Most LUC8K blogs are intentionally short.
This one isn't.
When we first saw Peter Delaney's extraordinary giraffe photograph, ‘Camelopard,’ we knew we wanted to learn more about the man behind the lens. What we didn't expect was to discover a story that had very little to do with photography and everything to do with life.
Peter's journey has taken him from the trading floors of London and Tokyo to the wilderness of Africa, where he now lives with his wife and children, creating some of the world's most celebrated wildlife photography. Along the way, he has won some of the industry's highest honours, reinvented himself more than once, and built a life that many people only dream about.
As LUC8K celebrates ten years of encouraging people to "live their colours", Peter's story felt like one worth sharing in full. It's a story about taking risks, following curiosity, redefining success, and having the courage to walk away from a life that no longer feels like your own.
So grab a coffee, settle in, and enjoy this conversation with a truly remarkable human being.
We think Sophie the giraffe would approve…
Leaving the Predictable Behind
LUC8K: Tell us about your life before photography Peter. What was your role in banking, and what did a typical day look like?
Peter: “Before photography, I was a money broker in the City of London. The company had offices around the world, but I worked from our London office in the heart of the City. It was a world built on unpredictability and stress. We dealt in huge amounts of money, trading on behalf of banks, and any slip up meant real losses for the company. Entertaining clients was a big part of the life too. It was relentless, but it paid well.
What I loved most about it was the adrenaline. When a major economic indicator came out, everything could change in seconds. Prices moved, phones rang, the floor erupted, and you had milliseconds to react before the trade, and the opportunity, was gone.
Looking back, I think I got addicted to that feeling. And in a strange way, wildlife photography gives me the exact same thing now. Most of the time, nothing is happening. You wait. Then suddenly it changes, an animal moves, the light shifts, something unfolds in front of you that won't happen again, and you have to stay calm enough to execute before it's gone. The adrenaline is identical. It's just that today it comes from something wild, not a screen.”
LUC8K: Looking back, was there a moment when you realised the corporate world wasn't where you were meant to be?
Peter: “It was more a gradual realisation than a single moment. I began asking myself whether I could imagine living exactly the same life ten or twenty years into the future. The answer became increasingly uncomfortable. I realised that success and fulfilment are not always the same thing.”
LUC8K: What was the catalyst that made you leave banking and completely reinvent your life?
Peter: “While I was working in Tokyo, I watched Michael Palin's Pole to Pole, a travel series I'd picked up on video. It followed Palin from the North Pole to the South Pole, and it was the Africa section that stayed with me. Not long after, I quit my job and set off.”
LUC8K: Was there a particular conversation, experience or moment that changed everything?
Peter: “There was one specific moment that changed everything. I was on my overland trip, at a remote camp near the border with Sudan, signing the guest register, when I found Michael Palin's signature on the page above mine — the same man whose documentary had made me quit my job and go in the first place. I read his words, and something shifted. I was in my thirties, I had no dependents, no one waiting for me to come back, and I realised in that moment that I didn't have to. I had no idea what I was going to do next. I just knew I didn't want my old life back.”
LUC8K: How did your family react when you suggested moving to Africa?
Peter: “My parents and siblings back in Ireland weren't happy. I was giving up a well paid job that would, in time, have made me genuinely affluent, for the unknown, and in their eyes, taking photographs wasn't a real job. I don't think that view has shifted much over the years, even now.”
LUC8K: What fears did you have before taking that leap?
Peter: "Honestly, I wasn't afraid. I had a house in the UK that was paid off, some money put aside, and I was in my thirties. I wanted to see the world, and Africa in particular, and just see what happened.
I've always taken risks. Leaving university after a year to move to the UK. Leaving a good job at a bank to become a money broker. Leaving London for Tokyo, then Tokyo for Africa. Selling my home in the UK and putting down roots a long way from family, family, in South Africa, to become a photographer — and not even the obvious kind, not a safari guide with a camera, but someone selling black and white fine art prints. By that point, taking the leap wasn't really a leap anymore. It was just what I did.”
Building a Life in Africa
LUC8K: Why Africa?
Peter: “I think it comes down to scale, and how alive everything feels. The skies are bigger, the silences are bigger, and so is the wildlife, in numbers I'd never seen anywhere else. Ireland, London, Tokyo — all wonderful in their own ways — but none of them had that sense of space, or that sense that something could happen at any moment. Once I'd felt that, it was hard to imagine going back to anywhere that didn't have it.”
