Wildlife photography is more than mere critter documentation. To truly master the genre, it requires constant innovation, a willingness to experiment with unconventional techniques, and an unyielding commitment to understanding your subjects. Wildlife photography should inspire, educate, tell stories, tug at our heartstrings, and help us build empathy with our fellow creatures here on planet Earth. In other words, wildlife photography, like all genres, should make a visual and emotional impact on your viewers.
To do that, you must move beyond simply getting the eye in focus, though that is important too. Wildlife photography does require a degree of technical skill after all. But to make an impact, you must introduce visual artistry, creative expression, and emotional engagement to your wildlife images.
And while the following ten tips are certainly not comprehensive, they are a good start.
Richard's Top Ten Tips
Tip 1: Embrace Creative Lighting
Most photographers opt for front lighting when shooting wildlife. “Point your shadow at the subject” is the conventional mantra because it ensures the bird or animal is evenly illuminated. In other words, it’s easy. It’s also boring.
This approach severely limits other interesting and creative lighting possibilities. Side lighting, directional light from a 90-degree angle, can reveal texture and add depth to the subject, creating a three-dimensional look and feel to the image.
Backlighting, essentially shooting directly into the sun, can give fur and feathers a beautiful rim light that glows, which is much more dramatic than flat front lighting. Just watch out for underexposure, autofocus difficulties, and sun flare when shooting backlit subjects.
Tip 2: Go Wide!
When photographing wildlife subjects, the initial impulse is often to use the longest lens in the bag and zoom in as tight as possible. After all, you didn’t spend thousands of dollars on that new telephoto lens for nothing, right?
But every once in a while, try resisting this urge and explore a wider view instead. Not only can the surrounding environment give perspective to the moment and help tell a story about the creature’s life and habitat, but it can also aid in creating a more compelling composition by bringing in complementary lines and visual elements.
So next time you use your telephoto lens, pull your eye away from the viewfinder every so often, look around at the surrounding environment, and ask yourself if its inclusion can strengthen the image.
Tip 3: Experiment with Long Exposures
Add some dynamic flair to your wildlife images by incorporating long exposures into your skill set. Animals on the move or birds in flight present excellent opportunities to use slower shutter speeds and camera panning.
For most wildlife photographers, freezing the action with fast shutter speeds will be the first option. But you should also try going with the flow! I’ll often opt for this technique when the light is too low to capture a razor-sharp image with anything other than an extremely high ISO.
Start with 1/15 second for moving subjects and experiment from there: faster exposures for rapidly moving animals and longer exposures for slower animals. Even static animals with elements of movement within the scene—like moving water—can help create a dynamic look and feel to wildlife images that faster shutter speeds just can’t express.
Tip 4: Anticipate, Don’t React.
Hockey great Wayne Gretzky allegedly once said that he never skated to the puck, but instead, he went to where he believed it was going to be. In other words, if he reacted to the action on the ice at the present moment, he was too late.
This is the perfect metaphor for wildlife photography. If you’re reacting to what’s happening — or what has just happened — it’s too late. You’ve missed the moment.
Instead, anticipate what’s going to happen next. Learning about animal behavior is obviously helpful since most are creatures of habit — just like humans.
But it can also be as simple as waiting for the right light or setting up at a waterhole and allowing your animal subjects to come to you. Anticipating and preparing is much more productive than reacting and chasing.
Tip 5: Implement Visual Design
As mentioned earlier, wildlife photography is so much more than just documenting the presence of an animal or bird with a camera. It’s no different than any other genre of photography in that successful images use good composition to help connect what’s in front of the lens with the viewer.
As difficult as it might be in the elevated excitement of the wildlife encounter, attempting to get the focus right, and trying not to scare away your subject, you still must try to think abstractly about shapes, lines, balance, and the edges of the image frame while temporarily letting go of the literal subject in front of your eyes.
Let go of the literal for just a moment and embrace the abstract. Your wildlife images will have a much greater visual impact as a result.
Tip 6: Get Low!
With few exceptions, the worst possible perspective when photographing wildlife is from a downward angle. Psychologically, it’s condescending and authoritative. Aesthetically, it results in an image with a busy and chaotic background and little or no eye contact with your subject.
Choosing a low, eye-level perspective, especially with smaller animals, makes it much easier for the viewer to relate and connect with your subject on an emotional level. The implication is mutual respect and equality, not dominance.
Getting lower still and shooting at an upward angle can imply majesty and exaltation. Getting low also delivers far more interesting, out-of-focus backgrounds where the subject almost “pops” off the screen.
Tip 7: Use Space to Carry Emotion
The amount of negative space in your images can have profound emotional implications.
First, make sure the negative space around your primary subject is ample enough so that it doesn’t feel cramped or crowded within the confines of the image frame. Give your subject plenty of room to breathe.
Beyond that, negative space can add emotional content to your wildlife image. An overabundance of empty space within the image frame can imply loneliness, desperation, or isolation. You can use negative space in this way if that’s how you want your audience to feel.
Conversely, a crowded image frame with minimal negative space can have the opposite emotional trigger. It can imply chaos and energy. How you use space — and how you want your viewer to feel — is completely up to you.
Tip 8: Deepen the Mystery
Francis Bacon once said, “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” That’s particularly true if you really want to engage your audience and make them active participants and not just passive viewers of the image.
The unknown pulls them into the scene by having you, the photographer, holding just a little something back. Stir their collective imaginations by hiding some of your subject behind a visual obstacle, or use shadows and reflections as proxies for the literal subject.
If you give everything away to your viewers — the entire animal head to toe, brightly lit, obstruction-free — there is no mystery, no imagination, no work left for the viewer to do. Deepen the mystery.
Tip 9: Express Gesture and Interaction
Gesture is defined as “a movement of part of the body that expresses an idea or meaning.” We want our images to have meaning, so why not let our animal subjects help us express it?
Don’t be satisfied with photos that only show a static animal or bird looking gloomily into the camera. Show how these animals interact with one another, play, mate, or hunt for food.
Unless you photograph a documentary stock image for a field guide, don’t be content with a simple wildlife portrait. Wait for something special to happen, and then be ready to act.
Tip 10: Know Your Subject
All photographers must confess that luck often plays a part in capturing that perfect moment while being in the right place at the right time. But professional wildlife photographers can’t rely on luck alone to consistently capture successful images.
It’s so important to the habits and behavior of the species you’re planning to photograph. For example, large birds and waterfowl always take off and land in the direction of the wind. That information might be important in knowing where to set up to get the shot.
As mentioned earlier about anticipating instead of reacting, the better you know and understand the habits of the species you are photographing, the better prepared you will be when something special does happen.
These ten tips are a good start to moving beyond documentary wildlife photography. Think and act like an artist if you want to make more wildlife images with impact!
Travel with Richard Bernabe
Many of the ideas explored in this article are central to Richard Bernabe’s approach in the field. On his workshops, the emphasis is not on chasing moments, but on slowing down, observing behaviour, and making deliberate creative choices. With extended time in the field and small group settings, participants are encouraged to think critically, applying the concepts in this article repeatedly in real-world wildlife situations.
