How a Nat Geo Photographer Captured Iconic Photos of Big Cats

Wildlife photographer Steve Winter has been stalked by tigers and chased by a rhino—all in pursuit of these stunning images featured in his new retrospective book with the author Sharon Guynup.

A male Sumatran tiger peers at a camera trap he triggered in the forests of northern Sumatra. Due to lost habi-tat and poaching, these critically endangered tigers could be the next subspecies to go extinct.
In Big Cats, Steve Winter and journalist Sharon Guynup chronicle the world’s mightiest felids—lions, and tigers, and jaguars, oh my—and show how their work has helped protect and conserve these awe-inspiring species.
ByRachel Nuwer
Photographs bySteve Winter
Published October 6, 2026

Big cats are masters of staying hidden, a skill honed by millions of years of evolution. Today, they have another reason to remain out of sight: humans. Yet National Geographic contributing photographer Steve Winter has built a career capturing tigers, lions, jaguars, snow leopards, and cougars in moments few people would ever witness. Making those images requires meticulous planning, technical ingenuity, patience, and artistic instinct—along with a fair amount of luck.

In Big Cats, a new retrospective created with environmental journalist Sharon Guynup, Winter brings together his photographs from decades in the field, like the image above of a Sumatran tiger. For months, Winter had tried and failed to photograph the elusive species. His luck turned when he met a former poacher who showed him the perfect spot for his camera trap.

Working under a tarp in a downpour, Winter carefully angled his equipment to create an ideal composition. “I set the beam up where I would want the cat to be if I was laying down, waiting for him to come by,” Winter says. His physical absence, though, was key: “If I was there, he would never go by—or else he would come behind me and kill me.” Two months later, he got the perfect shot. Read on for more behind-the-scenes stories of the collection’s most memorable images.

