Latest / Wildlife and Adventure Photography / How to deal with three common wildlife photography issues

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How to deal with three common wildlife photography issues · Wildlife and Adventure Photography

• 0:08
  > Graham>Foreign. The most popular podcasts that I seem to have are the ones that talk about photography as it applies to wildlife photography. So what I thought I'd do in this podcast is talk about four aspects that I think are quite common and I think they're where people tend to make the most common mistakes when they are photographing wildlife. So I've definitely spoken about these aspects before, but sometimes it's good to hear about them again.
• 0:45
  > Graham>And I'm also going to talk about them, in the context of a trip I've recently made to Namibia where I was photographing animals in the Etosha, national Park. Now if you don't know it, Etosha is essentially, assault plain if you like. there is vegetation around, but it's a pretty harsh environment and it's in many places sort of very white, with salt. So my initial impression, to be honest in certain locations was, okay, how do I make something of this? Because the kind of photographs I like to take and the I certainly think about when I think of wildlife involve a lot of greenery, so vegetation, trees, that kind of thing. And the animals are, ah, in there somewhere. Or it might be savannah, grassy plains, lots of, places for animals to hide. And that can create its own interest as well as its own challenges when it comes to wildlife photography.
• 1:51
  > Graham>But shooting in a Tosha is different because there isn't that contrast. I think that's the biggest thing. There isn't a great deal of contrast between the animal and the environment they're in.
• 2:06
  > Graham>Despite what I've already said, it's actually quite easy in many ways for the animals to blend in in that environment. And to me there's not so much for the eye to get a hold of. If you think about it, where there's a lot of forest, that's a very interesting environment to me. It's a place where your subject can be hidden partially or completely, pretty much. And you might have just an eye or a part of the animal showing and you can play with that.
• 2:35
  > Graham>And this is the whole point of the first aspect that I'm going to talk about, which is composition. And bad composition is something I've spoken about a lot because I think it's one of the most, definitely one of the most common mistakes that people make. And where bad composition starts is people tend to slap their subject right in the center of the frame. So that's really boring in most cases. not in every case. There are definitely situations, where it's good to have the subject right in the middle of the frame. You can use that in all sorts of ways. However, for most subjects it's nice to have them off centre somewhere. So I've spoken about rule of thirds before. It's one of the common, composition, rules, if you like, that you can use, but it gives you a good place to start. And if you use the rule of thirds, that will immediately create some sort of interest in your photograph. Because what you're then doing is starting to use space and creating empty space or negative space. Some, people call it, I don't like that phrase because to me there's nothing negative about it. It simply create space for something else to happen and that could be filled in by the viewer's imagination. So for, example, if you've got an animal looking to the left and you place them over in the right hand part of the frame, so there's a lot of empty space in front of them, it gives them space to be looking into, if that makes sense. So in that picture they're looking into that space, that's on the left hand side of the frame. And who knows what's happening there. It might be something that's about to happen. Maybe they've seen something. And the suggestion you've made by positioning the animal that way is that whatever they've seen is over on that side of the frame somewhere. So that's just kind of very basic stuff. But, it does allow you to put a bit more interest in the, photograph. There's also lots of other things you can do with composition, which I've spoken about before. And, if you decide to buy one of my courses, I will talk about it a lot more to you. So composition for wildlife. Think of the visual storytellers. So this is another thing that I talk about a lot. But you are telling a story, you're making certain suggestions to the viewer about what's going on for that animal. It might be the environment that they're in. There might be some threat to them. They might be looking for food, they might be looking for water, they might be part of a group, they might be alone. Do you want to, for example, amplify that sense of isolation? Maybe pull out, do quite a wide shot of the animal with a lot of empty space around them and put them in the context of possibly quite a harsh environment and they're on their own. So there's all sorts of things you can do with composition once you get into it. To me, it's a very interesting subject. It's a very interesting thing to play with and it will definitely make your photographs different from people who slap the subject right in the middle.
• 5:43
  > Graham>So that's, I guess, a good starting point for composition. In terms of what I was doing in Namibia, one of the things I was keen to do was to show the kind of environment that the animals live in. So I did quite a few wide shots. one of the things I did use a lot when I was photographing at waterholes was to use the reflection of the water because often there wasn't much else around. It might have been very dusty. You might get, some sort of salty ground that's fairly white, maybe a few rocks, but there wasn't much else. And maybe the odd, really kind of dead looking tree, the sky obviously. But if you've got a reflection there, then that will add another layer to the photograph. So I guess on the composition side, that's one thing to look for, just other things in that environment that you can bring into the shot that will create a level of interest, just bring that shot alive. So I guess that's all I'm going to say on composition for now. it is a subject I could talk about quite a long time. but I won't.
