Aldabra Atoll

The shot took years to set up. He had seen it in his mind's eye and sketched it with pen and pad dozens of times: a bronze whaler shark charging upward into a tight school of sardines, jaws open improbably wide, a regal predator frozen in an instant of total ascendancy. Most winters, a tongue of cold water licks the South African coast, bringing millions of sardines and thousands of sharks in an eastward migration, but the swift moving sardine runs and trailing sharks are hard to intercept.