Learn: Top 10 Tips for Professional Wildlife Photography

Ready to take your wildlife photography to the next level? If you feel like you’ve grasped the basics and are ready for your work to reach new heights, read these tips from award-winning wildlife photographer  Richard Peters. This advice should help you on your journey from beginner to expert wildlife photography.

You’ve made your choice on setup, whether that be a DSLR or mirrorless, your kitbag is full of essentials, including tripods and zoom lenses, and you have all the settings, including shooting in continuous shooting, semi-auto mode and autofocus. 

Read on to learn more about how to understand lighting, especially in low-light situations, how the rule of thirds can help create your perfect image, and a whole lot more. Over to you, Richard.  

1. Understand lighting

The single most important thing that is going to make your photo stand out is not the subject, what it is doing, or the composition. They all help, of course. It is the light, and the way you choose to capture it, that is the mindset to switch to. 

All else being equal, an image of your subject that is poorly exposed with something other than the subject being emphasised by what little light there is, will not capture anyone's imagination. 

Learn to understand what types of photos can be captured in what type of light. This will help you save time trying to capture images that simply aren’t possible in the light you are presented with. 

If you shoot in low light, don’t be afraid of using a higher ISO. You’re better off with a sharp shot that’s a little noisy. You can potentially fix that in post, but not so much softness due to too slow a shutter speed. 

If you don’t want to shoot high ISO in low light, opt for slow panning instead. Dappled light? Wait for a pocket of light to bathe the subject's face and eye, then press the shutter. Beautiful side-light? Use it to emphasise the contours and textures on the animal's fur or feathers. Successful photography isn’t about capturing the subject, it’s about capturing the light.

2. Don’t get hung up on exotic subjects

A huge misconception about wildlife photography is that the more exotic and exciting subjects make for more memorable images. This simply isn’t true. In fact, I often argue the case when I give presentations and talks that the more common the subject, the more memorable the photo. To overcome this you have to disconnect the experience of capturing the photo from the photo itself. 

Going on a safari to see lions is far more exciting than sitting in the local park photographing pigeons. But that experience does not directly correlate to the quality of the image you can capture. Get a good shot of something that most people overlook, and you will have an image that is hard to forget. A bonus of this way of thinking is it means you can concentrate your efforts closer to home.

3. Photograph the same subject over and over

Regardless of what you like to photograph, the more time you spend doing so, the better your photos become. This is an often overlooked photography technique, as it can be perceived as being boring. 

Whilst it’s nice to travel all over the world, it does make it a harder and slower process to spend repeated time with your subjects. Regardless—be it something on the other side of the world or close to home—the more time you spend with the same subjects, the more chance of seeing it do something different. And the more chance you’ll notice patterns in behaviour or catch that rarely seen perfect lighting condition in just the right spot. 

The more time you spend with your subjects, the fewer photos you’ll take. But the better those photos will become, as you hone in your eye and start looking for different takes to the ones you’ve captured before. 

Once the safe shots are in the bag, you also find that the more you photograph something, the more risks you take in terms of experimenting with different photographic techniques, angles and camera settings. Set yourself a challenge of picking a subject you see frequently and seeing how many varieties of images you can capture of it over the next year.

4. Learn from your mistakes

There will always be a shot you miss. Always. But that’s okay. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. That’s something that took me quite a long time to understand. Before I did, I would often get frustrated or annoyed with myself if I missed a shot or if the conditions were not conducive to a good image. 

Don’t see the failures as failures, see them as learning opportunities. Think back to the most recent time you kicked yourself for missing a shot. Was it because you didn’t pre-empt the settings needed, was it because you got distracted from the shot you wanted and were photographing something else to pass the time? Whatever the reason, there is almost always something to be learned or a lesson to be reminded of. 

It’s the times it goes wrong that help you learn and get better. You need to fail in order to succeed.

5. Don’t chase camera settings

I often find myself in situations where I recognise there is a shot I want to try and capture but it requires some persistence to get it right. 

A good example was in trying to capture this puffin in flight, with a slow shutter speed and backlight. The conditions were perfect, in one specific spot where the background was dark enough to let the backlight stand out. I was surrounded by puffins on the ground and flying past in other directions, all bathed in beautiful light. But I ignored all other opportunities, set my focus mode and exposure for that one area where the backlight was best, and spent half an hour trying to get that one shot. 

Don’t let yourself get distracted when you recognise the potential for an image. If you do, you might end up changing settings back and forth trying to take less interesting images whilst you wait for the good one. And in doing that, there’s a higher chance of missing that exceptional shot when the moment happens. 

Sometimes the best results come from being preemptive rather than reactive to the situation before you. When you recognise the shot, set your shutter speed, set your aperture for your required depth of field and then wait for the magic to happen.

6. Critique yourself

I’m often asked how to get better at taking photos. Or how to even know when you’ve taken a good photo and why one stands out above another. The honest and short answer is, it takes time. A lot of time. 