Researchers with the Thai Tiger Team, led by Achara and Saksit Simcharoen, measure, weigh, and fit an Indochinese tiger with a radio collar in Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary.
At Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary in Thailand, researchers fitted female tigers with GPS collars to study their home ranges. Winter got down on the ground to capture the process from the tiger’s point of view, then “just waited for a compositional moment to happen,” he says. When one of the researchers laid his head on the tigress’s belly to listen for the heartbeats of her unborn cubs, Winter knew he had it.
Biologists examine camera trap images of tigers made in Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, where the world’s longest-running tiger research program, launched by biologist Alan Rabinowitz, has been ongoing since 1986.
When several tigers died at Huai Kha Khaeng, the team assembled camera-trap photos to piece together what had happened. Winter wanted to capture the entire collection in a single frame, so he asked for a ladder. “I climbed up into the rafters, and it’s 110 degrees,” he says. “I’m sweating and it’s dropping down all over the pictures.” Luckily, everyone was happy with the result.
Lions, like this female, climb trees in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park to escape biting flies and cool off.
Some photographs require no planning at all—just being in the right place at the right time and recognizing an opportunity. While working on a story about lions in Uganda’s Queen Elizabeth National Park, Winter was heading back to the lodge after a long day in the field when he spotted this cub silhouetted against the darkening sky. “I thought, ‘Well, there’s a different picture,’” he says. “It just happened.”
A four-month-old cougar kitten perches atop an elk her mother killed. The kitten survived a wolf attack that killed her two litter-mates. Teton Cougar Project researchers named her Lucky.
To document cougars in Wyoming, Winter checked in in every morning with the project’s scientists, who used data from the big cats’ GPS satellite collars to determine the location of the latest kill. Almost invariably, Winterwould then spend a couple of hours slogging up a steep, snowy slope to get to the site. One morning, though, a mother cougar made a kill about 100 feet from a road. Winter was delighted: “This was the easiest picture out of the whole cougar thing.”
Hollywood’s most reclusive star, P-22, was first seen in Griffith Park in Los Angeles in 2011. It took me 15 months to capture this image of him. After the photo was published, P-22 became an icon: Angelenos fell in love with him, and he became a poster child for urban wildlife conservation.
Taking this hugely popular photo of cougar P-22, for a story about urban wildlife,was not without its obstacles, Winter says. The first: persuading a National Park Service biologist who “didn’t like photographers” to help him. With persistence, though, he won the biologist over and asked whether he knew of any trails where mountain lions walked, with the Hollywood sign in the background. “He looked at me like I was crazy,” Winter recalls. But eight months later, the biologist texted to say a mountain lion had moved into Griffith Park—ending the message with six exclamation points. Winter rushed to Los Angeles to figure out how to “set up cameras in a park with 10 million visitors a year, without them getting stolen.” The solution was to house the camera in a quarter-inch steel box attached to stop-sign posts drilled into the ground and reinforced with anchors. He also needed to find a spot that was completely dark behind the cat so he could use a four-second exposure without any ghosting from background light—a search that took careful planning. In the end, “this is the picture I wanted, and it’s the picture I got,” he says. “I was super lucky.”
Under the watchful eye of a guard in India’s Kaziranga National Park, I set up camera traps to capture images of Bengal tigers, Asian elephants, Indian one-horned rhinos, and other animals.
What this photo of Winter fails to show is his fear. “I was scared sh*tless,” he says. A 5,000-pound one-horned rhino in India’s Kaziranga National Park had just chased down the team’s jeep and smashed its door. Fortunately, the animal did not flip the vehicle, but the encounter was still “the most scary thing to happen out of my whole career,” Winter says.
This jaguar was rescued as a cub from the pet trade in southern Colombia. He will spend his life in captivity at this facility in Sabana de Torres, as he was raised by and has habituated to humans.
This jaguar cub at a rescue center in Colombia illustrates “what I hate so much about the pet trade and poaching,” Winter says. “Even rescued cubs,” he notes, “end up not being able to live their lives in the wild.” Photographing any animal behind bars is a challenge. To make this image more dynamic, Winter used a slow shutter speed and a flash, panning with the cat as it ran toward him.
A Bengal tiger in Kaziranga National Park moves through tall burnt grass, which provides excellent camouflage for hunting.
This massive Bengal tiger was hunting baby elephants when Winter came upon him. Moments before this photo was taken, Winter recalls, “he turned towards me, looked at me and goes ‘Rah!’” He felt like the tiger was reprimanding him for blowing his cover to his prey.
A vendor sells jaguar skins at a tourist destination outside Iquitos, Peru. Jaguars are an internationally protected species, but demand for their skins and canine teeth has increased in recent years, putting the cats back in the crosshairs.
In Peru, Winter and Guynup were reporting on the illegal wildlife trade, especially in jaguar parts. On the way to visit an Indigenous tribe, they stopped for a drink at a place where a couple of the big cats’ skins happened to be displayed for sale. The vendor “didn’t care at all” that Winter took her photo, he says.
Clay, Daniel, and Enzo, three of 39 tigers rescued from Joe Exotic’s now defunct Oklahoma zoo, cool off at the Wild Animal Sanctuary in Keenesburg, Colorado. These cats will live out their lives here, receiving proper nutrition and vet care.
When Joe Exotic left his infamous roadside zoo in Oklahoma, some of his tigers found homes at a sanctuary in Colorado. Winter had been photographing the cats for much of the day and had mused to his assistant that he wished a rainbow would appear. As the sun set over the Rockies, his wish came true. “As soon as the cat on the left leaned its head back, I took the picture and I knew I had it,” he says. “It became the opener of the story.”
Rachel Nuwer is a freelance science journalist and author who often writes about conservation, wildlife and the environment.

Steve Winter is a National Geographic Explorer and award-winning wildlife photographer whose work has focused on big cats and conservation around the world. Sharon Guynup is an award-winning environmental journalist and producer who covers wildlife, ecosystems, and the threats they face. Their new book, Big Cats, is available wherever books are sold and here.