Nature and Wildlife Photo Tips

Get up early

Mornings are best for photography. First light is pleasantly orange, lakes are mirror smooth, animals are active, and you don't have to deal with crowds of people. That early alarm is a big shock, but resist the urge to hit the snooze button. The first ten minutes after sunrise are crucial and you don't want to miss that. You will spend a lot of time driving around in pre-dawn darkness, but the traffic will be light. Once you arrive, you get to enjoy the quiet morning solitude as well as get great pictures. If there is one thing to dramatically improve your photos, this is it.

Do it often       "F/8 and be there"

Nature is like a lottery, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. You have a better chance of winning if you play more often. You never know when that big bull elk will walk out of the forest or a few clouds will create a stunning sunrise, so you need to be there when it happens. However, remember it is a fine line between persistence and futility.

Be Ready

Keep your camera readily accessible. Some photo opportunities are fleeting, and if you can grab your camera and shoot out your car window, you will get shots that others will miss. Many photographers keep their equipment in the back of their trucks, completely unreachable, and miss those impromptu shots.

Use a tripod

It is an absolute necessity with a long lens or a long exposure. You may miss a few shots because of the few seconds spent placing the tripod, but the ones you get will be sharp. Even if you could hold a long lens motionless, your arms will soon get tired. The choice of a tripod is always a compromise between rigidity and weight. You will wish it was heavier while using it, and wish it was lighter while carrying it. Do not use the center column except in emergencies, since it is not rigid.

Even if you have a perfectly rigid tripod, often times it will be standing on grass and therefore not be perfectly solid. Sometimes I leave the tripod legs mostly collapsed and sit down on the ground behind it. I rest my elbows on my knees and steady the lens. It is also faster to set up if you don't extend the tripod legs. The more fashion-conscious photographers look at me with disdain, but I get the sharp photos.

Know your subject

You need to know when and where to expect to find subjects. When you spend a lot of time waiting and watching for the perfect pose, you will learn about animal behavior. Seasons greatly affect animal behavior. Mating season is a good time to photograph large animals, since they are in prime condition, preoccupied, and active.

Understand the light

Morning light is also better because of its shallow angle compared to mid-day light which basically shines straight down. Remember, you are taking pictures of the sides of the subjects, not the top, so you need the light to illuminate the sides. You can photograph subjects like birds for about the first three hours of a day. After that the sun is too high, the bird's belly is in shadow, and the eyeball highlight is gone. Time to go home for a nap.

Many things look good when photographed with bright sun and blue sky. A thin overcast can help by reducing the harsh contrast slightly, but the sky will appear white. Other subjects look better in cloudy overcast light. Flowers benefit greatly from the non-directional and shadow-free light of a cloudy day. Waterfalls are not so blitzed with overcast light, plus a relatively long exposure can create a wonderful silky effect.

Beware the light meter

The built-in light meter does a fine job when it is seeing an average scene. But large areas of white or black can fool it and cause huge exposure errors. If your subject is standing on sun-lit snow, the meter will be fooled by all that bright snow and reduce your exposure, which will leave your subject as a silhouette. Conversely, if your subject is sun-lit with a dark shadowy background, the meter will be fooled by all that dark area and increase the exposure, which will blitz out your subject. In these situations, switch to manual exposure control.

You will also have to adjust your exposure if your subject is very light or very dark. Subjects like white pelicans need less light so you can retain detail in their white feathers. Similarly, black bears need more light.

There is a lot of confusion regarding this compensation. I have been told to accomodate a light subject by both "opening up" and "closing down". The source of confusion is where you start, an incident or reflected meter reading. For example, say you have a snow-covered scene in direct sun. If you start at the typical sunny day exposure of 1/250 at f/9.5 at ASA100, then you need to close down about one stop. If you take a reflected light reading using the camera's meter, it will be something ridiculous like 1/250 at f/22. Starting there, you need to open up about two stops. As always, if you are in doubt and have the time, bracket your exposures.

Focus on the eyeball

With a long lens, you don't have a lot of depth of field, so use it wisely. An animal's eye is the most important part and it should be razor sharp. A highlight also improves the photo immensely, and gives you something to focus on. Some animals have jet black eyes which look like holes in their heads without that highlight.

Don't harass your subject

In the quest for that frame-filling close-up, we all try to get close to the subjects. The tolerance distance for each animal is different, and you can't predict exactly what that will be. Sometimes the animal may accept or completely ignore you. Others will walk or run away, which only leaves you with a fleeting butt shot. A bird that feels threatened won't come to its nest, so you won't get any shots. If you have an uncooperative subject, it is pointless to harass it, so please don't. Remember, the welfare of the animal is paramount.

Learn from your successes and failures

When you get some bad photos, ask yourself "why is this photo bad?" and determine what you can do to recognize that situation and avoid repeating that mistake. Similarly, when you get a great photo, ask yourself what makes it so good and try to do that again. Be honest with yourself in your evaluation of your photos. Just because you went to great pains to get a photo doesn't automatically make it spectacular.

