Latest / Wildlife and Adventure Photography / Mastering Wildlife Photography Part 8: How to showcase your best images

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Mastering Wildlife Photography Part 8: How to showcase your best images · Wildlife and Adventure Photography

• 0:08
  > Graham>Foreign. So now that you've taken your wildlife photographs and you've post processed them, what are you going to do with them? So that's what we're going to talk about in this final part of this mini series, about wildlife photography. And in many ways it could be the first episode in the series because I am a big believer in. Well, what we'll refer to is starting with the end in mind and what I mean by that is simply to think about what you want to have at the end of this experience of taking photographs of wildlife. How are you going to share them? Because I think the worst thing is to have some great images and all they do is sit on a hard drive somewhere and get forgotten and maybe they're never seen again and that would be a real it's a real shame and it's a waste of potential and all the effort you've put in so far to get the, get the image. So I want to talk about what you do once you get back home or however it works for you. And this will depend quite a lot actually on how you, how you see yourself as a photographer I guess. So that's what we're going to cover in this episode. It's really helpful if you can like and subscribe if you found the episode useful and please share it. I don't want to be a best kept secret.
• 1:34
  > Graham>So the first medium I'm going to talk about is the one that a lot of people hesitate to say most photographers use, but certainly a huge number do and that's social media. So this is platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, that kind of thing, where you're sharing images, videos or you're doing carousels of images or making up videos of still shots, all that kind of thing. And how you use that will depend on why you want to share your images. So it might just be to share with limited number of people, you might just want to share with friends and family or people you're close to or you might want to attract a larger audience perhaps just to see what kind of engagement you get, what kind of feedback, maybe with a view to making photography a bit of a side hustle as they say. Maybe look at making some money from it or perhaps going full time, full professional with it. So the key thing about social media, and this is why I say start with the end in mind, is that the images you're looking at are relatively small JPEGs most of the time by Relatively small. I tend to use sort of around five to six makes that kind of thing. and the reason for that is simply that you want a quick download. People are really impatient actually and we've got used to this instant gratification that we get now with the Internet that that's delivered for us. The certainly when I started in photography it was extremely different. There wasn't the Internet for one thing, and also television channels, things like that. There wasn't so much choice in varieties so we got used to having to wait a little bit. Even when I started I'd get my photographs developed at the local chemist, which probably sounds really weird if, of a, if you're younger. But anyway that was the way it was back then. So think about the images you want and if that's all you want to do with them, if you're only photographing social media, then just shooting jpeg, you can get hundreds, thousands of images on most memory cards. If you're shooting digitally and you may never even have to worry about the card running out or it certainly might be, it could even be years before you fill up the memory that you have in the camera.
• 3:59
  > Graham>On the other hand, and what I've stressed throughout this series and also in other podcasts I've done, I'm a great believer in using raw. And the reason is actually very simple. Even if you never intend to print your images, you might get that one amazing shot. You're just really lucky you're in the right place, right time, everything's aligned for you, all your settings are correct, your exposures bang on depth of field, everything else, and you've got this amazing photograph and what a shame it would be if you shot it in as a low res JPEG and all you can do with it is stick it on social media. So to me that's a huge waste. And this is why, even though you may only be using quite small JPEGs as the final medium you put out, I still do encourage you to shoot in raw, to just treat it as if you were going to create a very large print of that image.
• 4:53
  > Graham>Because you never know, you might have that experience where it happens. So that definitely determines how you're going to set the camera up, how you're going to set your files up, how you're going to edit them and how they're finally going to be used. And it, I'd say the advantage of using social media is at least they do get out there. So people do get a chance to see these images, you might get some amazing feedback as well. on the other hand, and something I'll quickly put in here because it's come up before, you will also get, you always get people who will make some negative derogatory comment about your work. And this is just, unfortunately there are a lot of people out there like that. They don't do it to benefit, benefit you at all. It's simply there to make them feel good. And unfortunately these kinds of people only make themselves feel good by trying to put other people down. So if you're experiencing that with your images in social media, my simple advice is to ignore them. Only accept comments and feedback from people who you would go to to ask for comments and feedback. So these might be people whose work you've seen. You really love it and you just, you really want to learn what you can from. So those sorts of people are the people I would go to to get feedback. Anybody else, look, if it's nice, that's fine. If it's not, do they have a valid point or are they just being nasty?
