Wildlife cameraman Robert Hofmeyr talks about the challenges of filming Lions and Leopards and his success using the RED V-RAPTOR 8K camera

Reprinted with permission from the Guild of Television Camera Professionals, Spring 2025 issue of Zerb Magazine.

‘People say, “It’s not the camera, it’s the photographer,” but with wildlife, it’s a combination.’ - Robert Hofmeyr

As a wildlife filmmaker, what are the biggest challenges starting out?

For me the biggest challenge has always been financial. To get experience you have to be out there filming, but that costs money. And until you have a good showreel and you’ve made the contacts, you’re not going to get the paid work. So it can be a bit of a catch-22. Most of the work I do is long lens, vehicle-based cinematography, so I’ve got to have a good camera and telephoto lenses that are good enough to get a close shot of a leopard in a tree fifty metres away. Filming can also get expensive - once you’ve paid the filming permit fees and everything else it can be hundreds of dollars a day. So, I think the biggest challenge for me was getting experience without spending too much money.

How do you prepare for your expeditions?

I often start preparing months before I head out on a filming trip. I read and watch everything I can find about the locations I will be visiting and the species I might encounter. I notify my clients of where I am going and what I am likely to find, in case they need some specific footage that I might be able to capture. Most of my expeditions are overland, so I will then start preparing my Land Cruiser and Trailer - packing all the necessary equipment and camping gear.

A few days before departure my wife and mother-in-law cook up a whole stack of meals and freeze them for us - while it’s great to cook over a fire in the bush, filming in the heat can be exhausting so on some nights it is great to be able to return to camp and heat up a ready meal and go straight to bed.

How long are you in the field?

I guess this depends on the commission or how long it takes to film or the difficulties of shooting a particular subject. I have a wife and three kids back home, so it is hard for me to be away longer than a month at a time. Most filming trips are around three weeks long. Sometimes I will leave my vehicle on location and fly home for a few weeks, then return to continue with the shoot.

What camera are you currently using?

I’m currently using a RED V-RAPTOR 8K VV. It’s a great camera. It can shoot at up to 8K 120fps, so nowadays I shoot much of my footage at 100fps for 2x slowmo in a 50fps timeline. This makes media management a bit of a slog, but I’m hoping this will future-proof my footage.

Is camera equipment important in wildlife filming, or is it the passion for filming the subject?

It’s both, of course, but the equipment is very important for wildlife work, especially the kind of work I do. People say, “It’s not the camera, it’s the photographer,” but with wildlife, it’s a combination—you simply can’t film certain animals behaving naturally without telephoto lenses. That is not to say you can’t learn on more basic equipment or adapt the stories you film to fit the gear you have - for example, maybe the squirrels at your local park are so tame you can film them on your phone.

I was lucky because I came from filming and editing corporate and music videos, so I already had a RED camera before I started filming wildlife. I bought the best fluid head I could afford (an old O’Connor 515) and mounted it on the door of my vehicle. I started with a used Sigma 300-800mm F5.6 EX DG HSM lens and worked my way up to a Canon EF 200-400mm f/4L IS USM lens. Recently, I have been shooting a lot with a Canon CN20x50—it has an incredible 50-1000mm zoom range. I can’t afford one for myself, but I found the huge zoom range so useful that I bought a Sigma 60-600mm f/4.5-6.3 DG OS HSM Sports lens.

How has the frame rate helped you, and how has a higher-quality camera allowed you to create the images you want?

Two things I like about the RED V-RAPTOR are the frame rate and dynamic range. We usually have very little control over lighting in wildlife, so sometimes your subject is backlit, and the sun is still quite high. There’s nothing you can do about that—it’s the only angle you have, and you still want to get the shot. With the RED V-RAPTOR, you’ve got enough dynamic range that you’re not completely overexposing the sky to get your subject reasonably well exposed. So that’s the one big factor. With a lesser camera, you would have to choose between the subject and the background. The RED V-RAPTOR can often handle the entire range of the scene you’re trying to shoot.

Then in terms of frame rate, shooting wildlife in slow motion just makes everything look better. I often shoot at 4K 240fps for fast action—for example, if there’s a chase or a kill. I recently filmed a leopard cub climbing down a very tall tree at 240fps. I think it looks beautiful. It was fast, the whole climb probably only lasted 3 seconds, but because I shot it at 240 fps, I get 30 seconds of footage. I also think that high frame rate playback will likely become the norm for natural history content, so I am filming all my stock footage in HFR.

