Dare to be different…!

Rockhopper penguin looking at camera from nest

When you become a wildlife photographer, people give you lots of instructions about how to take pictures. Here are a few of the most common ones:

“You should always shoot at eye-level.”
“You should always shoot wide open.”
“You should always shoot in manual with auto ISO.”
“You should always use a long lens over 400mm.”
“You should always use image stabilisation.”
“You should always use a high shutter speed of 1/1000 of a second or more.”
“You should always shoot in burst mode.”
“You should always use back button focus.”
“You should always use the rule of thirds to place your horizon.”

These are all good starting points, and I’m sure there are plenty more. However, the rules don’t always apply!

There are plenty of occasions when the shot you’re looking for won’t be possible (or as good) with your standard settings and your default approach. Here are a few examples.

Slow Pan

This is my favourite way to break with convention. Normally, photographers shoot wildlife action shots with a high shutter speed in manual mode (or possibly in aperture priority) with auto ISO.

However, the slow pan is a good way to inject more energy and excitement into your shots. It’s hard to get right, and your hit rate will start off very low, but, done well, you should get a sharp subject with both the background and the animal’s legs (or the bird’s wings) nicely blurred.

To do that, you have to abandon your usual settings for exposure mode, shutter speed and ISO. This is hard to do on the fly, so it’s best to set up a custom preset that you can quickly dial in.

I have a pair of Sony ⍺1 cameras that are easy to customise, and I’ve included all my custom slow pan settings in preset 3 on both main dials:

Shutter priority mode
50 ISO (the lowest extended setting, which isn’t available in auto ISO)
Slow shutter speed (eg 1/15 of a second)

Action often happens in the blink of an eye and without any notice, so it pays to be able to switch settings as quickly as possible. Otherwise, you’ll miss the shot. Most of the time, you’ll use your portrait settings, but having a custom preset can save valuable time.

I’ve even had my cameras customised to remove the lock button on the main dials. That means I can now control the main dial with my right thumb (as well as the shutter speed dial and the exposure compensation dials) without taking my eye away from the viewfinder.

I spend a lot of time in Africa, and one of the additional challenges with the slow pan over there is the brightness of the light. Even at 50 ISO, it’s easy to max out your aperture at f/22 or so.

If that happens, you have a few possible solutions:

Shoot earlier or later in the day (when light levels are lower).
Shoot in overcast conditions.
Increase your shutter speed.
Change lenses.

There’s no ideal solution, so you have to trade off the pros and cons of each, depending on the situation.

Groups of Animals

Most wildlife photographers shoot wide open most of the time, and there are very good reasons for that:

You create a shallow depth of field to isolate your subject.
You improve your ability to shoot in low light.
You improve focus acquisition.
You reduce the ISO to avoid noise.

However, there are certain situations when you do actually want a decent depth of field. The most common example is when you have a group of animals. The chances are that they won’t all be at exactly the same distance, so if you want them all to be (acceptably) sharp, you’ll have to use a narrow aperture, such as f/8 or even f/16.

Sharpness is one of the visual qualities that you can’t really add in post, so you need to get your settings right in camera. In my experience, you always need a narrower aperture than you think you do. You can see this for yourself if you use a smartphone app such as SetMyCamera to check the depth of field at each f-stop.

Depth of field declines dramatically with focal length, and as wildlife photography usually involves long lenses, your subjects will only be acceptably sharp if they’re within a few inches of one another.

For example, if you have a 600mm f/4 lens like me, your depth of field at a subject distance of 60 feet is only 8.5”! That’s not a lot…

Equally, it won’t do to stop down slightly to f/5.6 or f/8. Your depth of field will only increase to 12” or 16.9”—which probably won’t be enough for a pride of lions, say.

If you need as much depth of field as possible, your best bet is to dial in f/16. (If you go much beyond that, you start to lose sharpness due to diffraction.) Even then, though, you’ll only get 33.8”, which is less than 3 feet.

Long Exposures

Every now and then, you might want to take a shot at a long exposure to blur clouds, water or your subject. This is almost impossible to do when shooting handheld, so if you’re on a game drive and can’t use a tripod, your best bet is to rest your camera on a beanbag and use the self-timer in single-shot mode.

Every camera has different controls, so if you don’t know how to do this, you’ll have to check the dials on your camera, look through the menus or just look it up online.

My cameras have a clock-face icon on the top drive mode dial, so all I need to do is turn to that setting. If I need to play around with the delay, I have to go to the Shooting menu under 3: Drive Mode and then Self-timer Type. There, I can choose between 2, 5 and 10 seconds.

I don’t use the self-timer very often, but it’s worth knowing it’s there. I used it most recently when I was on a game drive with Paul Goldstein in the Masai Mara. We saw a hippo wallowing in a river (see above), and there wasn’t much else to do!

Tripod Shots

Photographer shooting the Northern Lights in Arviat, Canada

A tripod is obviously a game-changer, so all your default settings such as image stabilisation go out the window! Again, it’s a luxury I can’t often afford on safari, but there are occasions when it’s essential.

I went to Arviat with Andy Skillen a couple of years ago to see the polar bear migration, but we were far enough north to be able to see the Northern Lights, too! He’d told us in advance what gear we needed, so I had my tripod with me.

The one shown above was taken at 15 seconds, and and without a tripod, it would simply have been impossible.