• 6:13
  > Graham>And, but don't take it on board because I know that can get very upsetting. if you are going to post in social media, you've got the option of storytelling. And what I mean by that is maybe running a series. It could be posting daily. with a wildlife series you could do a carousel. It's nice to have some sort of description about the image. I'm quite bad at that. so I put a really minimum minimal description on. But I think for a lot of people it's quite nice not only to see the animal but also understand something about where it is and you know, maybe what's going on, what the behavior is. one thing I will say, and this comes back to perhaps supporting wildlife conservation. But there are certain animals where you want to make sure your image does not contain metadata. And here I'm thinking about the animals that are poached. So I've definitely had this with rhino and I have post posted images of rhino but I've removed the metadata because that lovely include GPS information and what you don't want.
• 7:18
  > Graham>And unfortunately there are people who do this.
• 7:20
  > Graham>They'll search through images in certain areas and look for the GPS data because it shows them exactly where these animals were at that point.
• 7:28
  > Graham>And the chances are, particularly if it's an enclosed area that they're still there. And poaching is a serious issue. On the one hand, the people who do the actual poaching, they are often quite desperate to do it. some aren't they do it for money. but the, the real problem I believe are the people who are further up the food chain as it were and are paying and are basically making a lot of money out of destroying these amazing animals.
• 7:56
  > Graham>And, and so please bear that in mind. When you share images, check what data is in the file.
• 8:03
  > Graham>Photoshop, things like that, will let you do that and just make sure that you protect vulnerable wildlife especially. so that would be the ethical side of, of sharing those images. Okay. another option obviously is to build up a website or a portfolio. There are various ways of doing that.
• 8:23
  > Graham>You might want to even have the option of selling images. So Shopify is one Squarespace I think smugmug and Word, smugmug Def. Sorry Squarespace definitely I would suggest as a platform to look at because they are designed in many ways. They're a kind of go to for photographers. So they will give you the sort of layouts that are very useful to you. So that'd probably be my recommendation look at someone like Squarespace. that's a great place to keep a portfolio to maybe have images that people buy periodically if you're going to do that. It's also good to be able to hook in at the back end someone who prints. So I use a company called Creative Hub. They are part of the print space. I think it is Print Store. I always get this wrong some reason. But anyway if you Google Creative Hub you'll find them. They do really good quality prints. They are incredibly ethical in the way that they operate. I've had situations where prints have gone awry. are ah using standard post.
• 9:35
  > Graham>I think they've now got rid of that. But at the time and this was actually sending to Australia a couple of prints disappeared and they immediately reprinted them and sent them through tracked mail and didn't charge me anything which was amazing.
• 9:51
  > Graham>But unfortunately I think they've had so many problems now with standard mail that they've, they've taken away that option. Which does mean if you're shipping somewhere like Australia because they're primarily based, they're based in, I think the head office is London. They're in Dusseldorf or Frankfurt in, in the EU and they're also in the US somewhere. So unfortunately using DHL and place companies like that to provide trackable shipping it does mean that if you are not primarily Servicing one of those three areas, then the chances are once you go outside, the shipping costs will get quite high. It's something to bear in mind. And obviously there are other, other printers as well. But the advantage of using somebody like that, not only is their quality good, but they hook into the back end of people like Squarespace. So when an order is placed, you're not physically involved with it. That just happens in the background. You get a notification.
• 10:49
  > Graham>There's things you can set up with the printer, like your logo, if you've got a logo, thank you letters, that kind of stuff. So it's worth looking into if you want to make things a bit more professional. And, it's certainly nice to have a digital gallery. There are other things you can do. like you can have a literal digital gallery.