• 6:48
  > Graham>So.
• 6:49
  > Graham>Another one you're likely to find though, and certainly I found in Etosha, was harsh lighting.
• 6:55
  > Graham>So the thing to remember, particularly if you're in a tropical country, is that you, the best times to shoot are really the golden hours. And the golden hours are, ah, the first of all, the hour immediately after sunrise and then the hour immediately before sunset. So basically when the sun is fairly low in the sky, then you've got, it's a softer light. Often it's a more orangey kind of light which can add that hue to whatever you're photographing, which you may or may not like. Some people really like it. For others it's a bit of a distraction. Particularly if you want to get the true color of the animal. That can be a distraction. But certainly the, the time you don't really want to be shooting is middle of the day when the sun is directly overhead. You get these very harsh, very harsh light. It tends to burn out all of the colors. You basically see, a lot of white, a lot of white things in a bright light and maybe some sort of vague shapes in there. But it is quite a hard thing to photograph. And definitely when it comes to photographing animals at that time of day, it's definitely, definitely not ideal. one of the things again I like to try and get is to get down, and I've spoken about this before, often is get down to the eye level of the animal. The problem with that harsh lighting is often the eyes in shadow so you can't make that contact. And as I've said many times, again, the most powerful aspect of portraits, at least in my opinion, I, could be wrong and you're welcome to argue with me. But the most important aspect, portraits to me is making that eye to eye connection with the subject. And obviously there's the old saying that the eyes are the windows to the soul. Whether you go for that or not. I think there's definitely a more powerful connection with the subject when you have that direct eye contact.
• 8:50
  > Graham>M so in harsh lighting that is very difficult to achieve. You're certainly much more likely to get it at golden hour.
• 8:57
  > Graham>So what do you do with photographs you've had to shoot in harsh lighting? Well, the chances are, you're dealing with a level of overexposure or you've got to be very careful with the exposure you're using to try and control the exposure.
• 9:11
  > Graham>Anything that isn't overexposed is likely to be not that well defined anyway. So perhaps one way to use those images is to think about using them in black and white, taking the color out completely and just experimenting with the contrast in the image to see if you can produce something that is a little bit different. Because in some, on some occasions I've found that I really struggle to get the color where I want it to be, where I feel it's right. And again, something I've said before, what I use as a guide when I'm looking at my color saturation and how vibrant I'm making. Everything I try and get. If there's grass in the photograph, I'll try and get grass looking normal. What I think is normal looking grass anyway. And that serves as a reference for the intensity of the colors, the other colors that are ah, in the frame and particularly the colors on the animal itself because it's very easy to get fur looking kind of more intense than it really is. And then the animal starts to look a little bit unreal and it all gets a little bit cartoony. Look, it depends what you're going for. You might like these really vivid shots. Maybe you want something that's a bit more abstract, but if you're looking for something that's perhaps closer to what the animal looks like in reality, then you do need to be very careful with how much saturation you use. So if you have a situation where you've had to shoot in harsh lighting for a start, it's very difficult to get the colors accurate because the camera is really struggling to get an exposure that works for the animal itself. obviously you can choose where you're taking your exposure from by knowing how your camera works and how it measures exposure and what point it uses to measure, the exposure.
• 11:02
  > Graham>But beyond that, it does get a bit tricky. So I would certainly suggest one thing to think about is to make those, photographs black and white. Now I always shoot in color, I always shoot raw, so I never changed that. But this is the beauty of doing post processing in digital photography is that you've got a lot of things you can do once you've acquired the shot and you pop it in the software. And then you can experiment with both composition, which I've spoken about already, and how you're using color to create an image that has impact and might be different to what other people are seeing. And another thing that I definitely spoke about in the last podcast, if you listen to that, don't delete photographs straight away.
• 11:46
  > Graham>often when we shoot them we do a bit of chimping, which is, the phrase used to have a look on the.
• 11:51
  > Graham>Look, at the image on the back of the camera while the animal is still there. Not a good idea because that's generally when things happen. But if you are looking at that picture immediately afterwards or soon afterwards, within a few hours, it's very tempting to just delete it. So I suggest that you don't. I suggest that you keep that image for at least three months and then look at it again. And the reason, as I've said before, is that when we look at the image immediately after we've taken it, we have in our mind the image that we had in our mind, the photograph we were hoping to take.
