A Beginner's Guide to Wildlife Photography

Now if you've watched this channel before you'll know that I'm a landscape photographer by profession but more and more recently I've found myself photographing wildlife and it's usually wildlife that we come across while I'm on a landscape trip. So for example we've done polar bears when I was up in the east of Greenland photographing icebergs there, I photographed oryx in Namibia, arctic fox when I've been in Iceland, things like that. Now it used to be that landscape photography and wildlife photography were two very diverse areas of photography, you had different equipment for each. For wildlife you'd have very fast cameras with great high ISO performance but not necessarily high resolution and for landscape you had slower high resolution cameras with great dynamic range. But as the technologies progressed there's been a kind of convergence between these two cameras so now we have high resolution, high dynamic range cameras that are also really really fast, have very fast frame rates, extremely good autofocus and much better high ISO performance. And when you combine that with the fact that certain zooms like 100 to 400 or 200 to 600 are useful for both landscape and wildlife then more and more people like myself who have a kit which is really geared directly at shooting landscapes are finding themselves also with gear that is very very competent for shooting wildlife. Now I'm not a wildlife photographer by profession but I have been shooting a lot of wildlife over the last three years and what I want to do in this video is just try to pass on all of the stuff that I've learned that's helped me take better wildlife photographs and so if you're just getting into wildlife photography then this should be hopefully a really good place to start. Now any modern camera from the last three or four years is going to have an excellent autofocus system and is also probably going to be capable of frame rates of 10 to 15 frames per second. Now when it comes to lenses obviously faster primes something like an f2.8 300 millimeter is going to give you a really narrow depth of field which will help you to isolate the subject and will allow you to shoot with faster shutter speeds in low light but they're also incredibly expensive and it's probably not an investment that you're going to want to make unless you're going to be shooting wildlife full-time. But now with cameras that are capable of shooting really good images at ISO 3200 or 6400 alongside noise reduction software which has just got so much better in recent years it's perfectly possible to use a relatively slow zoom like 100 to 400 to shoot most wildlife subjects. To maintain a fast shutter speed to freeze the motion of the subject you will have to use a higher ISO than you would if you're using a fast lens. It is much much easier to clean that up and get a really good looking image now. Now when it comes to setting up your camera settings this is going to be different really depending on the camera system. Different photographers, different people like to have their settings slightly different. Everyone works in a slightly different way but what I found works for me is to shoot with the camera fixed at its widest fastest aperture and to have manual control over the shutter speed. Now I want to have manual control over the shutter speed because I want to be making sure that I get fast shutter speeds if it's a fast moving subject but I can also slow it down a little bit if the if the subject is much slower moving and to do that I have the ISO set to auto then you put a limit on what you want the maximum ISO to be. So if you're shooting in relatively good light or or towards twilight something like a maximum of ISO 3200 is generally quite good but if you want faster shutter speeds you're probably going to have to set that minimum ISO at something like 6400. Now the autofocus settings again are going to be different from different people. I set mine to subject tracking so it can track the subject across the frame. I use back button focus which fixes my focus at a specific point so I can track the animals better if they go behind bushes or trees and come out on the other side and I tend to use a single focus point which I always try to put on the eye of the animal. I don't use eye tracking because sometimes you can be shooting multiple animals so you've got multiple eyes and then with eye tracking the camera doesn't always know which eye that you really want to pick up on and focus on so I prefer to do that manually myself. So what I found when it comes to actually photographing the animals is that there's sort of three levels. The first is seeing the animal, the second is photographing the animal and the third is actually taking a good photograph of the animal. The first are quite easy we see a lot of animals here and it's very easy just to take a photograph of them but what you want to try to do is to create a compelling photograph something that really grabs people's attention. So what you want to elevate your image is some form of connection with the animal something that connects the viewer of your photograph with the animal itself and the best way to do that is to have the animal looking straight at you looking right into the lens but also some form of behavior so if the animal is looking off to the side looking at something outside of the frame that can work quite well or just capturing genuine animal behavior because a lot of animals they stand around eating the predators tend to sleep most of the day so you should be looking for some form of interesting behavior the young cubs playing with each other or climbing on their mother's back that kind of thing and usually