Karine Aigner's photograph of an elusive jaguar in Ecuador saw her win the General – Color category in the fourteenth season of HIPA (the Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photography Award), themed 'Power'.
With a prize pot of US$1 million [£739,550/AU$1,490,000] HIPA is the world's richest photography competition so its category winners are able to fund upcoming personal projects.
Karine is no stranger to prestigious international photography competitions, though. In 2022, she was the Adult Grand Title Winner of Wildlife Photographer of the Year for a photo of bees competing to mate in Texas in the US.
Her storytelling skills were inspired by working as a picture editor on magazines, including nine years as senior picture editor on National Geographic Kids, and she put these to use by shooting weddings at weekends, "in a journalistic style".
Since leaving the day job and turning professional in 2011, Karine has photographed a wide range of subjects – she's "not just a wildlife photographer going around with a long lens" – and leads photo workshops around the world.
And it was on one of these trips that the unexpected appearance of a potential subject required Karine to deploy her quick reflexes to good effect.
Speaking to her after the awards ceremony in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, in November 2025, she recounted how she captured her winning shot…
While leading a photography storytelling workshop in Ecuador for young photographers, Karine's group had stopped at a clay lick.
These are places where birds and animals – parrots and parakeets are prominent – congregate to lick and eat the clay in the ground to neutralize the acid in their bodies.
"You wait for the birds to appear – one comes down and then another to see if it's safe but if something spooks them they'll all fly off," she told Digital Camera World.
"It was hot and humid and we were waiting there for hours; I lay down on one of the benches, put my head down on my bag and dozed off.
"While I'm laying there I hear one of the kids say 'Jaguar!', but I was like, 'Whatever', and ignored it.
"Then the same kid says, 'There's a jaguar there!' Everybody stands up and there's this beautiful male jaguar in the clay lick.
"This was the first jaguar I'd ever seen in my life, but we weren't there for a jaguar. He stayed for about two minutes and as he walked off, all the students had their mouths open."
Karine said her group grabbed their cameras and started shooting, describing the moment as "raw, unfiltered awe".
"Technically it was hard because there wasn't a lot of light and it all happened so fast that you had to shoot with whatever [settings] you had left your camera on.
"If you messed up, you only found out afterwards when the picture was out of focus or the shutter speed was too slow and it wasn't sharp. It's also hard to focus when there isn't much light.
"That's what all of us were battling, the light and whatever settings our cameras were on in that moment."
But one of Karine’s captures would go on to become her prize winning-photo 'Jungle Keeper', and her cash prize will allow her to fund some forthcoming personal projects.
"These days photographers need to have their own funding if they want to be able to spend any real time on location," she said, noting that an editorial commission might only enable a wildlife photographer to spend 10 days on the ground – and there's no guarantee of witnessing the hoped-for animal behavior within that time.
"I know what I can get [but] I can't get it if it doesn't happen", she added.
Website: www.karineaigner.com
See Karine's Adult Grand Title Winner photo from Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2022.
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About the competition
The Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum International Photography Award (HIPA) rewards excellence in still photographs and moving images and has a prize pot of US$1,000,000 [£739,550/AU$1,490,000], with the winner of the grand prize taking home US$200,000 [£152,000/AU$307,000]. Free to enter, the theme of the 15th season is ‘Family’ and will open for entries early in 2026. Find out more at: www.hipa.ae
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