Looking for tigers in the monsoon is tricky. A few months ago we would have seen our tiger family almost every day, or, at the very least, we would know where they were. This trip was very different. In a month I probably got to film them in a meaningful way half a dozen times. Lots of 4am starts, lots of sitting in the rain.

We saw all our key characters just enough to move the story on, and in the best tradition of natural history film shoots I had my best filming session on the very last morning.

One of these days I’ll be able to share photos of these captivatingly beautiful creatures. In the mean time here is a selection of landscape shots taken with a Nikon D800E with a 24mm PC lens – I’d driven past these vines and trees hundreds of times and knew exactly the kind of images I wanted to create.

These prints were almost certainly made by the male tiger who is father to cubs we have followed for most of the last 18 months. He is enormous. These are his front paws, pressed deep into mud at the edge of a temporary water hole as he paused to drink.

Some cameras in the rain … next stop Senegal, for more rain, this time with chimps.

I’m finally back at home after a very busy start to the year – alternating shoots on the two BBC1 Dynasties films I’m working on has meant that I haven’t had much time to fully decompress. I now have a few weeks at home – the first time in a while – and actually get to spend most of the summer holidays with my family which is unusual, I’m hoping they can cope.

The last tiger shoot was pretty spectacular. In the past it’s often been the case that, for the first few days – or weeks – of a shoot we wouldn’t have any meaningful time with the tiger family, and the opportunities to film the kind of behavioural events you need to tell a story have been few and far between. On the last shoot we found the tigers (mother and her four, year-old, cubs) within 20 minutes on the first day, and for the next five weeks we saw them almost every day.

With four big cubs to feed the tigress was hunting regularly and we saw, and filmed, some fantastic behaviour – the tigress continues to surprise us, often doing things that aren’t in the tiger rule book proving that there are as many way to ‘be a tiger’ as their are tigers. After a year I feel like I’ve learned her patterns and idiosyncrasies as well as any individual animal I’ve filmed.

The three male cubs – now a year old, and a handful

The cubs are large, gorgeous and very boisterous, the three male cubs are particularly big whereas the single female is smaller but significantly more independant – she’ll leave her mother first, and may well prove to be a real challenge to her mother in the future.

Second breakfast time, with the full tiger filming entourage

My most recent shoot – for the Dynasties Chimpanzee film was also very productive. There have been major twists and turns in the fortunes of the key characters within the group over the last six months which is going to make for a fantastic story. The struggle for power within the group has diminished for the moment, and things seem fairly stable, but we filmed some incredible behaviour on the last shoot that will really show just how unique and fascinating this group of chimps is.

As always the chimp shoots are tough, and this was no exception. The temperature had dropped to the high 30’sC rather than the mid 40’sC, but as the rains are now starting the humidity was incredibly oppressive. Thickening vegetation and biblical swarms of sweat bees made life fairly unpleasant at times. I also took a couple of bee stings to the face one morning (the chimps raid them for honey and then run, I’m carrying 50lbs of kit and am slightly less light on my feet) which left me with one eye swollen shut and looking like the Elephant Man for a few days.

As always with film shoots it’s the people as much as the wildlife that make them special, in addition to the wonderful Michelle I had my dear friend Matt Drake with me on this shoot – the first time we’ve managed to hang out together for a very long time

The BBC’s Life Story series – for which I spent the best part of two years filming – has just been nominated for ‘Best Cinematography’ and ‘Best Series’ at the 2016 Windscreen Festival, the natural history equivalent of the Oscars, we’re up against very stiff competition but lovely to get a nomination and a real testament to everyone involved in working so hard to make the films.

It’s been a very busy last few weeks. We had a very good month in India working on our tiger film – as usual it was often challenging; always seeing so much more than we ever manage to film. But we had some lovely moments and it continues to be an absolute delight to have the privilege of spending time with such fantastic cats in such a beautiful place.

I then had a couple of weeks at home before heading to Ireland to work with two of my favourite people, Ken O’Sullivan and Katrina Costello, on their two, very different, projects; a series on deep ocean wildlife and a feature documentary about the passing away of the traditional farming lifestyle in rural Ireland.

I’ve then had a week at home to get ready for my next trip to Senegal to continue to work on the BBC1 film about chimpanzees – to be broadcast in 2018.

It’ll be hot now – 40C+ in the shade – and the hellacious grass that we had to battle through on the last trip should have gone. It’s always fascinating to re-visit a group of animals that you have got to know by name; I’m really looking forward to the shoot, and hoping that they play nicely with us!

