Black tigers are extremely rare to see in the wild—and even rarer to catch in a magazine-worthy photograph like the one on our latest cover. But National Geographic Explorer and photographer Prasenjeet Yadav did just that after carrying his Nikon Z 9 camera day after day. On the 119th day, just one day before his permit expired, he finally spotted one in the park.

We sat down with Yadav to learn how he managed to capture an image sure to join our pantheon of Nat Geo’s most memorable shots. “One of these black tigers showed up in front of me,” gushes Yadav. “They’re extremely rare, and most of their sightings are not more than a few seconds. But I got to be with this one for more than half an hour. It was unreal.” 

While searching for a lost Incan capital in 1911, American explorer Hiram Bingham was led to a mountaintop in the Urubamba valley of Peru. As rainforest turned into ruins, Bingham took early panoramic photos of Machu Picchu with a Kodak camera. He was not the first person to discover Machu Picchu—Peruvian farmers in the region had long visited the ruins—but he was likely the first to make a photographic record of the site. Here are the photos he published in National Geographic more than a century ago.

Thanks for reading today’s newsletter, which was edited and curated by Sidney Madden with the help of National Geographic’s photo team. It was produced by Alisher Egamov. Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here to catch next week’s Photo of the Week newsletter.