• 11:07
  > Graham>It's like a kind of virtual gallery online. one company I used was, was doing that. And it was like little exhibition area. You would just set up where your images were. They could zoom in, zoom out and you could link that to, somewhere they could actually, people could buy them if they wanted to. And that, company act also gave your clients the option to upload a picture of their wall and pop your artwork on there so they could get an idea of how it would look in their home.
• 11:37
  > Graham>So, you know, these kind of things are worth looking at if you want to, explore going, perhaps a bit more down the, let's say professional route where you're selling images.
• 11:49
  > Graham>Now the third option, and what I really love is, books, because, I'll talk about wall prints next because I think that's the best thing to do. But honestly, the problem is most of us only have so many, so much wall space. We can only get so many images up on a wall and you don't want it to look absolutely insane with image after image. So the other option there is to create an ebook or a printed book. So it can be either. And the great thing about that is that you can absolutely tailor it. You can lay it out any way you want to, you can add whatever text you want in there. So it could be quite minimal, just very simple, descriptions of the animal and where it was shot.
• 12:30
  > Graham>Or it could be a much more in depth, piece. So I've, put one together, a couple actually about elephants in Namibia. And one of them included, information about how you track and had some images of, footprints. So to help illustrate that point. So really the, the reason I'm saying this is that the content is totally up to you. You can do whatever you like. Now there are various people out there, and you may well have people locally like local printers who do that off of that service, which is great. And if you just want to share them with friends and family that's probably the route to go. I've used a few of them. one I'd, I'd say is very good is company called Blurb. They do high quality prints and in fact they give you lay flat options on the books and this kind of thing which is great. But it does start to get quite expensive. And if you're looking to offer these books commercially then that can be a bit of a problem because you want to get some kind of markup on there. depending on exactly how you want to use the books, whether they're a step to getting people to buy perhaps larger prints or the book might be an end in itself. So you want to have, you want to make some sort of money out of that. But when with a high quality printer, light blurb and their stuff is very good but to the person buying it they end up spending quite a lot of money on the book and I think that's a bit of a problem. So you have to make that call for yourself. The things I like about Blurb is one of the things they have is their own software that you download and you lay out the book using their software. So they'll give you the different page sizes. So there might be square books or kind of landscapey type books and that kind of thing. And it's very simple to lay out each page, choose how you want it laid out, whether it's just an image, single image, multiple images, images and text. It might be one image over two pages, that kind of thing. And as you're uploading the image to think with jpegs, it will also tell you if the resolution of that image is high enough to print well, which is really important because to get good quality prints you really want around 300 DPI dots per inch for the printer. That gives you a really good magazine like quality. And it's really good if the software is guiding you a bit. So you might have quite a low, quite a relatively small jpeg and if you try and put it over a full page it might lose the resolution, might not be good enough to give you a good print. So software like that helps you with laying out and making sure that the the image, depending on how far you expand it still is of a good enough quality to print. Well that's really helpful. So I definitely recommend that. And then obviously you can choose how you lay that book out, what the subject is.
• 15:21
  > Graham>You might have multiple chapters, you might have visual chapters that have a linking images. So it could be types of animal. It could be if you were on a trip through several countries or different areas of a country, maybe different wildlife, parks. you could kind of group each one together to give an experience of each one. So there really is a lot of potential in using books. And the great thing is they make great gifts. So you can normally it's print on demand with these businesses. So, so that simply means that you only print what you want. So, so you're not locked into a traditional printer. you might have to print 100 copies or something and then you're stuck with them. So print on demand costs a little bit more but it is much more convenient and they make great gifts. it means you can have images where you can just pull them out of a bookcase and have a look at them every now and again or share them other people. So I'm actually a big fan of, of those.