that will require waiting because most animals what they're doing most of the time is conserving their energy for when they really need it so they tend to be as inactive as they possibly can be so quite often you'll find yourself sitting waiting for the action maybe waiting for a lion to lift its head up and look at you and quite often you're going to have to reposition yourself or the vehicle that you're in to try to get an angle where that where the animal is actually looking at you or that you can get a clear shot of whatever the behavior is now this can often be quite challenging because the animals tend to just walk away as soon as they see you when they sense the vehicle when they sense your approach they'll just turn and walk in the opposite direction and photographs of the back ends of animals are really not the most compelling so learn to be patient take your time and wait for the animals to do something that connects with you now as i said before there is a big difference between a photograph of an animal and a compelling photograph of an animal and so much of that lies in the actual framing in your composition now composition can be incredibly challenging because animals are incredibly unpredictable it's not like photographing a landscape where we can look at the weather look at the light predict what it's going to do set up and then just wait for the kind of composition for the framing to work as the light moves it moves across the subject with wildlife it's constantly changing and we are often very limited in terms of being in a vehicle or being in hide and we might not be able to move left or right or change positions to get a better composition so often we're kind of forced to work around the animal to adapt to the situation and create compositions basically on what we can see in front of us which means that you have to think quite fast and often that can be really difficult what i found when i first started photographing animals is that sometimes i was so overwhelmed by the sighting maybe we've been tracking a lion or a cheetah all day but when we saw it i was just so excited that i forgot all of the basic rules of composition so i'd just be photographing the animal kind of pointing at its head trying to get some interesting behavior or trying to get the animal to look at me but in doing that i'd forgotten a lot of the a lot of the tenets of composition the important things of composition that i always think about in landscape photography when everything is happening a lot slower and that's things like scanning the edge of the frame making sure you're not cutting things off which can be quite challenging when you're just grabbing shots and often have only a few seconds to react so what you need to try to remind yourself is to scan around the edge of the frame if you're photographing a group of animals for example do you have part of one animal coming into the frame of the animal that you're photographing are you cutting off any of the elements of your subject this is very easy to do with a zoom lens because you zoom in quite tight to get a portrait the animal moves it's very easy to be cutting off an ear or to be cutting off the paws of an animal or its tail or its hind quarters and sometimes you'll find that another animal enters the scene and part of that animal kind of sticks out of the side of the animal that you're photographing and often you don't notice this when you're looking through the viewfinder because the kind of excitement takes over but when you look at your photographs on your computer later on you sort of see the back end of a of a zebra sticking out of the zebra at the front that you're photographing and it really does take away from the impact of the image but it's not just other animals entering the frame or cropping bits of the animal that you're photographing that you have to be aware of there's also the landscape elements that are around you because often the position that you have to take to get a good view of the animal there may be other landscape elements intruding things like bushes coming into the side of the frame or going across the face of the animal long grass in the face of the animal or maybe there's a tree in the background and it may be out of focus but you need to try to find a way to work the composition around this so if you've got a tree in the background even a blurred one you might want to make sure that you're including all of it or just to zoom in a little bit or try to move a little bit to the left or the right to remove any encroaching bushes or branches from the frame now one thing that always works well with the framing of wildlife images is to try to be on eye level with the animal this is often incredibly difficult when you're in a vehicle being in a vehicle will usually lift you up and you can't get out of the vehicle because it's incredibly dangerous to do so in most wildlife situations now you can try hanging your camera over the side of the vehicle composing with the lcd screen sticking out and getting the camera a little bit lower to the ground but you should always check with your guide to make sure that it's safe to do this and always make sure that your camera is secured with a wrist strap or with a neck strap wrapped around your wrist because if you drop your camera you're not going to get it back now this does have the advantage of getting your camera a little closer to the ground which gets you closer to eye level with the animal and it also makes the foreground look a little bit blurred and out of focus which which gives you a nice lead up to the animal but it is very difficult to compose this way usually you're in bright light so it's hard to see the lcd it's much harder to operate