Photographer Page

Michael Nichols

A young male, forced to leave his family herd, wanders through Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve in a photograph published in September 2008. Adult males, called bulls, tend to roam on their own, sometimes forming smaller, more loosely associated, all-male groups.

An African forest elephant bathes in Gabon’s Loango National Park in a camera trap photo, published in February 1999. Nick Nichols’s pioneering work on camera traps—getting colorful portraits of elephants at their level—‘‘pushed wildlife photography to new, higher levels,‘’ says editor Julia Andrews. “I compare him to George Shiras, the world’s first true wildlife photographer, whose work at the turn of the 20th century was championed by the magazine.”

This image of savanna elephants moving across the Serengeti plains was published in National Geographic in October 2012. In 2021, scientists identified two species of African elephants: savanna elephants, which are endangered, and forest elephants, which are critically endangered.

A female forest elephant charges photographer Nick Nichols in the Central African Republic’s Dzanga-Ndoki National Park in 1993. ‘‘It was very clear that we were in a place that was ruled by nature and not by humans. It was truly wild,’‘ says Nichols, whose photographs were published in July 1995. Seconds after Nichols took the image, ‘‘we both then turned off and ran.’‘

African elephants move through Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve in an image by Nick Nichols, published in September 2008.

Adolescent elephants tussle in Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve in this image by Nick Nichols, one of the first wildlife photographers to extensively document African elephants in the wild. Such play develops social skills in the young animals, as well as confidence and strength. This image was published in the magazine in September 2008.

Since the first elephant story was published in National Geographic in 1906, the magazine has taken different angles on covering the pachyderms, from hunter’s quarry to beasts of burden to species that need saving. As time went on, technology also advanced, helping photographers capture more intimate moments. Michael ‘‘Nick’’ Nichols made this photograph of orphan elephants splashing in a human-made water hole in Kenya’s Tsavo National Park by mounting a camera to a pole, which allowed him to get a closer view of the elephants but still maintain a physical distance. Daily mud baths are key to elephant hygiene, offering the animals effective sun protection while also cleansing their skin of bugs and ticks.

A child shares a moment with a hippo named Cupid at the Toledo Zoo in Ohio. This photo appeared in the July 1993 issue in a story about zoos across America changing exhibit spaces to better mimic the animals' native homes.

A tiger mother named Sita moves one of her cubs to a safer spot in Bandhavgarh National Park, India. Less than a year after appearing on the cover of the December 1997 issue, Sita was killed by a poacher.

For the December 2012 issue of National Geographic, photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols went to Sequoia National Park in California to capture this unprecedented image of the President, a giant sequoia that is the third largest tree in the world, measured by volume of the trunk above ground. Using a rig system of ropes, Nichols and his team shot every section of the 247-foot-tall, 27-foot-wide giant. It took 32 days of work to photograph the tree and stitch together the image from 126 individual photos.