• 16:25
  > Graham>the other thing in that sort of area, books and magazines is to contact magazines, and journals. a lot, a lot of magazines do look for content from other people. They might have their own photographers and their own people, but a lot of them are looking for material to use. So if you're, if your photography standard is good, it's worth exploring and maybe contacting maybe local magazines as well. if so for example there was one magazine in Australia they were only really interested in Australian context. That's what they did to do a bit of research. But there are lots of magazines out there and you've got nothing to lose really by contacting them. And it'd be pretty amazing to have you work in a, you know, perhaps one of the more well known magazines. Now the fourth option is wall art and home decor. So again this is what I do on my website. So I, I just print collections. I have collections available from time to time. I use a very specific way of doing it. So my prints are always limited edition.
• 17:26
  > Graham>Once those prints have sold out, I won't offer that again. So that's the way I choose to work.
• 17:32
  > Graham>but I think regardless of how you're doing it, even if you're not doing commercially, having that really good photograph in your home and it's Fantastic reminder of a perhaps a great trip anyway. But also you've got this amazing image that's in your home and I'm a big big believer in having a bit of wildlife in your home. Anyway, I mean not you know pictures are better because they don't mess up the carpets but it's whatever works for you. So if you're going to do that again there are lots of options. You can do frame prints, you can do canvas prints. There are lots, lots of things. Some of the frames are these floating frames. So again you've got a lot of choice in how you mount how you display the final image.
• 18:15
  > Graham>something I have mentioned is software from Topaz Labs so it does get a bit expensive. If you buy the software for a one off I wouldn't recommend that. But if you are going to start doing this regularly, Topaz Labs or there might be something else. Photo AI is not one I've used but that might be worth probably a, the a ah lower cost option let's say compared to the multiple programs that I use. But Topaz Labs is a, they sort of specialize in removing blur from images. They've got some very good algorithms. The AI software works very well. So they, there's Sharpen which gets rid of blur so you can retrieve images that were really good but were slightly out of focus. The, that's often a great way of correcting them. there's also Denoise, another package that removes noise which again you know is if you've the problem as we've discussed with lighting, you might be in low light situations so that's going to be an issue for you.
• 19:17
  > Graham>And then Gigapixel AI which is the main one for prints because they, it will expand up the file so that the image, the actual print file is big enough to print almost every size and then you can go from there. Now if you are using someone like Creative Hub again they will tell you, they'll give you feedback on the maximum print size that they recommend for that particular file size.
• 19:44
  > Graham>They'll look at the file size that you're providing. That can be either something like a tiff, I use jpegs, simply because by the time I finish with them they're pretty huge anyway. And if I was to use a TIFF file that'd be massive. My Internet, where I am at the moment in France is not brilliant. So that can be quite a frustrating process. so you really want to use printers who give you that kind of feedback. So they're checking to make sure that the resolution of the image is good enough to print. And certainly, Creative Hub give you recommendations on file size, the actual what will amount to dpi, or pixels, PPI for pixels per inch, which is the digital part of it. But you need to have a good enough resolution to provide a good print file.
• 20:31
  > Graham>So that's something to look out for. and again you might be able to sell them locally if there's local gallery or maybe there might even be a market depending on what you want to make from them. I've seen people do that, print their work and then go down to a local market every Saturday or whatever it is and sell their work. So you can use this as a way of creating some sort of an income. I'm not really focused on that. That's not what this series is about. But there are certainly some ideas there. another thing is so number five would be composite competitions and exhibitions.
• 21:03
  > Graham>So exhibitions have already mentioned some point, but there are lots of competitions around and they're always looking for images to be submitted.
• 21:12
  > Graham>So again I've mentioned competitions from the perspective of what you do in post processing. So they will definitely have strong guidelines, about post processing. And if you don't meet meet them, you're likely to have your work rejected. But again, they can be a bit of fun. If you're into that, you might win something. Some of the prizes are pretty good. You'll get your work out there.
• 21:34
  > Graham>So, again I would treat it as a bit of fun.