Show only your best work

Take lots of pictures and sort them mercilessly. If any are out of focus or blurred, throw those out immediately. If you get a dozen dynamite shots, nobody else needs to know how many hundreds of duds you threw away.

Wildflower photos

are a totally different matter. For more hints, see Advice for Wildflower Photography.

John Shaw has written several books that explain the technical details of photography in a clear, no-nonsense way. They cover aspects of lenses, films, exposure, flash, etc, with many illustrative photos. His books are:
      The Nature Photographer's Complete Guide to Professional Field Techniques
     John Shaw's Closeups In Nature
     John Shaw's Focus on Nature
     John Shaw's Landscape Photography

My Equipment

Camera

OK, I'm a dinosaur. I have several old Canon A-1 cameras with a range of lenses from 24mm to 800mm. Mostly I use a 400mm lens for wildlife. Longer lenses are often envied but are not the ultimate panacea. Besides their expense, they are heavy and awkward, prone to vibration, require precise focusing, and attract unwanted attention from curious tourists. They also do not give you as much magnification as most people expect. My rule of thumb is: if you can't see it with the naked eye, you can't take a decent picture of it with a 600mm lens. To see the effect of different length lenses, see my lens focal length chart.

It is really the lens that determines the maximum quality of your photos, not the camera. After getting fed up with malfunctions and unsharp images from off-brand lenses, I finally have all Canon lenses now. I would suggest you stick with camera-brand lenses. This is an area where you get what you pay for. Canon makes "L" series lenses which can be surprisingly expensive, but the difference is quite visible if you enlarge the image very much. After you have experienced the photographic opportunity of the lifetime, it is very upsetting to have the photos ruined because of some shortcoming of your equipment.

For landscape photos, I like to use my Mamiya 7 medium format rangefinder camera. Yes, it is a step backwards from 35mm in terms of size, cost, versatility, and ease of use. But those giant 6x7cm transparencies definitely make it worth the extra trouble! The quirks of a rangefinder take some mental adjustments, not the least of which is the propensity to photograph the inside of the lens cap. Using a polarizer or split neutral density filter on a rangefinder is less convenient than on an SLR, but definitely possible. No you can't do macro photography or super telephoto wildlife photos, but it is great for general landscapes like waterfalls and big mountains glowing orange at sunrise. I chose this system because it was reasonably light and portable for those long hikes. It has worked well.

Tripod

I have a Gitzo 320 tripod with an Arca Swiss B-1 ball head. It is fine for a 400mm lens, but barely adequate for longer ones. For those, a 410 is a better choice. Gitzo and Bogen legs are the best choices. A ball head lets you quickly adjust the position of your camera by turning one knob. Both of these items are amazingly expensive, but they will give you many years of solid service.

Film

I use Fuji's Sensia and Velvia film, but probably not for much longer. Digital photography is rapidly eclipsing traditional film. For a while, digital seemed like a quaint toy but now it has matured to where it is better than film. Processing slide film just got tremendously inconvenient for me when the local lab closed. I'm still clinging to my ancient photo equipment only because switching to digital will mean buying a whole new camera system. None of my existing Canon lenses will fit on a new camera.

You don't necessarily have to go to exotic locations for wildlife. Keep your eyes open and you never know what you might find. For example, both of these photos were taken within two miles of my house in the city. A roadside field was flooded with spring runoff and some migrating white pelicans landed in it. A gnarled old tree with a big empty cavity stood in an open space area which I had passed hundreds of times, but for a few days, this screech owl was in the cavity.

Photography is not really a social pastime. Locating the animals is as much a part of it as actually photographing them. After I have spent several days scouting for bird nest holes, I'm not anxious to tell other photographers. At a minimum, I will have to share "my" subjects, and the other photographer may not have the same level of respect for the subject. Some photographers will pump you for information and offer none in return, which seems unsociable and unfriendly. A few photographers are major jerks with huge egos, but you soon learn to avoid them. Wildlife photography is competitive, but we can at least be civilized.

Equally important as where to find wildlife, is when. The changing seasons greatly affects the animals' behavior and your photo opportunities. Great horned owls nest in February and have fuzzy chicks by May. Migrating birds come through the area in April and May. Nesting songbirds can be photographed in late June. Mountain goats need to be photographed early in the summer, before they start losing their hair and look like rotting carpets. Different wildflowers bloom at different times throughout the summer. The leaves on the aspen trees turn to gold during September, which is influenced by altitude and latitude. Elk start their mating activities in late September, followed by mule deer, then bighorn sheep at Thanksgiving.

If you can't make 80 trips to the park each year in all seasons, or don't want to get up at 4AM and drive around in the dark, you might consider buying a book. For less than the price of two rolls of film, you get to see the results of the best days I've had in the mountains over the years. I hope you will get as much enjoyment from my seeing my photos as I had taking them.