LUC8K: What was the reality of moving there compared to what you imagined?
Peter: “I think I expected South Africa to be more third world than it turned out to be. The reality is it's a blend of both — first world and third world — and which one you experience depends almost entirely on your income. The racial divide was something new to me too. I'd lived with racism before, in different forms, in every country I've called home, but South Africa operates on a different level entirely. That took some adjusting to.”
LUC8K: What has living in Africa taught you that life in Ireland never could?
Peter: “Before Africa, I spent years living the kind of life where stress becomes so normal you stop recognising it. Finance, deadlines, targets, always thinking about what comes next. I assumed that was simply how life was supposed to feel. Africa taught me otherwise.
In the wilderness, nothing moves to your schedule. Wildlife operates on its own rhythm entirely, and if you want to witness any of it, you have to surrender to that. You sit. You wait. You pay attention. At first that feels uncomfortable. Then it becomes the most natural thing in the world.
Watching an elephant family gather around a calf, a lion at rest beneath an acacia, a chimpanzee lost in quiet contemplation — these things don't just make for good photographs. They recalibrate something in you. They remind you what stillness actually feels like.
Africa didn't only change the way I work. It changed the way I see. And I think that shift is present in the photographs themselves. Many of my prints are less about the animal and more about the feeling the image carries. Quiet. Space. The sense that the world, for a moment, has stopped asking anything of you.
When someone hangs one of my prints in their home, I hope it does something similar for them. In a world of noise and screens and constant demands, I hope it offers a small moment of escape. A reminder to pause, breathe, and reconnect with something that matters.”
LUC8K: How has the landscape changed the way you see the world?
Peter: “Africa changes your relationship with the world, not by rejecting it, but by putting it at a distance that makes it easier to see clearly. When I'm on safari, I can go days without news, without the internet, sometimes without even knowing what day it is. The outside world doesn't disappear — it just stops feeling urgent.
Ask any ranger who lives on a reserve and they'll tell you the same thing. There's a bubble quality to life here. Not isolation exactly, more like perspective. You realise how much of modern life is self-imposed urgency.
The scale of Africa contributes to that shift. In Ireland or Japan, a long drive might be an hour or two. In Africa, twelve hours in a vehicle to reach somewhere remote is entirely normal. Distances are bigger. Horizons are bigger. Even the silences feel bigger.
Living here has taught me that not everything requires an immediate response. Not every email needs answering today. Not every headline deserves your attention. Nature operates at its own pace, and if you spend enough time in it, you begin to do the same.
I don't think Africa disconnects you from the world. If anything, it reconnects you with what matters and helps you let go of some of what doesn’t.”
LUC8K: What does a normal day look like for you now?
Peter: “The day starts early. In Africa, school begins early, so once the kids are dropped off it's straight to the studio. Most people assume a wildlife photographer's day is spent in the field, but the reality is that much of my time is here, at my desk, working on the images themselves.
Choosing a photograph to put on the website is not a simple decision. First the edit, then if I'm happy with that, I print it on my fine art printer. Then I hang it in the studio and live with it for days. I observe it. I let it sit there. If it stops me in my tracks after a week, if I can genuinely live with it, it makes the gallery. The rest don’t.
The other half of the studio day is clients, responding to people who reach out for
custom pieces. Some want a statement acrylic print for a large wall. Others want a Collector's Edition, hand signed, with a personal note on the back telling the story behind the image, for themselves or for someone they love.
In the middle of the day I take my hike, into the forest, to breathe, to feel the sun on my face, and to give thanks for my life and my family. Then my wife and kids come home, and the chaos begins, and doesn't end until around eight. After that, an hour of mindless social media, and then bed. That's the routine.”
LUC8K: What moments in Africa have had the biggest impact on you as a person, not just as a photographer?
Peter: “That one is easy. A chance meeting with my wife when I was forty-five. By that point I had quietly put to bed the idea of finding a soul mate. I was on my own, doing the work I loved, and I had made my peace with that being the shape of things.
What happened instead is difficult to put into words. Having Nicolinah beside me, and then having children, has changed me more profoundly than anything Africa
itself has done — and that is saying something. I am a different person, a better person, and I think a better photographer, because of them. The work has more feeling in it now. More patience. More understanding of what bonds and family and loss actually mean. You cannot photograph elephants grieving and not feel it differently when you have people of your own to lose.”