What are your top tips for shooting with long lenses?

First make sure your camera support is up to the task - for long lens work the camera needs to be really steady and the fluid head needs to be perfectly smooth. When I shoot on my Canon EF 200-400mm f/4L IS USM lens I have image stabilisation, so I can get away with a lighter head and a bit of movement in the vehicle, but with the Canon CN20x50 nobody gets to breathe when the camera is rolling. Get out of the vehicle onto a tripod whenever possible, but often this is too dangerous. If possible, try to make sure the vehicle has firm suspension, otherwise any movement inside the vehicle will mess up the shot.

How have environmental issues affected your shoots or subjects?

I don’t think there is anywhere on earth that is not affected by human beings - even in the most remote areas of Africa, climate change is starting to take a toll. Human expansion also seems to be relentless: remote locations that I camped at as a child with my family now have luxury lodges that I can’t afford (I have nothing against low-impact high-cost tourism, I just wish I could afford to visit these locations).

Recently I’ve been filming a lot in the Chobe Riverfront area. The Chobe River forms the border between Botswana and Namibia. On the Botswana side there is a National Park, but in Namibia there are villages and the locals graze cattle near the river. This causes conflict between the farmers and the wildlife: lions cross over to kill cattle and the farmers kill the lions. Recently one of the subjects of the documentary we are shooting was killed in Namibia. There is a group that tries to locate the lions whenever they cross the river and chase them back into Botswana, but it is a difficult task since the area is huge.

How important is your vehicle?

I mostly work out of my own vehicle - a custom Land Cruiser 76 Station Wagon. I have added a second battery, camera power points, inverter, and a custom filming door with camera mount and extra-large window. I also have a stabiliser mount on the front and on the roof rack for gimbal work, and recently I’ve added a Starlink dish so we have Internet in the bush. Usually, we camp when we are filming (although I occasionally do deals with lodges and exchange some footage for a few nights of luxury accommodation). Our camping setup consists of a Metalian Genie-X trailer with a large tent with 2 sleeping rooms, a stove, inverter, lights, fridge/freezer, solar power, a 70l water tank, a gas stove and hot water heater. Everything is powered from solar panels and the vehicle’s alternator, so we can live off-grid for weeks.

“For long lens work the camera needs to be really steady and the fluid head needs to be perfectly smooth.”

As a storyteller, how do you try to create unique images?

I wouldn’t say I have a unique style. What I’m trying my best to do is put together beautiful images and frame them well. I have a photographic background, so I aim to have every frame of my footage well lit and framed, like a photograph - of course this is impossible, but it’s something to aim for.

Ideally, in terms of story, I edit a lot and I would suggest that any young wildlife filmmaker edits as much as they can. It helps you understand which shots can be cut with other shots. When I’m filming wildlife, everything has to have a little story. Even if it is as simple as an elephant coming down to drink water. I need different focal lengths. I need a wide shot of the elephant coming towards me. Then I need a close-up of the trunk going into the water. I need some kind of action, maybe the elephant drinking the water. And then I need the elephant to move away, preferably out of frame, to end the sequence. So even something as simple as an elephant coming down to drink can become a little self-contained scene. And if you start to think like that, to think in terms of scenes rather than shots, that’ll help too, because a single shot of an elephant drinking can only be used for a short Instagram reel. You have to build things into sequences.

Editing definitely makes it a lot easier to understand what you need to shoot as a wildlife filmmaker. When you get into the edit suite and you go through your footage and you see your mistakes you can learn from them. If you’ve got five shots of an animal at the same focal length, even if they are all great shots, they are hard to edit together. You have to cut between tighter shots and wider shots, otherwise it just looks funny.

How does animal behaviour affect shooting your subject?

Understanding animal behaviour is critical to getting good shots, especially with limited time in the field. It’s important to learn as much as possible about the target species before the shoot to understand as much as possible about the potential behaviour you may encounter. That said, in my opinion, nothing beats a good local guide or researcher in the field.

Is there a particular species that you enjoy filming the most?