Point of View

Elephant walking beside Chobe river in Botswana

Taking pictures at eye level is another rule of thumb that works well most of the time, but it depends on what you’re trying to do. The most common advice I give students on my photography workshops is to get down lower. They have a habit of taking pictures from where they stand, but that’s no good if you’re photographing an otter at ground level! Your subject will look small and therefore insignificant, and it’s fairly obvious that the picture was taken by a human being.

The idea of getting down to eye level is to try and enter the animal’s world by sharing the same point of view. With that perspective, viewers will almost feel as though they belong to the same species! That builds a connection and helps generate more emotional impact.

However, there may be occasions when you want to show the size, scale and power of an animal. This works well for elephants, for example. If you can get down far enough, your subject will seem particularly large and impressive from the low angle (see above).

Equally, a high angle looking down on your subject can make it seem small and insignificant—or cute! Cute sells, as they say, so it’s worth experimenting, even if you don’t end up doing it very often. (Not many wildlife photographers want their subjects to look insignificant!)

Focal Length

Wildlife photographers tend to buy very long lenses to bring them closer to their subjects. The extra reach is important, and it gives you the ability to photograph skittish animals from further away or concentrate on close-ups of telling details.

However, there is an alternative. Paul Goldstein often says that he takes his best photographs with his longest and his shortest lenses. For example, lots of guests on his Svalbard trips take pictures of polar bears with their telephoto lenses, but very few switch to wide-angles to show the bears in the context of their bleak, barren, icy environment.

That’s not to say a good wide-angle shot beats a good telephoto shot, but it’s important to experiment with both. Wide-angle lenses exaggerate perspective, and it’s been quite fashionable recently to take wide-angle close-ups with camera traps. The short focal length gives the viewer a real sense of being there, right up close and personal with a potentially dangerous wild animal (see above).

Mirrorless

One of my Sony ⍺1 camera bodies with my 600mm G Master lens

Mirrorless cameras are gradually replacing DSLRs, and that has an impact on how you should use your camera. Ever since I became a professional photographer, I’ve been using back button focus, for instance, but it’s far less important now that I use mirrorless cameras rather than DSLRs.

The idea of back button focus (or BBF) is that you separate the two jobs of focusing and taking pictures, giving them to separate buttons.

If you want to take a picture, you can still do that in the normal way by pressing the shutter button. However, the camera no longer engages the autofocus when you half-press it. Instead, you have to press another button with your right thumb—usually the AF-ON button on the back of the camera body.

There are a couple of advantages to doing it like this:

If you press the back button once, it’s easy to focus and recompose.
Switching to manual focus is easy—and won’t be affected by pressing the shutter to take pictures.
If you keep the back button pressed, the camera continually updates the autofocus with moving subjects—even if you’re taking a burst of shots.

The first advantage only applies to DSLRs. Mirrorless cameras can focus on a subject virtually anywhere in the frame, but DSLRs only have a limited focusing zone. That means you have to use back button focus if you want your subject to be somewhere outside the central area. Otherwise, half-pressing the shutter would activate the autofocus, and you’d end up focusing on the wrong thing!

The second advantage is useful with both DSLRs and mirrorless cameras when you have an obstruction in the foreground that means the AF system struggles to acquire focus. If you didn’t use back button focus, the camera would automatically switch on the AF system every time you pressed the shutter to take a picture. That would be very annoying—unless you flicked the switch on the camera body to change to manual focus.

However, with BBF, you can happily fine-tune the focus using the focus ring on your lens and take as many pictures as you like without changing it. That will only happen if you press the back button.

The third advantage only really applies to DSLRs. Some DSLRs (but not all) have trouble shooting moving subjects using AF-C (or AI Servo). They can focus or take pictures—but not both!

Maintaining focus is easy enough by continuing to half-press the shutter, but what if you actually want to take a picture? If you press the shutter fully down, you’ll take a single picture or a burst, but the camera will then stop focusing. The first frame will be in focus, but not the rest. If you want to take any more pictures, you’ll have to acquire focus all over again!

Mirrorless cameras don’t really have this problem as you can set up eye detection and tracking to work full-time—even if you don’t use BBF. All you need to do is half-press the shutter until you’re ready to take pictures, then fully depress it, then lift off slightly to continue focusing.

Again, this is not the way things always work with every single DSLR and every single mirrorless camera. However, the advantages of BBF are clearly more significant if you’re using a DSLR. I’m sticking with it for the moment—but more out of habit than anything else!

Silhouettes

The rule of thirds is one of the most famous and the most useful rules in photography. It stops you plonking your subject right in the middle of the frame every time and makes the composition a little more interesting and balanced.

However, there are times when it just doesn’t work at all. One of those concerns the positioning of the horizon line. Normally, you should place it a third of the way up the frame if the sky is more interesting than the ground or a third of the way down the frame if the ground is more interesting than the sky.

The problem comes when you’re taking silhouettes. Anything below the horizon will be pitch black, so it’s pointless taking up a third of the frame with a colourless band of nothing! Instead you only need a thin strip of blackness beneath the true subjects of the photo, which are the animal itself and the sky.

Conclusion

It’s one thing being able to change your settings while looking through the viewfinder, but it’s quite another knowing when to change them. Rules of thumb and rules of composition are useful guides, but it’s important to know the exceptions.

If you don’t want to produce cookie-cutter images that all look the same, you need to think about when to accept advice and when to ignore it…!

If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.

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Capture the Moment!

When to Abandon Default Settings