Photographing wildlife
Steven B. Zwickel
May, 2020
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| 1960 Jimmy the Squirrel |
I love taking pictures of the animals I come across in my backyard; I always have. I must have at least a dozen blurry, black-and-white photos of the squirrels my grandmother used to feed table scraps. Whenever I see some animal or bird that we aren’t used to seeing in urban areas, I grab my camera and try to get a few pictures. I have chased wild turkeys down the street and climbed up on a ladder to catch a raccoon sleeping in the crotch of a tree. I think that most of them would be meaningless to anyone who wasn’t present when they were taken, but a few came out well and were added to my photo album.
Here are some thoughts if you are thinking about photographing birds and other animals in the wild.
How serious are you?
It makes a difference if you are interested in photographing exotic animals on an organized photo safari or just hoping to have a chance encounter with some critter in your own neighborhood.
If you really want to get great photos and can afford to do so, sign up for a safari led by someone who really knows photography. Prepare for your trip by getting a good camera (read Consumer Reports before you buy) and reading up on the places and learning about the wildlife you are hoping to encounter. (If you shell out enough to go on a safari, you would be foolish not to know the difference between a zebra and an okapi).
That is how the pros do it—the folks who shoot those gorgeous images for magazines like National Geographic. If that’s your dream, go for it.
I can pass along two things I have learned about how professional nature photographers work, based on an article I read years ago. It was about a photojournalist who’d been following migrating caribou (or elk or some other four-footed beast) for three days and nights. The article said he returned home exhausted with just over 150 rolls of film to be developed. The two things I learned were first, if you really want to shoot pictures of animals in the wild, you need to be ready to live out there with them for extended periods of time. Second, you need to take a LOT of photos {if you are too young to remember film cameras, each roll had 36 exposures and having 150 rolls means the pro took 5400 photographs, of which maybe 4 or 5 would be printed in the magazine.}
Professional photographers also use expensive, high-quality equipment and often carry multiple cameras and lenses. The heavy-duty stuff they carry with them into the bush weighs a lot and can wear a person down in warm climates.
This is not a cheap hobby. People who go on serious photo safaris are serious about their equipment. If they are into the technology, they can talk your ears off with brand names, ƒ-stops and lens lengths. You may get an interesting reaction by telling them how much you enjoy using your Kodak Instamatic or Polaroid Land Camera.
“This is a squirrel who came right up to the door”
Equipment
You don’t need to know a lot about cameras to get good wildlife photographs and you don't need to spend a fortune on equipment. Any camera or smartphone will work, but there are two things that can make it a lot easier to get a good image.
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| White pigeons. |
The first is an ability to zoom in on your subject. Single-Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras can be fitted with a telephoto or zoom lens that makes that fox on the far side of the field look much closer and easier to see. These long lenses add a lot of weight to the camera and there’s an easier way to accomplish the same thing. It’s called a teleconverter and it attaches to an SLR camera with your standard lens. Teleconverters are smaller and lighter than the long lenses, but can do a lot of the same things. Consider using a teleconverter rather than a heavy long lens. {Size doesn’t always matter!}
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Same photo, but cropped so focus
is on the girl
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Get in close
Even with a zoom lens, you need to get close enough to see what you are taking a picture of. This can be complicated, because most creatures try not to be seen. They are all trying to avoid being caught and eaten by other animals, so they use camouflage, freezing in place, and flight to avoid predators.
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Cooper's Hawk. Coloring makes bird hard
to see when it is up in a tree
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The solution to this problem is to control the depth of field—how much of the image is in sharp focus. If you can make the background and foreground blurry, then an animal in the middle ground will stand out.
Some cameras allow a photographer to alter the depth of field, but many automatically adjust so the entire image is in sharp focus. Depending on your camera, you may have ways to control the depth of field: increase the number of the ƒ-stop to decrease the size of the lens aperture (smaller opening = less light hitting the sensor), decrease the distance from camera to subject (move in close and the camera will focus more on the subject), or use a long lens to increase focal length (similar to moving in closer). If you can’t do any of these with your camera (or don’t want to stop to change settings before the animal moves away), you can change the depth of field using photo editing software. Digital tools that let you “blur background” or otherwise change which part of the picture is in focus after you take the photo are easy to find online.
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| Wild Turkey at neighbor's house
on a cloudy day
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Think about the light
The direction of the light will affect how your photos will look, but you don’t always have a choice. It doesn’t make sense to wait for a cloud to get out of the way or for the sun to move across the sky when you have the opportunity to get a good shot at wildlife. I have read some articles that recommend having the light coming from behind the animal, but that will result in backlighting—if your camera adjusts to the bright background, the subject of the photo will be dark, almost in silhouette and sometimes too dark to make out. So, if you can move to a spot where your subject will be well lit, move. Otherwise, take what you can get and try photo editing software to adjust highlights and shadows to correct backlighting.
