to stand out in the entire world is post-processing. So I really honed in on my editing skills and I tried to match my photography with the other photographers who had the most expensive gear. And I just did that by simply focusing on editing, which is behind the scenes. I'd say strengthen on areas that you can have control.”

He urged photographers to take the initiative and seek corporate sponsors.

“Another thing that I'd put out for anyone who is trying to make this a career, I'd say don't wait, don't ever wait for someone to approach you,” Dhir said. “Almost all of the collaborations and brands that I've worked with, it's a result of me reaching out first and me pitching the idea. The reason to do this is because there's an oversaturation of literally any content. There's just so many people doing the same thing. Even for brands, it becomes difficult for them to choose. So you'd rather just step in first.”

Companies need photographers to hype their products.

“Basically, they want to promote their products and they want to associate themselves with creators who have sort of established their audience,” Dhir said. “If they have a new product launch — although I have not yet worked with a new product — but any product that they want to push out in terms of sales or anything like that, they would tell me to take content with it.”

He emphasized the need for confidence in whatever someone pursues in life.

“When I used to look at interviews from celebrities and athletes, they used to say you have to believe in yourself,” Dhir said. “It's just been used so many times that people are tired of it. It sounds so cliche, so you wouldn't really listen to that advice. But then you'll only realize it when you actually do it. When I started out, I read books, which obviously helped me strengthen my self-belief and confidence in myself and dreaming big, basically. I feel like that's one of the biggest factors that led me to become where I am today. I would say for someone who wants to do this, they need to have a lot of self-belief and they need to dream very big. Even if you don't reach the sky, at least you have reached just below the sky, at least you're much above where you are right now.”

He stays motivated because people are inspired by his work.

“It's important to always realize where you came from, because back when I was 16, I never would have imagined that I'll be doing tours in just a few years,” Dhir said. “That's what makes me keep going. People have come from various parts of the world and they have trusted you. They were inspired by your work, they followed your work. They like your work. So if you're not going to deliver, it's going to be such a huge disappointment, not only for them, but also for you. Because the greatest thing someone can do is inspire someone. And if someone has trusted you with that, you should be able to live up to that. And it brings fulfillment to me when I see someone who's actually very inspired by my photography.”

He receives positive feedback about how his work inspires youth.

“I've had the parents of 8-year-old kids tell me, my son watched this,” Dhir said. “He really wants to be like you.”

He hopes his social media content also inspires people.

“I want them to get inspired by not necessarily my photography, but my journey, because I started as a 16-year-old photographer. What I want to do is I want to inspire people that with enough self-belief and consistency, anyone can achieve anything.”

Dhir’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spotclickpost/

Dhir’s website: https://dhirjakharia.com/

Dhir’s blog: https://dhir-jakharia.ck.page/profile