• 12:24
  > Graham>And if what we've actually got falls short, it's quite natural to feel a bit disappointed. However, if you leave it a few months, you've forgotten what you were, the chances are you've forgotten what you were aiming for in the first place and then you're looking at that image in its own right. Or you may have seen something else that's inspired you, given you another idea about what you can do with that image in post processing. So harsh lighting, that middle of the day lighting, it's not ideal, but it's certainly not a deal Breaker. I would go out and shoot anyway. I do that anyway. And often I can come up with ways of using those images that give me something slightly different. It doesn't float everybody's boat, but, you know, photography won't. It's about creativity. It's subjective. but the important thing is to, I think, experiment, as I spoke about in the last podcast, and try different things.
• 13:21
  > Graham>Okay, so that spoke. So I spoke about composition.
• 13:25
  > Graham>I was talking about harsh lighting. Another one I want to talk about is background. So a lot of people forget about the background. They get so fixated on the animal that they forget what's going on behind. And this isn't just in wildlife photography. I mean any kind of photography, people tend to, get blinkered and just look at the subject and forget to look at what else is in the frame. Which is really one of the things that the, visual storyteller idea is designed to eliminate by getting you to look at the whole frame and evaluate everything that's in there and how does the background support your subject. So that's really relevant in this particular situation because something I noticed in Ethiopia particularly is that for a lot of the animals, they actually blended in really well, which was great for them, in terms of, I guess, not being, not getting eaten by something, but not, so handy for me as a photographer.
• 14:19
  > Graham>So it does mean that you need to look at how you're using the background, depth of field, which is the other thing that I want to talk about, but I might as well bring that in at the same time.
• 14:31
  > Graham>Depth of field is a very powerful tool for controlling what is in focus in the image and what isn't. And if you are in a situation where you've got an animal that blends in very closely to its background, then it's definitely worth experimenting with your aperture. Try a narrow depth of field and it may be a case of just shooting the sequence with different apertures.
• 14:57
  > Graham>just one shot, change aperture, shoot, one shot, change aperture, shoot again. And do that.
• 15:04
  > Graham>Hopefully, out of that you'll get something that, where the depth of field really brings, pulls the animal out of the background. If the background is going out of focus and your subject is sharp, then that's a great way of bringing it out of the, background. So if you're using a large depth of field, you may well find that the animal doesn't particularly stand out. So, one of the most important things I think when you're, photographing anything is to have a clear Subject, you know, people want to. People shouldn't have to ask the question, well, okay, this is fine, but what am I supposed to be looking at that should be absolutely there. That's pretty fundamental.
• 15:49
  > Graham>Again, going back to visual storytelling, you can't really have a story without a subject. So what's the subject and how do you pull that subject out of the background? So I would definitely suggest that depth of field is one way of doing that. Other ways are, to just look at how the scene is lit. If it's an animal that's moving and you've got areas of light and dark, can you capture it? When the animal's face, or at least its eyes are lit by natural, light and everything else is in shadow, that's a, way of pulling the animal out. Or at least the eye. Ah, Again, you know, we tend to look at the eyes. So that's another way of pulling the animal out of the background. It's certainly a challenge. And I guess the overall thing, what I was tending to do in Etosha was I like to do, what in some circles is known as an establishing shot. But it essentially sets the situation that you're in. It sets the background, it sets the environment that the animal is in. But by its nature, most of what is in the frame will be in focus. So it might be less obvious where the subjective is. If you're in a situation where they're well camouflaged, the thing then is to try and pull them out so you might zoom in more. So again, look at how you can optically crop by zooming in. So using your, optical zoom, by physically changing the focal length, use, that to see if by using composition you can get the, subject stand out. Maybe have them have the subject much bigger in the frame.
• 17:30
  > Graham>That would be one way of making it much easier to see what the subject is. and then maybe experiment with depth of field in that situation. But these are definitely, problems that come up when you are working with wildlife. And obviously, as I've said, they happen for good reason. You know, animals have evolved to, not be that visible. It's the whole point of camouflage. So as a photographer, we really have to be looking at all of the tools we have available to get good shots.