Learning To See the World Differently
LUC8K: Was photography always a passion, or did it emerge after your move?
Peter: “Photography wasn't something I planned. It arrived in my late twenties through a chance find in a secondhand bookshop in the City of London — a Don McCullin retrospective that I picked up almost without thinking. One image stopped me. An Irish homeless man, shot in black and white. There were no words needed. The photograph did everything. And something about it unsettled me deeply, because I recognised the distance between his story and mine, and how small that distance actually was.
That single encounter sent me down a path I hadn't anticipated. Courses, printing, exhibitions, self-education in every form I could find. And then in 1995 I walked into the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London, not knowing what to expect, and left knowing exactly what I wanted to do.
I couldn't have told you then that I would one day win that same competition three times, in 2011, 2013 and 2017. At the time I was just someone standing in a gallery, trying to understand why certain photographs stopped you in your tracks and others didn't. That question has never really left me.”
LUC8K: What was the first image you captured that made you think you might actually be good at this?
Peter: “There are two photographs, really, that were pivotal in their own way. The first thing I ever had published was a shot of an African priest in robes, wading out into the Indian Ocean with huge waves around him, his arms spread wide, the shape of his arms and robes forming a cross. I converted it to black and white and it ran as a double page spread in a UK black and white photography magazine.
The second came on my second trip to the Kalahari — an image of a white-backed vulture. That one was published as a double page in National Geographic, I was paid five thousand dollars for it, and it went on to win in the Animal Portraits category at Wildlife Photographer of the Year.
Those were the two moments that told me this could actually be a living, not just something I loved doing.”
LUC8K: How would you describe your style as a wildlife photographer?
Peter: “Black and white, always. That's not a recent choice — my love has always been black and white. When I'm photographing, I see in black and white. I see lines, shapes, texture, form. I see subtle tonal ranges moving from deep blacks to the whitest whites.
Often, people confuse style with just the edit of an image. But style to me is about your visualisation — whether in the field or the digital darkroom. It's your choice of subject, your choice of lens, your composition. And most importantly, what you're trying to say or portray in the photograph.
From the moment I press the shutter, I have in mind that the final result will always end as a fine art print. My photography has always been about the print, not just a digital display. There is something intangible, almost magical, about a fine art photography print — the way it holds light, the way it feels in your hands, the way it commands a wall. A screen can show you an image. A print lets you live with it. My photography is more deliberate, more emotion-based than the action-based wildlife photography that's often associated with the genre. I'm not spraying and praying. I'm waiting, feeling, and then committing — always with the print in mind.
LUC8K: What separates a good wildlife photograph from a truly great one?
Peter: “I think most people can become good photographers if they put in the time. What separates great from good is harder to pin down — some kind of X factor, a different way of seeing and portraying things than everyone else, something intangible. Anyone can capture a great single photograph now, especially with the equipment available today.
What's harder is consistency. A body of work. Being published again and again, when editors are ruthless. Winning at the top level of competitions, when judges are just as ruthless. And having people — patrons — who choose to buy your work and put it in their homes.
That's the real measure for me. Someone parting with money they've worked hard for, to give your work a place in their space. That still humbles me, every time.”
LUC8K: What are you trying to make people feel when they look at your work?
Peter: "I want them to feel what I felt. Not the technical achievement of the photograph, but the moment itself. The quiet. The scale. The sense of being in the presence of something wild that doesn't know you're there.
If someone stands in front of one of my prints and feels, even briefly, that they are somewhere else entirely, then I've done what I set out to do.”
LUC8K: Which image are you personally most proud of and why?
Peter: “I'm proud of the work that has been recognised at Wildlife Photographer of the Year. The chimpanzee portrait, Contemplation, won the Animal Portraits category.
Big Foot, an extreme close-up of an elephant's foot, won Nature in Black and White. The Gladiator, my Kalahari vulture image, was awarded second place in Animal Portraits. And Bonds of Love was shortlisted for the People's Choice Award.
