How to Personalise Your Photos
She’s got the look…
"Tiger, tiger, burning bright…"
Wildlife photographers sometimes talk about how flattered they are when someone tells them, “I knew immediately it was one of your photos.” I’m not sure how true that is (!), but it raises a few questions. Is it important to have a certain ‘look’? What should it be? How can you achieve it? Let’s discuss all those questions—and more!
Is it Important to Have a ‘Look’?
Eye of the Rhino
When I was at secondary school, I used to study Art with a boy called Huon Wardle. He was a very gifted artist with a very distinctive style, so you really could tell which paintings were his. Since I took up wildlife photography in 2013, only one person has said something similar about my work—but I’m not sure if it’s a compliment or not!
Perhaps we should define our terms. There are many ways of developing a ‘look’, including your typical subject matter, background, lighting, camera settings and post-processing. Each one contributes to what viewers can expect from your typical photo, and certain wildlife photographers have developed a worldwide following out of their particular approach.
Federico Veronesi is famous for his black-and-white portraits of African elephants, Joel Sartore for his clean, monochrome backgrounds and David Yarrow for his juxtaposition of wildlife and supermodels! I certainly wouldn’t put myself in that category (yet!), but I do think about finding my own niche. Should it be ‘wildlife photography’ or ‘African wildlife photography’ or ‘predators and prey’ or some combination of my typical camera settings and individual style?
What Should it be?
Eddie the Penguin
There are many ways to develop your own style. Let’s have a look at a few of the obvious ones.
Subject Matter
Cheetahs Never Win
If you just call yourself a ‘photographer’, you probably won’t get very far in life. You need to specialise. But how narrow should your niche be? There are a few common genres based on subject matter, such as portrait, landscape, architecture, sports, street and, of course, wildlife, but is that enough? Do you need to narrow it down further to ‘African wildlife’ or ‘predators’ or ‘birds’?
I’ve been on around three dozen photography trips, and two-thirds of those have been Africa safaris, so that’s certainly one of my specialisms—but it’s not the only one. I’ve set foot on all seven continents and visited a total of 51 countries, so I’m not sure it’s that easy to pigeonhole me!
In general, I love photographing the predators, and that usually means the big cats. When I’m in Africa, I focus on lions, leopards and cheetahs, but I’ve also photographed jaguars in Brazil, tigers in India and pumas in Chile. However, there are plenty of times when there aren’t any predators around, so I’m happy to shoot prey animals, such as the other Big Five animals (elephants and Cape buffaloes) and all the many iconic animal species found in Africa, including the zebra and giraffe.
I even photograph birds. When people ask me, I often say, “Yes—as long as there aren’t any animals around!” However, that’s just a joke. More than a quarter of my Top 100 images of all time are of birds, and I love shooting them as they take off—especially now that I have a Nikon Z8 with Pre-Release Capture!
In terms of individual countries, I’ve been to most of the ‘usual’ safari destinations in sub-Saharan Africa, such as Kenya, Tanzania, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. However, I’ve recently started to branch out by visiting Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. There are a few hidden gems out there, so I didn’t want to miss out!
Anyway, that’s a quick guide to what I like to photograph and where I like to go, but what about you? There’s no right or wrong answer to this. It just depends on your personality and interests. Personally, there’s nothing more exciting than a cheetah chasing an antelope at 70 mph or a brown bear catching a salmon in mid-air, but that’s just me. The most important thing is to go where your passion leads you.
Backgrounds
"Who turned out the lights?"
I once met Mark Carwardine on a cruise to Svalbard, and he published a video a few years later dividing a photograph into three key elements: the subject, the light and the background. In a way, the background is the easiest to control but the most commonly ignored!
As I say, some photographers like Joel Sartore are best known for their backgrounds, and they are an important element in wildlife photography. If you tend to shoot tight portraits of animals or birds, then they’re obviously less of a priority, but it’s still vital to avoid unnecessary distractions, such as leaves, branches or very bright or dark areas.
I don’t do any studio photography, so it’s impossible for me to control my backgrounds completely, but I spend most of my time in wilderness areas, so I’ll almost always have grass, trees, water and mountains in there somewhere—or snow and ice!
However, there are a few ways to personalise your backgrounds (and foregrounds). One is to use a shallow depth of field to make distant or near objects dissolve in a creamy blur known as ‘bokeh’. This is a common technique in wildlife photography, and you can do it in several different ways.
To reduce your depth of field, you can use a longer lens or a wider aperture or just move closer to your subject. In addition, you can adopt a lower position. This doesn’t change the depth of field, but shooting at eye level generally makes it easier to ‘push back’ the nearest background objects—sometimes to infinity!
Another approach is to take ‘environmental portraits’. There’s no strict definition, but the general idea is to keep your subject quite small in the frame to emphasise its surroundings. I tend to prefer close-ups and full-frame shots of individual animals and birds, but environmental portraits are becoming more ‘fashionable’ these days, so I’d like to do more of them in future.
Finally, you can deprioritise the background by making it black or white. This isn’t as easy to do in the wild as it is in the studio (!), but it is possible, and it can provide dramatic contrast. If you want a low-key shot, you need to find a subject in good light with shadows in the background. You can then underexpose by a few stops. If you prefer a high-key version, it helps to shoot on an overcast day and overexpose so that the sky is close to white to begin with. Either way, it pays to get as much as possible right in camera before finishing the job in an editing program like Lightroom or Photoshop.
Lighting
Red Run
People often prefer warmer colours in wildlife photography, so it’s a good idea to make the most of the rich, soft light during the Golden Hour, either just after dawn or just before sunset. In fact, there are some photographers who even boast about not going out during the rest of the day, when the light is usually at its harshest and can create ugly shadows.