• 18:03
  > Graham>So it's not only what we can do with our camera gear. If we've got a nice long zoom lens that's great, we might be able to get in really tight and get some lovely, get some lovely shots or we can use things like I do with my EOS 5Ds. I know I'm shooting a very big image, so that means that I can go to, I tend to use full optical zoom where I can, so 400 mil is generally what I use. But beyond that I can crop in even closer, get even closer by just cropping that large image. And it means I can still retain the detail and the sharpness of the subject, but I can actually get in, probably in effect double my focal length, when I'm shooting an animal some distance away.
• 18:49
  > Graham>And I had this situation with a leopard drinking, at a water hole. And that was a really rare encounter anyway, so I definitely wanted to make the most of that. And I shot everything at 400 miles. But I knew that once I got the shot I could then crop in and get in much, much closer. So the final images that I've been using and that I've shared on, some social media with my Patreon group for sure is these kind of double zoomed in. So there's full optical zoom plus an effective digital zoom by cropping the full image and cropping down to get the detail of the animal. So two things you can use straight away to get close to the animal or create a more interesting photograph. So optical and digital zoom, as I've said, use depth field, think about your composition, maybe, even just change your direction. Are you tending to shoot in landscape mode? So sort of horizontally? what if you spin the camera around and shoot in portrait mode? Look about how you're using the space around your subjects. I was talking about space right at the beginning of this podcast. It's a very important thing to, understand, frankly. Once you start getting used to using space in your composition, you can then create some very atmospheric images because you start to learn how much space, for example, to put in a shot. And again, if you don't know what I'm talking about, just try it out. So, go practice somewhere. Find a subject. It doesn't have to be an animal if you're just practicing, but find a subject where you can make it very large in the frame and then kind of pull out and make it smaller in the frame and then put the space in different places around that subject, maybe to the left, to the right, to the top, to the bottom, and even then re crop those images.
• 20:51
  > Graham>Maybe put your subject right in the corner and look at the difference that that makes to how that image feels. Look at the story and ah, maybe once you finish doing it, maybe leave them for a couple of weeks just again to get that disconnect from doing the more technical thinking about what you're doing and then going across to just looking at the image as an image in its own right. So this is all good practice. It's grist of the mill really because as you start to experiment with those things and if you're not doing that already, I, definitely recommend that you do it starts to give you ideas about how to shoot when it comes to the crunch. When you are photographing wildlife, maybe on your vacation or trip for lifetime, whatever it is, by the time you get there, you definitely need to know your camera and you really need to have a handle on this stuff. If you want to get images that you really love, even if you're going to crop them later, you've got to have an idea of what to shoot in order to get the best results. So key, thing there would obviously be exposure. that's the thing that if I'm going to get anything right, I mean I like to get a sharp image obviously. But exposure is pretty critical as well because you can recover an underexposed or an overexposed photograph. But it depends on what you've got, what software using. But generally I wouldn't say more than a couple of stops either way it starts to get really problematic I think once you go beyond that. So not only that you can pull the image out. I mean that's, I'm not saying you can't do that, but we tend to get are a lot more artifacts coming out that require an awful lot of work to clean up, if you can clean them up.
• 22:37
  > Graham>So that's just another thing to consider when you are doing your photography.
• 22:43
  > Graham>So I guess just to recap. So the things I've spoken about here are again it's to do with things to think about, things you can practice before you go off and do your wildlife photography. So think about your composition. one of the things I use that I've spoken about before is back button focus. And what that means is that when I set my focus, I don't do it on the shutter button. So the way your camera is likely to work, by default is when you push the shutter button halfway down. The autofocus, if you've got that on, will set the focus based on the focal point or points you've got set up. So you need to understand what they are on your camera and you need to understand what you've got. So I use a single autofocus point. I generally stick it in the center of the frame because I'm not going to be shooting my photo against that particular composition. but that is where I set my point. And then I don't use the shutter button to set my autofocus. I actually use one of the buttons on the back of the camera. And I do that by reprogramming that button. So again, depending on the camera you have, not all cameras will allow you to do this. But, if you just have a look, see if you've got a back button, focus or a way of reprogramming which button sets your AF point. Experiment, with that. It does take a bit of practice to get used to. But I have it on both of the camera bodies I normally run with. So, it's now become second nature to me. But I just find that much more useful because once I've set the focal distance, if, this is particularly important if you're in an environment where there's lots of things, typically in front of your subject. And it might be, might be behind as well. But as you're moving the focus, if the subject is relatively small in the frame, or for example, I was photographing ostriches and giraffes and I'm trying to get the focal point on their head. And if I'm a little distance away, that is quite small in the frame initially when I'm just trying to set the focal point. So it's really easy to actually miss the head and shoot either something in the background or something else that's in the way. So it means the focal point is set on the wrong thing. And obviously you're then going to get a subject that's out of focus. So do have a think about that. But do get to know how your camera works on, focus. And the same with the exposure.