The photograph that stays with me most personally is Bonds of Love. It was a photograph of an elephant family gathered around a newborn calf, only hours old, that had been trampled by a young bull. What unfolded in front of me was one of the most touching things I have ever witnessed — the mother, grandmother, daughters and siblings all moving in around the baby, trunks outstretched to comfort it. What made it even more profound was that my wife and baby son were sitting right beside me when I captured it. A once in a lifetime moment, made even more so by who I was sharing it with.
And then there is the Camelopard giraffe, which belongs to a different chapter of my life entirely. After having a family, I found a new kind of discipline in getting away on my own, into the wilderness, with nothing but the camera and the silence. That photograph came from that place. More considered, more patient, more thought out than anything I had made before. I predicted the giraffe's movement before it happened and was ready when it unfolded.
To me it is quintessential Africa — the scale, the minimalism, a lone tree, the giraffe feeding from its lower branches, grass stretching out like an ocean, storm clouds on the horizon. It is also, I think, the fine art print that best reflects who I have become as a photographer — and that journey is still going.”
The Giraffe That Stopped the World
LUC8K: Tell us about the giraffe image that has attracted so much attention.
Peter: “Camelopard. A lone giraffe, feeding from the low branches of a solitary tree, grass stretching out like an ocean around it, storm clouds gathering on the horizon. To me it is quintessential Africa — the scale, the minimalism, the quiet drama of it all.”
LUC8K: How long did it take to capture that incredible shot?
Peter: “It was one morning in the Mara. I had been hired for a one-on-one specialist safari, working with a client to help her understand the art of creative fine art photography in the field. These are the sessions I love most — one or two people, the chance to really understand what they're trying to see and help them become a better version of the photographer they already are.
I spotted five giraffes approaching from a distance. In that moment I could read where they were going, and I worked out the best position and perspective before they arrived. I explained everything to my client — how to read the scene, how to anticipate the movement, how to be ready. The whole thing lasted no more than twenty minutes from first sighting to the giraffes moving on.
While she was shooting, I took a handful of frames myself. One became Camelopard. Another, of all five giraffes in perfect symmetry, became a photograph I called Serendipity. Two completely different photographs from the same twenty minutes — which is why you never stop paying attention.”
LUC8K: Was it planned, or one of those magical moments nature gives you unexpectedly?
Peter: “Both, in a way. I had positioned myself and was watching the giraffes. I predicted their movement before it happened and was ready when it unfolded. So it wasn't entirely spontaneous, but nature still had to cooperate.”
LUC8K: What was happening in the seconds before and after the image was captured?
Peter: “In the seconds before, I was focused entirely on my client. Talking her down to a calm, steady state, reminding her to breathe, to frame slowly, to keep everything still. Engine off, driver quiet, no sudden movements. The most important thing in those moments is not the camera — it's the person behind it. To zone out from everything else and become completely one with the moment in front of you. And afterwards, the thing I always say is this: stop. Don't immediately check the screen or move on to the next thing. Sit with it. Realise how rare and special what just happened was. Be in the place you are, with the wildlife behaving naturally around you, completely unaffected by your presence. That is what it means to be a true observer.
Long after a safari ends, it's those moments the clients remember most. Not the images. The moments.”
LUC8K: When you first looked at the image, did you know you had something special?
Peter: “Yes. You always know. At least I do. For me to pick up the camera in the first place, something has to have triggered an emotion. That's the threshold. If I don't feel something, I don't shoot.
Good photography is about emotion. Great photography is the perfect balance between emotion and technique, between heart and head. When both are working together, when you feel it and you execute it, you know in the moment that something has happened. Camelopard was one of those moments.”
LUC8K:. What does the giraffe represent to you personally?
Peter: “Quintessential Africa. The scale of the continent, the minimalism of the landscape, the soul and essence of a place that operates at its own pace and on its own terms. A lone giraffe in open grass under a storm sky says more about Africa than almost anything else I could point a camera at.”
LUC8K: What do you think people connect with when they see that image?
Peter: "The space and the stillness. There's something in the photograph that asks you to slow down, and I think people who are drawn to it are people who feel that need. It's not a dramatic image in the obvious sense. But it stays with you.”
LUC8K: What advice would you give someone considering a radical life change?
Peter: “Don't wait for certainty, because it never arrives. I left banking because I had a dream, a bucket list of things I wanted to do and see before it was too late. The longer I stayed, the further that dream moved away from me. At some point you have to take a leap of faith. What's the worst that can happen? At least you tried. At least you didn't spend the rest of your life wondering."
