📰. SOUTH AFRICAN PHOTOGRAPHER WINS GLOBAL WILDLIFE AWARD AFTER 10-YEAR QUEST 💡

PRETORIA-BASED photographer Wim van den Heever has been named Wildlife Photographer of the Year, one of the most prestigious titles in the world of photography. His award-winning image, titled “Ghost Town Visitor,” was captured in Namibia and earned him both the Urban Wildlife category prize and the overall competition title. The international contest, run by London’s Natural History Museum, has been celebrating the best in wildlife photography since the 1960s. This year, it received nearly 60,000 entries from more than 90 countries.

For Wim, the victory marks the end of a ten-year journey in pursuit of the perfect shot. He has travelled the globe leading photography tours, but one location kept drawing him back — the abandoned diamond mining town of Kolmanskop in Namibia’s Namib Desert. The haunting site became the backdrop for his patient mission to document one of the desert’s most elusive creatures.

His subject was the brown hyena; a rare and nocturnal animal found mostly in southern Africa. With an estimated population of just 4,000 to 10,000 in the wild, brown hyenas play a vital ecological role by scavenging and spreading nutrients across the desert landscape. Kolmanskop’s deserted buildings provided them with perfect hiding and denning spots, creating the mysterious setting Wim sought to capture.

After years of returning to the same site, tracking footprints and signs of movement, Wim finally succeeded in photographing a lone brown hyena wandering through the ghostly, sand-filled streets. His perseverance and passion for wildlife storytelling have now earned him one of the world’s highest honours in photography — proving that patience, dedication, and love for nature can truly pay off.

It took him years.

And meticulous planning. He mapped out the possible routes a hyena would take through the town to find ideal placements for countless camera traps. Endured failed attempts, thrashed equipment and adverse conditions that ruined the shot.

He did this for a decade, upon every return to Kolmanskop.

In June earlier this year, the moment finally came.

“My camera triggered three times that night. Once with me testing the scene. The second time, nothing happened, and the third time, there was a hyena in the picture,” Wim shares.

A lone brown hyena walked exactly where he had hoped it would, in front of a crumbling Kolmanskop house, with mist rolling in from the Atlantic. The camera clicked. And that was it, the picture Wim had fixated over for a decade.

This month, he travelled to London where he accepted his flowers for it. Wildlife Photographer of the Year.

“It’s exactly the way I envisaged the picture to be,” he says. “It’s exactly what I was looking for from day one. It’s why I went through all the effort, all those seasons to try and do it,” he says.

And that’s this week’s lesson in not giving up. It pays off when you find the strength to try and try again.

“This award is an absolute dream come true. It’s the Oscars of the Wildlife Photographers world and to stand on top for this small window in time is truly an honour,” says Wim.

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