Top Tips for Budding Wildlife Photographers

Starting out in the world of photography can be a daunting prospect, and typically wildlife photographers are solitary creatures, spending most of their time alone behind the camera. Watching and waiting for that perfect wildlife moment. 

As a beginner looking to try out wildlife photography, it can be hard to know where to turn and how best to develop your skillsets from the start.

In this quick tutorial I hope to give you the confidence to conquer and achieve your dream of being a wildlife photographer by looking at the main points that will help you to understand this sometimes tricky medium!

1) Researching your subject…

This may seem daft to start here, after all, all you want to do is pick up that camera and get snapping! But getting to know your subject before venturing out into the field can prove really beneficial. It is something that every photographer will recommend but it is the most overlooked wildlife photography tip.

Going into a situation blindly trying to find, predict, and capture an animal on camera is more than likely going to end in a fruitless trip if you know nothing about the species. Plenty can be learned in the field just by simply watching an animal, but I would highly recommend doing some reading online about the animals behaviour, habitat, and the best locations to spot them.

2) Getting that image sharp first time…

Understanding all of the elements that make up the sharpness of an image will go a long way to crisping up your images. Although this makes up a huge part of whether an image is pin sharp - it is just not down to whether you focussed the image correctly or not. There are plenty of factors that contribute to what actually makes a photograph sharp.

Below are just some of the factors that may be causing you problems with your images:

• Quality of the glass in your lens
• Diffraction (using too small an aperture – a.k.a high f-number)
• Shutter speed is too slow
• Wrong focus mode

Although the infographic below is for landscape photography, these still apply! This was something that really helped me when first starting out in wildlife photography, so I hope this helps you too.

3) Dealing with low light situations…

The majority of wild animals are more likely to be active at dawn and dusk. Of course, these are times during the day when less light is available, which means it can be challenging to keep your shutter speed high enough to eliminate motion blur (or even camera shake) from your shots. To make things even tricker, animals tend not to stand out in the open, so you’ll probably find yourself shooting into shade, or under the cover of trees, which means there’s even less light available to you.

This was another big hurdle that I myself had to overcome when first starting out as a wildlife photographer. After waiting hours for the opportune moment, only to find that they are ruined by motion blur because the shutter speed was 1/20th second, can be an incredibly frustrating lesson to learn.

The ISO speed will become your best friend in these situations, and you will probably find yourself constantly adjusting it as the light gradually gets lower. The higher the ISO value, the more sensitive the camera sensor becomes to light. This may sound great and think it solves all your problems, HOWEVER this will introduce more digital noise into your photographs. 

Different cameras have different capabilities when it comes to ISO speeds, so where some may cope very well with an ISO of say 1600, others will really show significant amounts of noise. Unfortunately, it tends to be the more expensive cameras that will show less digital noise, but do experiment with your own camera to learn its limitations.

If you have limitations on ISO speed, then shutter speed will be the next thing to try. Shooting at a shutter speed of 1 over the focal length of your lens would be ideal*, but conditions don’t always lend themselves to this, which means slowing things down even more.

*Shooting at a shutter speed of 1 over the focal length -  shooting at 400mm would mean you’d want a shutter speed of at least 1/400th to avoid camera shake*

A way around this would be to use a tripod, this way you could still shoot at 1/30th second but maintain stability through the tripod. If the animal is standing still, hold down the shutter and shoot 10 or more frames - at least one of those frames would be sharp. But as ever this all becomes about timing and catching that perfect moment.

4) Zooming in isn’t a priority…

Not being able to get close enough is one of the beginner’s biggest frustrations, BUT this isn’t something that you need to do every time! Filling the frame is great because you can capture all the small details that usually go unnoticed, however if you can’t get as close as you would like to - make the best of a bad situation and incorporate it’s environment. 

Keeping the animal small in the frame achieves a much more minimalist shot, and who knows you may love this angle on wildlife photography?!  

In Conclusion…

Everyday provides something new to be learnt. So whether you are completely new to the wildlife photography game, or have been capturing animals for the past 20 or so years, there is always something there to improve on. Wildlife photography requires a lot of time and dedication, but if you have the patience then you will succeed!