King in the Rain

This shot has an awesome back-story. 

During the Great Migration photo safari I hosted in September 2014, we headed our for our afternoon game drive one day as storms were building in the Mara Triangle. We weren't more than 2km from our camp when a call came in on the radio that a gorgeous male lion had walked onto the banks of the Mara river directly across from our tents and laid down overlooking our camp. We didn't need much motivation to turn around and head back in the hope of creating some great images.

We got to our camp - saw the lion flopped down on a high embankment on the river across the water from our dining tent.
We each got a chair, and a drink, and sat and waited for him to move and sit up.
While we were waiting we saw a couple of wildebeest run up to the river, consider crossing, and decide against it. We also saw elephants feeding in the distance and a huge buffalo bull come very close to squaring off with the lion who was lying on a very thin wedge of riverbank.

Eventually, we were able to capture some photos as he lifted his head and looked at us.
But he flopped down again.
And then the rain came! Many of the guests ducked back to the dining tent to protect their camera gear, but a couple of us pushed through and opted to rather shoot in the wet weather, as the lion was bound to get up and seek drier pastures.

He did - and we fired off a couple of frames as the sun came through the falling rain, before he ducked right into that shrub behind him.
As darkness fell, he kept roaring us to sleep.
Man, I can't wait to head back there in August! :)

Techs:
Nikon D4s
Nikkor 500mm f4 VR-II
f4.0 | 1/400 SS | ISO-4000