If you like the warmth of the Golden Hour, it would be easy to create a personal look or style by restricting your portfolio to shots taken during that time. Of course, there is a downside, which is that you’ll effectively have to give up shooting during the rest of the day! That’s all very well in theory, but I’ve had some of my most extraordinary sightings in ‘bad’ light—including four lions taking down a Cape buffalo!
Another problem is the operating hours of national parks, especially in Africa. They tend to open at dawn and shut at dusk, so it’s hard to spend much time during the Golden Hour—especially if you need to drive a long way to reach your chosen location.
Anyway, it’s an option to consider, and the results can be spectacular!
Camera Settings
"Ah, grasshopper..."
Do you have a ‘go-to’ collection of camera settings? Do you like to stay in your comfort zone when it comes to your shutter speed, aperture or focal length? There’s nothing wrong with that—in fact, I do it myself. I usually shoot wide open at 1/1000 of a second in manual with auto ISO using my Nikon Z8 and 600mm lens.
That’s all very well, but it does mean that my pictures tend to look very similar. Gerry van der Walt thinks this is a bad thing and talks about the ‘rut of competence’, in which you end up as a decent photographer but one with limited range and creativity.
However, you can look at it positively and think of your camera settings as part of your individual style. A wide aperture leads to creamy bokeh, a fast shutter speed leads to sharp action shots and a 600mm lens gives you great reach and subject separation. Those are all good things, so don’t be afraid to use the same camera settings and equipment over and over again.
You’ll have to experiment to find out what works, of course, but the whole point of this article is to help you create a recognisable personal style. That means you have to settle on a default approach that’ll work in most circumstances.
Post-processing
Stealth
This is where you can absolutely fill your boots! You can saturate your colours or go for a desaturated look or even black-and-white. There’s an infinite number of different ways of editing your images, so it’s easy to come up with a distinctive look. You just have to decide what’s right for you and be disciplined enough to cast aside shots that don’t fit the mould. If you really want your photos to be recognisable, then you’re going to have to be able to say no!
I use Lightroom and very occasionally Photoshop for post-processing, and I’ve set up a few presets that help me save time in my editing workflow and also achieve some sort of consistency across all my photos. I won’t say they all look the same (they don’t!), but I almost always use Auto tone as a starting point before playing around with masking and the basic panel for global adjustments. In addition, I almost always apply the same ‘finishing touches’ using different Lightroom panels:
Basic: Correct white balance (not auto!)—unless I’m using Shade to warm up sunrise and sunset shots
Tone curve: -5 for Highlights and +5 for Shadows (to avoid clipped whites or crushed blacks)
Detail: Denoise (for shots taken at 1000+ ISO), Sharpening Amount = 0 (as it’s not really ‘sharpening’ in Lightroom but contrast!)
Lens Corrections: Remove Chromatic Aberration and Enable Profile Corrections
Effects: Post-Crop Vignetting Style of Highlight Priority with Amount of -12 (so that the vignette is barely noticeable)
Calibration: Blue Primary Saturation of +50 (to make the colours ‘pop’!)
This is my default approach, but I wouldn’t say it gives my photos a definable look. I simply try to make them realistic but not naturalistic—and there’s a crucial difference! A wildlife image that’s realistic is believable—no matter how much you’ve worked on it! A wildlife image that’s naturalistic is more of a record shot—a picture that simply records what your subject happened to be doing at the time.
The problem with naturalism is that animals and birds spend most of their time doing very little. I always say that wildlife photography is a bit like being in the army: 99% boredom and 1% excitement! You can’t expect people to get excited by pictures of day-to-day activities such as grazing, drinking, preening or sleeping.
You need to select the moments when the proverbial hits the fan and a cheetah takes down an impala or an elephant gives itself a dust bath. Those are the moments people want to see—even though they’re not remotely representative of what happens most of the time…!
The same goes for your post-processing. Yes, you want your shots to look realistic, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t warm them up or play around with all the editing tools at your disposal. Raw files just don’t look very good straight out of the camera, so you have to do a little bit of work just to make them ‘pop’.
I should perhaps divide these changes into two categories. The first are those that leave total control with the photographer, including all the sliders in the Lightroom Basic panel, such as Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks. All you're doing is making a kind of quantitative change. All the values are just bits and bytes anyway, so you’re simply bumping a few up and knocking a few down. Most people wouldn’t see anything wrong with that.
The second category includes settings that give control to the editing program—often with the use of AI. Opinions differ on these features. Some photographers, such as Paul Goldstein, are religious about refusing to add anything to or take away anything from their images, and most reputable wildlife photography contests adopt similar rules. They don’t even allow you to use the Lightroom Remove tool using generative AI, let alone any of the many websites that let you create digital art by means of a text prompt!
My view is that photographers are artists, not journalists, so it’s fine to use AI to remove distractions. To me, that’s grunt work that just speeds up my workflow and improves the final product. So what if there was a fly on the lion’s nose in real life? It looks better without it!
One man’s meat is another man’s poison, so I’m not trying to persuade you that my approach is the right one. All I mean to say is that there’s a huge range of opportunities to personalise and tailor your images so that they reflect and represent your view of the world. If that means ‘tweaking’ reality to fit your vision, you should feel free to go with your instincts.
Verdict
Bear Gills
Almost all wildlife photographers will end up having a personal look when it comes to their images, but the question is how far that should go. Are we just talking about basic features, such as the subject matter or geography, or are we talking about a more single-minded approach that only lets you shoot with a certain type of background, at a certain time of day or with certain camera settings, backed up by a fixed set of edits?
The answer is up to you, but I hope this article has encouraged you to think about the major questions. How important do you think it is to develop an individual style? What should yours be? How are you going to go about achieving it?
Good luck…!
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