I’d say in the last few years I’ve mainly filmed lions, leopards and caracals. I really enjoy filming lions and other cats when they’re doing something, but 90% of the time they’re not doing anything and you’re sitting around waiting for sleeping animals and then 10 minutes before the light is gone, they get up and start doing something wonderful.

While I love cats, I think my favourite thing to film is birds. I find that birds are always busy. They’re always doing something, preening, feeding, catching things. Take for example a Bee-eater sitting on a branch: every few minutes it flies out, grabs an insect out of the air, flies back to the branch, slaps it against the branch and eats it and then starts looking for another one. The problem with birds is that they’re small, so you need a long lens. With the Sigma 60-600mm I can add a 1.4x teleconverter and crop into 4K on the V-RAPTOR to give me an effective 1680mm. But teleconverters and crops compromise quality so ideally, I need an even longer lens to get really close for bird cinematography.

Have you had any funny experiences that you would like to share with us?

A few years ago, we were camping in the Kalahari and a young male lion came into our tent. I was camping with my brother-in-law Andy, and this was before I had a camping trailer, so we were sleeping in a ground tent. We had just come out of the tent in the early morning, and we were brushing our teeth next to the tent and the tent was still open. It was before sunrise. Out of the darkness, a young male lion just walked straight towards us. Luckily, I had my head torch on and I could see the reflection of his eyes in the torchlight. We quickly jumped into the vehicle that was right next to us. Luckily the lion didn’t get between us and the vehicle. But then the lion went straight into our tent. We looked through the back of the vehicle and saw the lion coming out of the tent with Andy’s pillow in its mouth. He wandered off into the grass and lay there eating Andy’s pillow. Then he came back and went back into the tent and he came out with my sleeping bag in his mouth. Kalahari nights can be cold, so we couldn’t let him steal my sleeping bag, so we turned the car around, and sort of drove towards the tent and revved the engine. Thankfully the lion dropped the sleeping bag, but he hung around for about another hour. He was tearing up our camping chairs, just absolutely destroying everything he could get his paws on. It made for a very interesting travel insurance claim and we ended up starring in a BBC One show called When Camping Goes Horribly Wrong.

“I got this shot looking along the top of the water as all these lions with cubs came down and drank at sunset. I’m still very proud of that shot. It’s just so beautiful.”

Is there a particular shot that you are most proud of?

Yeah, there’s one shot that I can tell you about, and it’s quite an old shot that I did. It was about 10 years ago, and I was filming in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, and there was a pride of lions coming down to drink, and we saw them heading towards the river, and I realised that they were probably going to drink. And there was sort of a dam where the road went down, and you could get the back of an open vehicle down almost to the water level. So, I got my guide to take me down there, and I got this shot looking along the top of the water as all these lions with cubs came down and drank at sunset. I’m still very proud of that shot. It’s just so beautiful. As usual, a lot of it was luck and a little bit of it was me predicting where they were going to go. But, yeah, a lot of it is pure luck. (see main image).

Tell me about a particular shoot you enjoyed shooting?

Madagascar. I was just shooting stock with my brother-in-law, but I loved every minute. It’s just such an interesting place - such weird animals and you can often get really close to them. Plus, the people are amazing and the food is incredible. Of all the places we visited in Madagascar, my favourite was Masoala - it’s truly wild there. We travelled to the peninsula by boat and stayed in the local village not far from the ocean. From there we took walks into the incredible primary rainforest and filmed the critically endangered Red ruffed lemurs.

Is there a story or something special you would like to work on or film in the future?

I would like to continue filming a project I’ve been working on for a few years now. It follows a very interesting group of lions in Botswana who I call the Misfits. The main characters all have disabilities or quirks, and they are usually found where the territories of the 2 large prides in the area overlap - they have no allegiance and will mate with males from either pride. The most interesting of the Misfits is Broken Paw - an adult lioness with an old injury that has left her unable to hunt. She can hardly bear weight on her paw, yet she survives thanks to the support of the rest of the pride. In the past I have seen her acting as babysitter to the other pride member’s cubs while they hunt. In 2024 she had 2 cubs of her own and they are doing well. I think it’s a really fantastic story. So, I want to spend more time filming this particular group of lions as well as the other interesting species in the area. Let’s hope I can find the money somewhere to complete it.