and find the focus point and obviously you're manipulating the camera with one hand which can make it challenging to get a shot and also to to take into account all of the things like the composition like the things entering the side of the frame it's much more difficult when you're hanging over the side trying to operate the camera with one hand now with the zoom lens it can be quite tempting to zoom all the way in and get nice portraits of the animal and this can work you can get really nice shots doing this but what it also does is it does remove any sense of context or sense of place from the so it's nice to have a compositional variety try to have different range of compositions so zoom out shoot a little bit wider to get a better sense of place for example having trees in the background that can work as a balancing element for the animals including lots of negative space above the animal just to give it a sense of scale a sense of place things like that can give your portfolio a wider variety and just make your collection of wildlife images a lot more compelling on the opposite side of that there are also opportunities to create minimal or abstract images by zooming a long way in and just capturing for example parts of the animal things like the textures of the skin or the patterns on a zebra or a giraffe's back really trying to create interesting composition or framing and making images that are a little bit more abstract and a little bit more minimal in wildlife images like with landscape images what really gives an image impact is depth now quite often what we find ourselves doing here is photographing an animal that is a very similar color to the landscape that it exists in and quite often that can mean that the animal can just get completely lost in the landscape everything just looks like it's the same color or you can find yourselves photographing an animal that's in the shade it's laying in the shade because it's very hot in the sun so you just have everything in shadow which really desaturates the image it pulls all the contrast out of the image so even though you may have a very shallow depth of field which can help isolate the subject a little bit from the background you still find that the whole tonal range or the color range of the image is pretty much the same which makes the image look relatively flat so what you really need to be looking for is light on the face of the animal now it's wonderful if you have patches of shadow but really you need the animal to be looking into the light because the light will really help pick out the features of the animal it brings the viewer's attention to the face of the animal which is the subject of the photo it's what you want people to see so really if an animal is with its back facing towards the light it's often hard to get that to happen so usually you'll find yourself trying to reposition trying to find certain subjects that are looking into the light or have some form of side light on their face and finally and perhaps most importantly is occasionally take the time to put the camera down and not take any photos take the time to really enjoy the moment what i found with wildlife photography is that you're often witnessing just some incredible moments seeing these beautiful animals in their environment and there is from a photographic point of view so much to think about to create these kind of compelling images and often creating the images and thinking about the camera settings thinking about the composition takes up a lot of your mental bandwidth and sometimes that can be so overpowering that any moment that you have what you're doing is only really focusing on capturing an image of the animal so sometimes i think it's important to put the camera down and just enjoy the moment what you really don't want is all of your memories of the place to be revolving around taking images of the animals around dealing with the camera settings thinking about composition sometimes you need to just put the camera down watch and enjoy being in this incredible place and that's it for this video i hope you've enjoyed it i hope it's been useful and i hope it's been interesting and if you have enjoyed it please don't forget to like and subscribe because it really does help the channel this is it from me in Moshatu in Botswana but we're off to Namibia next week where we'll be shooting more wildlife and if you'd like to join me on one of these trips we will be coming back here to Botswana in a couple of years time in 2028 and next year we've got trips to Namibia and to Galapagos and also lots of other landscape photography destinations we'll be going to the Drakensberg we're going to Alaska and to Utah you can find all the information on all of my workshops on my website so check that out we'd really like to have you join us on one of these trips so just drop me an email if you've got any questions now if you've got this far in the video and you saw my last video about the book first thing i'd like to do is just to say thank you to everyone who supported the book there were so many people i never really expected it and i'm just so incredibly grateful to everyone who's pledged for a book the book's definitely going to go in production now we should have them towards the end of the year and if you haven't bought one yet and you would like one tomorrow monday the day after this video goes out is the last day that they will be available on kickstarter there aren't that many left available so i would really really really appreciate it if you would pick up one of the last copies and as ever thanks so much for watching thanks for supporting the channel and good luck with all your photography i'll see you next time take care