Wildlife photography is notoriously tricky and requires a lot of patience. But for those same reasons it can be very rewarding! There are many factors involved in producing the professional images seen in magazines and on TV, with photographers often spending hours and even days sat in a hide waiting for the brief moment an animal appears in front of the camera. But regardless of what part of the world you live in, or what your skill level is, here is some advice to help improve your own wildlife photography skills. Please remember, these aren’t rules set in stone, they can sometimes be broken.
But before we get started, what kit will you need? Well, having the top gear is beneficial, but the good news is you don’t have to own the biggest and best lenses out there. Not everyone wants to carry a 600mm VR around all day. However, being realistic you do need something other than your standard 28-70mm zoom to get consistently good wildlife images. The shorter your lens the better your fieldcraft needs to be, as the closer you’ll need to get to the subject. But, anything from a 70-300mm upwards is a good starting point, as I would consider 300mm the ideal minimum for most serious wildlife photography.
- Focus is key!
Regardless of your camera, lens or skill level, my number one tip is always get the focus right, and use those focus points on the camera to good effect. This is by far and away the most important aspect of any photo. If your focus is not in the right place, the image will not be successful. Make sure your focus is on the subject or main point of interest within the photo to help draw the viewer in. This is especially true if the photo is a close up portrait, in which case the eyes being in focus is critical. If they are not in focus the viewer will not be able to connect with the image as it’s often the eyes that draw you in.
The trick to getting this right is making sure your focus point is square on the subject’s eyes/head. If it’s a small bird, don’t be tempted to just focus on the body and think it’ll all be in focus, because as the bird gets bigger in the frame, your depth of field at any given aperture will get smaller and eventually you’ll end up with a photo that has a beautifully sharp bird’s belly and a soft head. Also, don’t focus then recompose the shot if you can help it, because again, when working with small depth of field, it’s easy to move the area of focus (known as the plane of focus) by just enough that your subject will no longer be critically sharp.
Image © Richard Peters Photography
Photo taken with a Nikon D3, 200–400mm 1/5 second, f25, ISO 200
- Put yourself on the subject’s eye level
To really connect with the subject, try getting the camera as close to its eye level as you can. This is especially true for small subjects on the floor such as birds, squirrels and rabbits. Photos taken at a steep angle, looking down at the subject, are rarely flattering and the subject won’t pop from the image. By placing yourself at the subject’s eye level, you are drawing the viewer into the subject’s world and seeing life from their viewpoint which is not only more aesthetically pleasing but also more interesting. So get that tripod as low to the ground as you can or use a beanbag, even if it means lying on the floor (something I tend to do a lot!). The difference that can be made to an image just by getting the camera two or three feet lower to the ground really is amazing.
With this coot image, I had my lens resting on a beanbag barely off the water. And although it required laying in some mud and dirt, it gave me an incredible angle looking straight at the coot as it swam towards me.
Image © Richard Peters Photography
Photo taken with a Nikon D300, 600mm f4 1/400, f8, ISO 500
- Backgrounds: Watch for distractions
Another advantage of getting down low is that it will help give you a nice diffused background that will make the subject stand out. But you need to be careful when doing this, as it’s all too easy to concentrate so much on what the subject is doing, that you fail to spot something as seemingly innocent as a dark tree trunk in the background. It might sound like a strange thing to say, but anything in the background that has an overly dark or bright colour can quite easily be a distraction to the image, drawing the viewer’s eye away from the subject.
This is especially important if you’re photographing in your local park, where you may have people, dogs, bins etc in the background. Even a gap through trees where you can see daylight might turn a nice even green background into one with a big blue blob or bright white hot spot in it.
You can see with the image below that my view of the woodpecker pointed at an area in the background where the wall and the trees behind met. This resulted in a very distracting block of green at the top of the image. I therefore had to crop in closer than I would have liked to remove the green, but that resulted in an image that directed all your attention to the bird.
Image © Richard Peters Photography
Photo taken with a Nikon D3, 600mm f4 + 1.4xTC, 1/640, f7.1, ISO 200
Hopefully these tips will get you thinking about what’s needed for great wildlife photography – many thanks Richard for supplying them. We’ll have the second part of this series of tips from Richard on the blog soon, but in the mean time we’d love to hear about your own wildlife photography experiences. What has worked well for you? Why not share some of your photos on our Flickr page. You can also see some more of Richard’s wildlife shots in our Flickr photostream here.
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