Sitting in the office in the grey old UK with rain streaking down the windows, we can’t help feeling cheesed off. Rainy weather means there’s no escaping the drudge work of our job. After seven weeks of being fortunate enough to photograph every day in wild places, and almost always in great light, we’ve come down to earth again along with the snow of recent days, the subsequent thaw and now the persistent drizzly rain of a slow-starting British spring.

Secretarybirds striding out, enjoy a Kalahari puddle

We’re working through the mundane and monotonous tasks that always welcome us back  from a trip. The not often talked about stuff that’s as much a part of being professional wildlife photographers as the field work – if not more so. Clearly this side isn’t our favourite part, even if as former journalists we respond like Pavlov’s dogs to a deadline. So we’re busy key-wording and archiving images as fast as possible, so we can put them out to work for us – assigning them to the right places in our portfolio, to various stock agencies and getting them ready for marketing, for preparing upcoming lectures and for promoting our photographic  safaris.  All must be done in the narrow window available between trips. There’s no escaping the fact that wet weather days are admin days. Bor…ing!

A tawny eagle enjoys a rare paddle in the Kalahari

Exactly what type of  office work we’re doing isn’t the issue;  that depends on urgent deadlines, what’s hurtling towards us in the diary and, of course, on what, if any, photographic treasures we’ve managed to dig out on our latest photographic crusades. This time in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (KTP) the big cats, always stars, seemed to emerge as a key theme. So we’re post-processing big cat images all the while and pedaling as fast as we can. The only thing that can stop the treadmill is good weather (or dry stuff at least)  providing us with the excuse to drop the office jobs we’re juggling and get back out there with our cameras…

Filling in the requisite data fields on photographs for various agencies which each require the procedure done differently, on a dull, damp weekend afternoon, we’re both missing the warmth, sunshine, reliable light, guaranteed subjects and sheer freedom of photographing in the bush in an African summer…

…Then scrolling through our pictures from the Kalahari section of our recent South Africa/Namibia trip it dawns on us maybe we’ve got it all wrong.  Have we not become a tad spoiled?

How could we have forgotten so soon just how dry the KTP was for those first few weeks of our trip, and how desperate and expectant the animals, and the veld, seemed to be for the late rain to arrive?

When we remove our favourite images, putting to one side those shots we’ve earmarked as priorities for immediate post-processing,  a simple, humble story emerges. Our incidental pictures, grabbed when driving back to camp once the best light had gone, a bunch of odds and sods really, languishing in Lightroom folders labelled ‘miscellany’, are quietly revealing the significant impact the rain finally made on the everyday lives of our KTP subjects when the clouds broke.

We’ve already forgotten the Kalahari was so dry there wasn’t a blade of grass

So we’re enjoying this small selection of images from a few weeks ago in the KTP in which the residents are making the most of something we all take for granted – puddles in the road. Simple shots, nothing loud, exciting, sexy or dramatic – just a handful of regular stock pictures gathered along the way that served to remind two whingeing wildlife snappers to suck up the rain, get on with it and accept that a good downpour isn’t a downer for everyone.

For weeks of our trip the rain promised but the brooding clouds didn’t break

Shy species like brown hyena hang around when there’s fresh rain water to drink

Going green. The Kalahari and its cats refreshed by rain

A Kalahari puddle makes the perfect plunge pool for a leopard tortoise

Secretarybird settling into a puddle right up to its middle for a welcome bathe