Villiers has been leading photographic safaris since 2009, but his love for nature and wildlife in particular actually started as a toddler, when he would visit the Kruger National Park with his family during the holidays. After school, he studied Nature Conservation at the Tshwane University of Technology, and he had the privilege of researching leopard movements in Botswana’s Mashatu Game Reserve for four years as part of his Master’s Degree.

After that, Villiers spent nearly a decade crisscrossing the African continent as a travel writer, visiting some of its wildest and most beautiful national parks and game reserves for local travel magazines like Getaway, go!, DriveOUT, and Travel Africa. During this period, he also presented a wildlife photography insert on South Africa’s longest-running nature program, 50/50, and interpreted rare big cat behaviour as part of a panel of experts on NatGeo Wild’s Caught in the Act for six seasons.

Villiers’s photographic guiding career started in his home away from home, Mashatu, and expanded to the Sabi Sands when he and his wife moved to the Lowveld town of Hoedspruit in November 2013. Since then, he has frequently led photo safaris to amazing destinations like Mala Mala, Elephant Plains, and Djuma, but he has also taken guests further afield to more remote places like the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, northern Botswana, East Africa, and even the jungles of India.

Most recently, Villiers started a YouTube Channel called The Safari Expert, on which he shares a host of safari-related videos that include everything from safari trip reports and awesome animal sightings to photographic gear reviews and interviews with other wildlife experts. He loves sharing his knowledge about animal behaviour and photography with the viewers as well as his photographic safari clients when out in the field.