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THE LEOPARDS OF THE ROYAL CITY
- Avanish Dureha
- Aug 1
- 7 min read
Photographing at Jhalana Leopard Reserve, Jaipur Jhalana-Amagarh Leopard Conservation Reserve, Jaipur · May OM System OM-1 · M.Zuiko 150–600mm f/6.3–9 & OM-3 M.Zuiko 40-150 f/2.8
A complete series on the geometry, behavior, and photography of the Indian Leopard across three radically different landscapes.
This is the final installment in our journey through the world of the Indian leopard. We have seen the shared landscape of the Rabari in Jawai (Part 1) and the uncompromising wildness of the Sal forests (Part 2).
The Series Arc:
Part 1: Where Stone Meets Spotted (Jawai) – [Link to Article 1]
Part 2: Into the Sal (Rajaji) – [ Link to Article 2]
Part 3: The Leopards of the Royal City (Jhalana, Jaipur) – The concluding look at coexistence in an urban reserve.
In this final chapter: I bring you to my own adopted neighborhood. Jhalana is a testament to what happens when a city decides to let its predators stay. We will explore the “Urban Frame”; the visual tension of a leopard silhouetted against a backdrop of apartment blocks and why this might be the most important story of all.
Let Me Tell You About My Neighborhood
My Wife is from Jaipur. I want you to think about what that means for a moment.
Ten minutes from home — through perfectly ordinary city traffic, past a petrol pump, past a school and a hospital, there is a dry Aravalli forest where the apex predator is a spotted cat of forty kilograms who has never found reason to be afraid of anything. Jhalana-Amagarh Leopard Conservation Reserve sits in Jaipur’s southeastern corner, surrounded on three sides by one of Rajasthan’s largest cities. There is no gradual transition from urban to wild. You drive through a gate, and the city disappears.
I’ve been photographing at Jhalana for several years now. In May this year I did a short series of safaris, three safaris including one morning slot over two days, I was mentoring a group of photographers and I specifically focused on the 150–600mm to work.
Understanding the Animals Here
Jhalana has something no other leopard reserve in India has to quite this degree: individually documented animals with known, mapped territories and studied behaviour patterns. Spend twenty minutes with your Gypsy driver the evening before, and you walk into the morning with a genuine intelligence brief — which animal was active yesterday, where, and at what time.
This is both Jhalana’s great gift and a subtle trap: preparation yields frames, but it can also make you passive — waiting for the named animal to perform in the expected spot. The best sessions I’ve had here came when I used the drivers’ knowledge as a starting point, not a script.
In May this year, across two days and three safari slots, every sighting taught us something different; about patience, about reading the forest, and about the leopard’s singular ability to be everywhere and nowhere at once. I have detailed those encounters separately below.
The Urban Frame — A Distinctive Opportunity
Here’s something I think photographers consistently miss at Jhalana, and I want to be direct about it: the city is part of the story.
There are positions along Jhalana’s northern boundary where, on a clear morning, you can frame a leopard in a dhok tree against the blurred backdrop of Jaipur’s apartment blocks and water towers. At f/9 at 600mm, the background compression and bokeh render the city as a warm, abstract wash — unmistakably urban, but not distracting. The visual tension between the leopard and its improbable context says something that no pure forest frame can say.
I have been waiting and planning for one image — a female or for that matter a male, resting on a low rocky outcrop, the city visible but soft behind her — I did not get this image this time but gives me reason to plan many more visits.
On the urban composition: For the city-backdrop frame, you need a specific combination: a high vantage point for the vehicle, a leopard below a rocky ridge on the northern side of the reserve, and a morning with reasonable atmospheric clarity (May haze can reduce the city to a flat grey). Ask your naturalist if there’s a position that offers this view. Not all guides will think of it unprompted — it’s a non-standard ask.
The Technical Reality of May at Jhalana
I’ve said elsewhere that May is not the conventional wisdom for Jhalana. Most guides recommend October to February — cooler weather, better visibility, thinner vegetation. All true. But May has a specific photographic advantage that I return for: water.
By early-May, the few reliable water sources concentrate animal movement in completely predictable ways; leopards, chital, jackals, hyenas. And because the vegetation is at its driest, the dhok forest having dropped its leaves aggressively through March, sight lines across the valleys are cleaner than at any other time of year.
The trade-off is heat. By 9:30am it’s genuinely difficult, and there is nothing to be gained by staying out in 41-degree heat. Plan from gate opening at 5:45am to no later than 8:15am, and accept that anything after is background documentation at best.