Another way many animals avoid being eaten by predators is by being nocturnal—they only come out at night. Taking photos of nocturnal animals is a challenge and it’s really beyond the scope of this article. I suggest you do an online search for “photographing animals at night” to learn more about how to do this.
Where to point the camera
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| Cranes in an open field on a cloudy day |
If you go looking for wildlife to photograph, you need to think about the direction in which you will be shooting.
Taking pictures of birds or other animals up in the trees or on the side of a hill often means pointing the camera up towards the sky. The main advantage of this is that most animals show up beautifully against a bright blue sky. However, this may mean that you will be facing the underside of the animal, which is a lot less interesting than the head and top. It also means that you may find that overhead power lines will be in the way. Of course, shooting images against a bright sky will also result in backlighting, so you will have to compensate for that.
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| Rabbit in the snow |
If you shoot pictures of animals in front of grass/trees/shrubbery you may get some great examples of how hard they are to see with their natural camouflage. This is where you really need to get narrower depth of field so that the animal is in focus and the background is blurrier.
When to take wildlife photos
The natural time to go out to take pictures is when you have time to do so and when the animals are around. That’s why you need to be aware of how things change in the animal world depending on the time of year and time of day.
Photographers often say that the best time to take pictures is the “Golden hour” at sunrise and sunset when the light is bright enough to see your subject and low enough in the sky to provide the shadows that give photos a sense of depth. {At noon, when the sun is directly overhead, you lose the shadows and images tend to look flatter.}
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| Deer in the field |
Think about photographing wildlife as the same kind of stalking that hunters practice and which requires a lot of patience. You can bumble around and you might get lucky, but you’ll have a much better chance of getting a good photo if you put some time and energy into preparation before you set out. A good stalker knows when and where to look; so read up on the birds or animals that live in the area before you go.
Many avid bird watchers and wildlife lovers record their sightings and make them available online. There are websites where you can sign up to receive an email or text alert if a particular bird or animal is spotted in your area.
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| Raccoon in tree |
What’s in the frame?
One way to think about photos of wildlife is to consider the two main types. The first is a photo in which you shoot a stationary animal or shoot at a high speed so that you freeze an animal in action. You will get a clearer photo, but the image will have less information about how the animal moves and lives. Without a sense of action, the photo doesn’t give a viewer much context. In other words, it doesn’t tell much of a story.
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| Raccoon closeup. People like lookng
at animal's faces.
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On the other hand closeup images of an animal’s face and eyes add a lot of character and make the pictures more interesting to (most) viewers. People tend to anthropomorphize—to read “human” emotions into an animal’s expressions. Thus big eyes are “cute” and pleasing; big teeth are scary. There are advantages to making a wildlife photo that makes humans feel an emotional connection.
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| Turtle sunning on a rock at noon. |
The other type of wildlife photo is one in which the image captures the animal in action, doing something that gives the viewer some insight into how the animal lives. Action pictures may be blurry when the subject moves, but that motion can make the photo more exciting. Taking action photos means watching them from a distance, and that requires a stable tripod and long lens. The problem is that the photographer has to move the camera when animals move and where they move. That’s tricky, but it can be a lot of fun to get a photo of animals moving in a natural setting. {I still have an image in my memory of a great photo I didn’t take of wild horses running in North Dakota. I just couldn’t move my camera fast enough, so no photo, just a memory of the one that got away.}
The last question to consider is how to orient the camera: is it better to use landscape (horizontal) or portrait (vertical) orientation?
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Blackbird: blue sky, but background is too
busy and distracting.Needs to be cropped
and background made blurrier.
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Landscape orientation is great for getting a photo of the animal’s whole body and background scenery. Portrait orientation is a good way to capture an animal’s face. I try to always take at least one of each type, because you never know which will be the best until you try it. You can also crop a photo to change the orientation if you wish.
I also follow the “Rule of Thirds” of composition whenever I take photos. Many cameras can be set to project a 3×3 grid on the view screen or eyepiece. Positioning the camera so that the most important part of the images is on a point where the gridlines cross makes the composition of photos a lot more interesting.
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Applying the Rule of Thirds to Photography
The rule of thirds is one of the most basic composition guidelines in photography, because it explains what part of an image the human eye is most strongly drawn towards first.
An imaginary tic-tac-toe board (grid) is drawn across an image to break it into nine equal squares. The four points where these lines intersect are the strongest focal points. The lines themselves are the second strongest focal points. Applying the rule makes photos more interesting.