There are generally no shortcuts. Unless you are exceptionally gifted, we all go through a learning curve. I find a really useful path to improvement lies in critiquing your own photos. And the best way to do that is to set yourself the following challenge. 

The next time you photograph a subject for the day or go away on a photographic trip, come home and do the following: 

For a day photographing a single subject, look for the top three images of the day. For a week or more away, look for the top ten. Or for the year as a whole, look for the top twelve. That might sound difficult, but they are in there. 

The way to do it is to look through all your images and compare them to one another. Have a sequence of 30 images that all look similar? Start by deleting all the ones where the composition is off. Then compare the sharpness in the well-composed shots, and remove the ones that are miss-focused. Then the ones where there’s no catchlight in the eye or the ones with distracting background elements. 

When you start treating your images as a ‘spot the difference’, you’ll slowly pick up on these subtle differences. Over time, you’ll get very quick at noticing small flaws—meaning the flawless images stand out. And once you start noticing it in the photos you’ve taken, you’ll start noticing them before you even take the photos in future. I like to say you end up shooting less but keeping more.

7. Think about the bigger picture

Going in for the tight crop and filling the frame with the subject is all too easy to do. And it’s often because when you first get a camera or lens that allows you to do so, you can suddenly see subjects up close and personal. 

In the right conditions, portraits and frame-filling subjects can look great. However, opting to get the subject smaller in the frame and showing some context to the scene is often a much more powerful way to capture the viewer's attention. 

The trick to this type of image is ensuring the surrounding landscape is equally as photogenic and composed well. This can make these types of shots much harder to pull off but very rewarding when you do. 

Depending on the subject's distance, these types of shots can be taken with a telephoto lens, compressing the landscape around the subject. Or with a wide lens, which will give an immersive and intimate feel to the subject and immediate surroundings. 

This is also where full frame vs cropped sensors can make a difference. Full frame offering easier wider views and cropped sensors help to get distant subjects larger in the frame.

8. Learn the full power of your autofocus

From a technical perspective, once you grasp the basics of aperture, shutter and ISO, there’s one thing you can do to improve your chance of getting the shot. Learn how to get the best out of your autofocus system. 

Most mirrorless systems offer animal eye focusing, but this isn’t foolproof. It’s key to knowing when to turn that off, or—if you don’t have it to start with—knowing which autofocus mode to pick and why. 

One of the most powerful settings to look for when buying a camera is the ability to delay how quickly the focusing system tracks an object moving quickly. With Nikon, that is called ‘Focus Tracking with Lock On’. Knowing why and when to introduce a delay could often be the key to getting the shot or not. 

Imagine your subject is 20 feet away. But 10 feet away—between you and the subject—is some tall grass blowing in the wind. You focus on the subject, but the camera keeps jumping back to the grass as it blows across the focus point. 

By setting a delay on the focus system, it could be just enough for the grass to essentially become invisible to the camera. Or a bird in flight coming towards you at speed, if you have a delay set, you’re making it harder for the camera to keep up as the delay reduces the camera’s ability to quickly refocus to varying distances.

9. Perfect your composition with the rule of thirds

There is a lot that can be said for the rule of thirds, it’s an important compositional tool to get well-balanced images. Ensuring important parts of the frame fall across these key areas can be the difference between a visually pleasing frame and one that feels off balance. 

Most cameras have the ability to turn grids on in the viewfinder, so it’s worth seeing if your model does. Switching this feature on can help you pre-visualise the composition before you take the shot. 

Try to avoid the temptation to crop after the fact. Where possible, shoot full frame. Get the composition right in the camera. Relying on a crop later could result in either a smaller, lower-quality final image or the inadvertent need to crop out something important in the frame to balance the image.

10. Don’t compare yourself to other photographers

Compare yourself to other people is a huge mistake to make. Everyone is on their own journey. You're going to be better than someone and someone is going to be better than you. Comparison is a slippery slope. 

Just go at your own pace—with time, you'll get better and you'll progress. Social media and the race for followers have put unnecessary pressure on the expectation for instant success and results. 

Most importantly, take photos first and foremost for your own enjoyment and to please and push your own boundaries. The moment you start taking photos to gain other approval, appear more successful than someone else or beat an algorithm, you’re allowing pressure in and slowly but surely enjoyment in the process fades away. 

Photograph wildlife for personal pleasure—anything else is a bonus.

Conclusion

Thanks, Richard. While wildlife photography will always be a favourite for photographers from beginners all the way through to experts and professionals, styles and expectations change all the time. No matter what stage you are at, you shouldn’t feel pressured to keep up with the best in the field.

Now you are comfortable with the basics, a huge part of taking your work to the next level is learning how to critique your work. Set yourself Richard’s challenge of narrowing down your work after your next shoot, and your work will go from strength to strength. 

Looking for more wildlife content?

This article is part of the MPB Guide to Wildlife Photography and Videography, our comprehensive look at how to create wildlife imagery, with camera recommendations, advice and interviews with experts.