Autofocus in Jhalana’s Broken Light
The dhok forest at Jhalana creates a specific autofocus challenge that I want to address directly: broken, patchy light with hard edges between sun and shadow. A leopard moving across a hillside in this light will shift from deep shadow to bright sun and back within seconds. Older AF systems — or systems relying on contrast detection — struggle with this. The phase-detect system on the OM-1, combined with the AI Animal Detection, tracks through these transitions with a consistency I find remarkable.
What I’ve settled on for Jhalana specifically: C-AF+TR with Animal Detection enabled, medium AF zone (not the smallest point — the algorithm needs room to track), and Face/Eye Detection as the priority. When the leopard turns away from camera, the system drops back to body tracking. On every safari in May, I had at least three sequences where the camera tracked a moving leopard through partial foliage and shadow transitions that I would previously have called ‘difficult conditions.’ The keeper rate on those sequences was around 60–65%. That’s not perfect. It’s genuinely impressive.
The Sightings
Sighting 1 — The Ghost You Could Smell
Our first sighting was, more accurately, a smelling. Before we saw anything, the air told us something had died nearby — the unmistakable scent of a fresh kill drifting from the direction of a water source. Common sense said the leopard would not abandon an unfinished meal, so we waited. And waited. The cat was there all along, pressed into the grass beside its prey, completely invisible from the safari track. The photograph attached to this piece captures what I mean: you can see the leopard, and you can see the kill — but only if you know where to look. That evening, we came away with a couple of decent bird frames and the satisfaction of having caught the ghost in its own ghostliness. A safari many would call wasted. I call it a lesson in reading a forest.
The Complication — Leopard Census Night
That same evening, we learned that a leopard count was underway — and would continue for the next twenty-four hours. Several zones were off-limits to safari vehicles. The additional movement of Gypsys positioning census teams in treetops was doing exactly what you would expect: pushing the cats deeper into the grass and further from the tracks. The leopards were not hiding from us; they were simply responding, sensibly, to the unusual level of human activity in their territory. Knowing this changed how we read the next morning.
Sighting 2 — Return to the Kill, 06:30
The next morning, at 06:30, we went directly to a different location where we had prior intelligence about an older kill. A leopard that has invested in a kill tends to return; this is reliable behaviour if you give it time and resist the temptation to push. We waited. And return he did. This was the frame I had been hoping for: a leopard at its kill in the early morning light, the forest still cool and the cat unhurried. Preparation and patience, not luck.
Sighting 3 — The Cub in the Bushes
On the evening safari, we came across a cub sitting quietly in the bushes; patient, alert, waiting. Almost certainly waiting for the mother to return with a meal. There is something both touching and quietly impressive about a young leopard holding position like that: still, composed, already practising the discipline of stillness that will define its adult life. We spent some time with him, kept a respectful distance, and moved on without disturbing the wait.
Sighting 4 — Last Light, ISO 10000
Just short of the end of our safari, near sunset, we encountered one more leopard; deep in the bushes, motionless, waiting for us, the census teams, and all the human noise of the day to be done with. The light was almost gone. I pushed the OM-1 to ISO 10000 and shot anyway. The results surprised me: several keepers, the grain sitting in the image in a way that suited the mood of a cat disappearing back into the dusk. High ISO at the limits of available light is not a compromise I’d choose. But when it’s the only choice, the OM-1 handles it with more grace than I have any right to expect.
Project Leopard and Why Jhalana Matters
I want to end this article with something that isn’t about photography, because Jhalana deserves it.
Rajasthan launched Project Leopard, India’s first state-level leopard conservation programme, and Jhalana is its flagship. In the years since the reserve was notified, the leopard population has grown from a barely viable number to over forty individuals, despite being enclosed in an urban landscape with no corridor to other forest. Cubs are born here regularly. The community has responded; there is genuine local pride in Jhalana that I’ve seen grow over the years I’ve been visiting.
This did not happen by accident. It happened because the Rajasthan Forest Department made a decision to protect habitat in a city rather than surrender it to development, and because the people of Jaipur chose, broadly, to accept their feline neighbours.
Go to Jhalana. Carry your best lens. Bring patience and an early alarm. And then tell the story of what you find there.
— ✦ —
Avanish Dureha
OM System Ambassador | Wildlife & Street Photographer
dureha.substack.com · durehaography.com · @apdureha · Instagram: avanish_dureha
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