This story appears in the September 2019 issue of National Geographic magazine.

Every photographer has a dream shot. For Steve Winter, that shot was a tiger’s face seen from below. The challenge, says Winter—who has long covered big cats and other wildlife for National Geographic—was getting that perspective in a way that didn’t end with his own face inside the animal’s mouth.

ROBOT VS. TIGER Photographer Steve Winter tries out a unique gizmo to get an in-your-face view of tigers.

Enter this apparatus, a camera mounted on a four-wheel, remote-controlled vehicle. The “camera car” had been built by the National Geographic Society's Exploration Technology Lab engineers but never used. Winter saw its potential to capture that looking-upward view and asked if he could take it to India for a project on tiger conservation.