LUC8K: Has success changed your definition of happiness?
Peter: “Success can mean different things — money, awards, recognition — but happiness for me has never really been about wealth, even though as an artist, income goes up and down more than most. Meeting my wife and having three sons, relatively late in life, is what actually brings me happiness, and what gets me out of bed every morning. All I want now is to be able to provide for them, and that's what pushes me to work as hard as I do, every day.”
LUC8K: We are a big fan of being constantly curious. What role does curiosity play in your life?
Peter: “Curiosity is most of the job, honestly. The animals that interest me most are the ones doing something I haven't seen before, and the only way to be there for that is to stay curious enough to keep watching after most people would have moved on.”
LUC8K: What does luxury mean to you today?
Peter: “During my money broker years, the answer would have been completely different — I collected watches, cameras, homes. Now, and I hope this doesn't sound contrived, luxury is a 4x4 on an open road, heading to a reserve to spend a week or two on my own. As much as I love my family, I also love solitude, quiet places, just being able to breathe and do the work I love, making fine art black and white prints of the wilderness and what lives in it. No lodge, no people, just camping on my own, a fire, and a night sky that looks like diamonds scattered on black velvet. That's luxury to me now.”
LUC8K: In a world obsessed with speed and technology, what can nature teach us?
Peter: “Nature doesn't hurry, and it doesn't perform for you. In a world that rewards speed, spending hours waiting for nothing to happen, and then everything to happen at once, is its own kind of lesson. It teaches you that the important things rarely arrive on schedule.”
LUC8K: What do you hope your children learn from the life you've built in Africa?
Peter: “Not to become photographers, necessarily, but to follow whatever it is they're drawn to, on their own terms. And beyond that, to grow up respecting and loving both people and nature. If they take that with them, I'll be happy.”
LUC8K: If you could photograph only one species for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?
Peter: “If I could only photograph one species for the rest of my life, it would be elephants. When I first arrived, I was scared of them and didn't enjoy photographing them at all. Since then I've learned bushcraft, how to approach animals properly, how to read them and respect them. But elephants are the ones I never tire of. It's how human their characteristics are — the family bonds, the grief when they lose someone, the way they protect their young when they're threatened. As a husband, a father and a son myself, I recognise all of that. I don't think I'll ever stop photographing them.”
LUC8K: Sophie, LUC8K's global ambassador, happens to be a giraffe. What was your reaction when you heard that?
Peter: “Honestly, I was surprised. I don't know many luxury brands that put wildlife front and centre the way LUC8K has with Sophie. I love it, because it keeps conservation in the conversation, and giraffes in particular are under serious threat right now, more than most people realise. Anything that brings attention to that is a good thing in my book.”
LUC8K: Why do you think giraffes capture people's imagination so powerfully?
Peter: “There's something about a giraffe that doesn't quite make sense — the proportions, the height, the way they move. They're strange and graceful at the same time, and I think people respond to that — something that shouldn't work but clearly does.”
LUC8K: If Sophie could talk, what advice do you think she would give humanity?
Peter: “If Sophie could talk, I think she'd keep it short. Something like, "Seriously, is this the best you can do?" A giraffe looking down at us, quite literally, asking whether we're really making the most of what we've been given. She'd probably also remind us that we're only borrowing this planet from future generations, so perhaps we should start treating it a little better. I think that's about right.”
LUC8K: What message would you like to leave with the LUC8K community?
Peter: “Thank you for reading, if you've made it this far. Every photograph on my website began as a moment in the African wilderness that moved me enough to press the shutter. If one of those moments resonates with you and finds a place in your home, I would be honoured. Either way, I hope Sophie approves.”
LUC8K: Peter. You truly are an incredible, inspiring, lovely, creative, humble human being. We really hope your story inspires others to live their colours. If just one person reads this blog and decides to change their own life for the better, that would make us, and you, very happy. Thank you. Beyond words.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Peter Delaney is a three-time Wildlife Photographer of the Year winner. After walking away from a successful finance career as a money broker in London and Tokyo, he relocated to South Africa to pursue his lifelong passion for black and white fine art wildlife photography.
Connect with Peter:
- Website: www.peterdelaneyphotography.com
- Email: peter@peterdelaneyphotography.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/peterdelaneywildart/
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/delaneyfineartphotography/