To capture the perfect wildlife image,  a photographer has to be in exactly the right place at precisely the right time. Well, that's all photographers aside from David Slater. He wasn't even there when his most famous picture was taken!

In 2011, he visited a national park in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, and left one of his cameras unattended for a while when one of the animals hijacked a camera and took hundreds of selfies.

Many of them were blurry and some were pointed at the jungle floor, but among them were a handful of fantastic shots, including a selfie taken by a grinning macaque monkey which made headlines around the world.

But after appearing all around the world, Mr Slater is now facing a legal battle with Wikimedia after the organisation added the image to its collection of royalty-free images online. The Wikimedia Commons is a collection of 22,302,592 images and videos that are free to use by anyone online, and editors have included Mr Slater's image among its database.

Slater argues this is jeopardising his livelihood – Wikimedia argues that the monkey pressed the shutter button so therefore he "owns the copyright" not Slater.

Mr Slater now faces an estimated £10,000 legal bill to take the matter to court.

Speaking to The Telegraph he said that the photography trip was extremely expensive and that he has not made much money from the image despite its enormous popularity.

“That trip cost me about £2,000 for that monkey shot. Not to mention the £5,000 of equipment I carried, the insurance, the computer stuff I used to process the images. Photography is an expensive profession that’s being encroached upon. They’re taking our livelihoods away,” he said.

“For every 100000 images I take, one makes money that keeps me going. And that was one of those images. It was like a year of work, really.”