• 25:17
  > Graham>Generally that is also set when you press the shutter button halfway down. So you need to again look at how that works in practice on your camera and look at the options you have to set how the camera is setting the exposure. Is it taking the whole frame? Is it taking a part of the frame? Is it taking a particular point and using that point as that's the bit that has to be correctly exposed. Because that's what's going on one way or another, whether you know about it or not. That's what your camera is doing.
• 25:52
  > Graham>All right. So, I kind of went off. I sort of veered off course when I was doing the summary, but hopefully that's useful as well. It's definitely something I've spoken about. and again, it's stuff that I cover in detail in the courses.
• 26:06
  > Graham>So as always, if any of this sounds like suddenly starting to sound like gibberish to you, hopefully it's not the way I'm explaining it, but if it doesn't make any sense, do please learn what those things mean. So knowing, how your autofocus works, knowing how your exposure works, you really need to understand how they work on your camera, even if you only do it once so that you set the camera up so it's correct for how you like to shoot. I rarely change how I set the exposure on my camera and where I set the autofocus because I know how the camera works and I know what works best for me. So it's one of those things I set up once and generally leave alone. it may involve diving into the menus or you might have more of a summary. A quick access menu, which, I do on the canons by pressing the info button. So rather than pressing the menu button, I press the info and there's a summary there. And generally, certainly for the things I'm likely to change more regularly, that's where I go. But, my AF points are certainly in that summary window. So these are things that you will not likely be changing very often. But you do need to get them set up correctly in the first place, and that's why this is important. So if you don't understand them and you don't want to take a course, then do, please Google them, google them for your camera model and see how to set them up.
• 27:36
  > Graham>Usually there's quite a lot of useful stuff on the web anyway. But if the whole thing is sounding very confusing to you, then I do recommend that you just take a course that takes from scratch.
• 27:48
  > Graham>and in that way, yeah, you're going to hit things you already know, which is great. But it also means that you're going to hit other fundamentals that you might not know or you might have misunderstood. And this is maybe where, I know for sure that's where some people have difficulty, when they can't seem to get certain things to happen for them correctly. And it's because they've misunderstood how a certain aspect of the, the camera works or a certain aspect of photography. So it's always good to occasionally just go back to basics and make sure You've got all the bases covered.
• 28:19
  > Graham>Okay, so just to return to the summary. So that composition, we looked at composition and how you can make the most of it. And also what contributes to, getting things like sharp focus, correct exposure, spoken about harsh lighting. So you might not have a choice because, a lot of mammals, for example, tend to hunt at twilight or at night.
• 28:39
  > Graham>And that's how mammals have evolved. So depending on what you're shooting with, it's pretty nigh on impossible to get good photographs at night.
• 28:49
  > Graham>certainly even in the evening sort of twilight time, it can be difficult and you may end up with quite grainy shots. So, to actually see the animal, to get some sort of picture of it, you may well be having to shoot at a time of day that's not ideal. But again, it's a. You know, as wildlife photographers, we have to sort of deal the hand that we're played. So it were. And, so just make the most of it and just have some ideas.
• 29:19
  > Graham>Think, about ways you can use the photographs you're shooting using, what's in front of you and, go from there.
• 29:24
  > Graham>And then the final thing really, was to talk about backgrounds. And first of all, think about them.
• 29:31
  > Graham>Look at them, Think about how they support the subject. What's the story that you're telling? Are you telling the story of where that subject lives?
• 29:41
  > Graham>is there some action going on? You know, it could be that there's a chase going on, a predator chasing down a prey animal. Maybe there are other prey animals in the background. Sometimes it's good to get them there because they'll generally be watching from a distance, what they feel is a safe distance at that point. But it can all add to the story, that you're creating. So, again, being able to pull the subject out of the background, much as you can, is important because otherwise you end up with something like a me too type picture, which is just, you know, a bunch of stuff, and the viewers trying to work out exactly what they're supposed to be looking at because everything's in focus, nothing's particularly standing out as a subject. So that becomes a so what picture. All right, so that, as I say, some m thoughts there. hope you found those useful and, I will speak to you again in the next podcast. So bye for now. 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. 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.