Two projects that I was involved with have recently been nominated for cinematography awards; Wild Alaska for the Royal Television Society award and Japan: Earth’s Enchanted Islands for the Guild of Television Cameramen Award for Excellence. Both films were very much team efforts and the nominations are a testament to the hard work and talents of everyone involved in their production.

I’ve been home for three weeks, it’s been lovely to actually be around for most of December to see the boy’s school Christmas productions – the last few years I haven’t returned home until late December and I’ve really missed the buildup to Christmas.

My most recent shoot was in Senegal, filming chimps for a 1hr film for BBC1. This is a similar project to the tiger film I’m working on; following individual animals over 2 years or so to get a detailed understanding of their lives.

I first filmed this group of chimps a couple of years ago and it was fantastic to see them all again. They live right at the very edge of chimpanzee distribution in a mixed habitat of savannah and woodland – very different to the thick jungle in which we typically imagine chimps living. This group do all sorts of wonderful behaviours; digging for water, making spears to hunt bush-babies and much more bipedal walking than most chimps. They are an absolute joy to be around.

The days are long as we have to be with the chimps when they wake up, and then put them to bed each night so we can find them again the following morning. This typically means getting up around 3.30am and not leaving them until 6pm or so to walk back to the vehicle. It’s tough going too, they might not walk too far in a day (although we put in a couple of 10 mile days on this last shoot) but, although the topography isn’t too challenging, you are constantly dropping down off the plateau into river valleys, so it feels like you are spend a lot of time scrambling up and down slopes.

An extra level of fun at this time of year is the vegetation; the rains had just finished and the vegetation was unbelievably dense – the grass would often be 8ft tall, and very thick. You’ld expend a lot of energy just pushing through it. Add 50lbs of camera kit and 35C temperatures and it felt as much like an SAS boot-camp as an exercise in filming primates.

The dense vegetation also made it very easy to loose the chimps, if you gave them a 30 second head start (usually due to me faffing around sorting out the camera) you might not see them again for an hour or two – or even the rest of the day. They can move very fast, and in absolute silence, when they want to, and it was only due to the unbelievable skills of Michelle – the research assistant on the project and my guide – that we managed to stay with them at all on most days.

Michelle is incredible, not only is he capable of identifying all the individuals in the group by sight (often at huge distances), he can also recognise most of them by their voices (which is very unusual – and extremely useful). He also has the uncanny ability of second guessing the chimp’s movements, and regularly led me around the most hellacious patches of vegetation and certain-death rock slopes to meet up with the chimps in another part of their territory. As has so often been the case in my career I’ve had the huge good fortune to stand next to people with such extraordinary field skills that I have managed to film things that would have otherwise been utterly impossible. Huge thanks also to the wonderful Jill Pruetz, and to Rosie and Luke for a great shoot.

I next head back to the chimps in March, by which time it will be getting significantly hotter – starting to push in the mid 40’sC, but at least the grass will have died back and I should have a chance of seeing them!

My next trip is back to India to carry on with our tiger film, we are now nearly a year into the project and we already have some really special sequences, and we have over a year still to go. I’m excited about what this film could be, as significant as the challenges of filming tigers are, I always look forward to going back.

I had a nice article about my work published in Nikon Pro (the magazine that gets sent to all Nikon professional photographers) this winter. Something I couldn’t have imagined when I bought my first second-hand Nikon SLR from saved paper-round money when I was 15.

During my month at home I’ve managed to spend some time on the bike, and for the first time in years have started to take training seriously, and although my Functional Threshold Power is improving it’s still about the equivalent of one of Chris Froome’s legs. I’m slightly more encouraged by my Watts/Kg, but this is currently being challenged by the consumption of mince pies.

Have a lovely 2016. I’ll be seeing in the New Year from 38,000ft somewhere over central Asia, but I’ll raise a plastic cup of British Airways G&T in the hope that the world regains some of the (at the risk of sounding trite) peace, love and tolerance that sadly seems to be missing right now.

A 1hr film following the fortunes of key individuals within the Fongoli Group of chimpanzees living in the mixed savannah and forest of eastern Senegal. This is a remarkable group of chimps, living right at the edge of chimpanzee range. They exhibit some wonderful behaviours such as digging for water and making spears to hunt galagos. I filmed this group a couple of years ago for BBC1’s Life Story series, now we are back to make a much more detailed film about the ever changing fortunes of certain key characters within the group.

The filming will take place over the course of two years. It’s a very challenging place to work; typically getting up at 3.30am to follow the group for 12 hours or so in temperatures that can reach 50C in the shade – all while carrying 50lbs of camera kit. But they are such incredible creatures, in such an unexpected habitat (I keep getting reminded of the opening sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey), that every day in the field has the potential for magic.