• 21:36
  > Graham>honestly, I'm not a big one for competitions mostly because I forget to do them. It's the honest truth. But, there you go. So, maybe it'd be more fun if you did it locally as well. There could be local exhibitions which is just nice to do and it's a way of engaging with other, other photographers. The sixth option is education and conservation uses. So this is where you can use your work for conservation. And this is where I use my work. I use or some of it at least it goes to projects I' work with. I always give them access to certain files, certain images that they can use them in their own promotional work. And this is really important as well for telling the story of what's going on. So if you're doing a regular tourist safari trip, look, you might be able to use your work that way. But definitely, if you're volunteering, which is something I recommend for all sorts of reasons. I won't go into them here, but I do recommend that you look at volunteer programs and then the photographs that you produce while you're there. Volunteering can be the kind of final thing you give them to help them in their work. And most of these programs are really good. They're very, very focused on conservation, on dealing with the root causes of threats to animals and how we deal with that. So definitely a good thing to support if you can. And the final option is stock, photography.
• 23:04
  > Graham>So that is something I've done for a while. There are various people like Shutterstock for example, Getty, Adobe stock, there's lots of them. And if you're using stock, again they will have very strict rules, excuse me, about the images that can be submitted. So that will relate to visible logos, certain buildings, believe it or not, you need to have a model release form for effectively or permission to use that building, photos of that building commercially. So the Sydney Opera House is one, I think the Eiffel Tower is another. There are quite a few of them. So you need to check if you're in that kind of work. Obviously for nature and wildlife it's a lot simpler because you know there generally aren't logos around and you're out in the bush somewhere. if you are going to shoot stock, it's always good not to get too close with your crops, simply because if you've pulled out a bit from your subject, it gives a picture editor room to re crop that image to suit their spread, their magazine or however they're using it and they may even want to use it as a title photo. So if there's an image, so your subject might be in the image but if there's a clear area and if you're using rule of thirds you'll tend to get that anyway. But it gives them space to put text or a heading. So there are some little tricks to stop photography. so it's worth considering, it's worth considering as a way of getting more from your, from your photography.
• 24:33
  > Graham>So just, I guess just to recap, so the things I've spoken about here are social media, your own website or having a portfolio using books, magazines, whether it's something you produce yourself or submitting work to a magazine using doing large prints as home decor, essentially a, wall art, looking at composition, competitions and exhibitions where you can get your work out There, education and conservational uses. So people need images to teach other people about wildlife and then stop. Photography is, the final one. So just in closing, first, of all, thank you. If you've listened all the way through this series, I, hope you found it interesting and I hope you found it useful. It's something I tried as new idea. I get a lot of interest in, particularly in the wildlife photography, podcast. So I thought I would do a deep dive and just try that out. please remember to like and subscribe and please give me a comment. Any feedback is really welcome because a lot of the time it's me sat here on my own talking to a microphone and hoping that, I'm not just talking randomly. What I'm saying is actually helpful and making sense. As I say, any ideas you have, please let me know. I really want this, podcast to be beneficial to people and to help you in your photography. there are other things I run.
• 26:01
  > Graham>Please have a look at the workshops. Some of them are simple challenges. There are the, ebook PDFs that you can download. I've got online courses and obviously prints that you can buy as well. So, please, if there's anything that you would like me to do that I'm not, please let me know. And on that note, I'm going to say goodbye. That is the end of this miniseries and I will speak to you again in the next regular podcast. So bye for now.
• 26:30
  > Graham>Well, I hope you enjoyed that. Now, I just want to say thank you for tuning in and joining me in, the Wildlife and Adventure Photography podcast. If you have enjoyed today's episode, please give me a.
• 26:43
  > Graham>Like a subscribe, maybe tell your friends, and by all means leave a comment. And if there is a subject you would like me to cover in the future, please let me know and I'll, be very happy to do my best. So thanks again for joining, me and I look forward to seeing you again next podcast. Bye for now.