This Decade-Old DSLR Camera Captured 2025's Wildlife Photo Of The Year

The winner of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2025 is South African photographer Wim van den Heever, for his chilling and beautiful image of a hyena roaming an abandoned mining village, captured using an 11-year-old camera. To beat out the 60,000 other entrants, van den Heever captured a rare brown hyena near a decrepit building in the light of the moon, titled "Ghost Town Visitor." According to van den Heever, it took him over a decade to capture the moment using camera traps in locations where he knew one of the rare hyenas would pass while hunting at night. Interestingly enough, he never changed the camera he was using that entire time — a Nikon D810.

The Nikon D810 came out in 2014 and lacks a lot of the new features of modern cameras. However, it's the Nikon D810's old-school DSLR functionality that made the image so striking. A digital single-lens reflex camera uses a mirror to reflect light upwards, flipping up to allow the light to hit a digital image sensor when the photo is taken — this makes it great for capturing images in low-light situations. Professional photographers still use the Nikon D810 over a decade later, noting that its slower readout speed is perfect for these dark environments. This can create more dramatic and striking images than a newer iPhone camera, especially if you know what tricks to use.

After 10 years of work, van den Heever only had one image to show for it. His idea was to try to capture one of the most elusive animals, the rare brown hyena, while it wandered through the Kolmanskuppe ghost town. It's not an area he often thought about photographing, since it's manmade, which makes sense for a nature photographer, but it turned out to be more inspiring than he initially realized. "I'm always trying to look for something that I could photograph wildlife in an area like that," he said. "And that's where the idea came up; to try and photograph a brown hyena in the desolated ghost town of Kolmanskuppe." 

Why Kolmanskuppe? Van den Heever had seen tracks in the area a few times over the last few years, likely as the hyenas traveled through the night looking for food. According to Museum Scientist Natalie Cooper, brown hyenas are the rarest type of hyena, with as little as 4,000 individuals left in the wild. It's a shy animal, so van den Heever's only option was to set camera traps — and this resulted in zero images for ten seasons. With his specific goal of capturing the abandoned building on the left and the brown hyena on the right, he got one single photo — the winning snapshot.  

"I couldn't believe my eyes," van den Heever said of seeing the image on his Nikon D810. "It is the ghost that I've always dreamt of." It reflects the ghost town itself, an abandoned mine being reclaimed by the desert. He hopes this image — and many others — will showcase the beauty of nature that we rarely get to see, inspiring others to preserve it going forward.