How to Take Environmental Portraits
It’s all about the environment these days…
Miss Saigon
Environmental portraits seem to be quite fashionable these days, but what exactly are they, and how do you create them? Let’s have a look at both of these questions in more detail.
What is an Environmental Portrait?
Tortoise Crossing
What is an environmental portrait? Well, there’s no hard and fast rule, but it’s a photo in which the subject only occupies a small part of the frame. That might mean around 5% as in the case of this giant tortoise (see above), or it might mean something a bit bigger. Either way, the point is to show the animal’s surroundings and thereby tell the viewer something about how it lives.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t show all the usual behaviours that make a good wildlife photo, such as hunting, mating, feeding and drinking. However, it puts a premium on the animal’s habitat—whether that’s forest, desert, mountains, ice floes, jungle, the sea or the savanna.
How?
The good news is that it should be just as easy to take environmental portraits as any other types of wildlife shots. You just need the right equipment, settings and technique.
Equipment
Nikon AF-S 80-400mm f:4.5-5.6G ED VR lens
These days, you’re probably better off with a mirrorless camera than a DSLR for any kind of wildlife photography. However, the most important decision for environmental portraits is your choice of lens. It’s very easy to get locked in to using the longest possible focal length, but that doesn’t work very well for environmental portraits as it makes it much harder to include the surroundings and/or a deep enough depth of field.
Changing the aperture will make very little difference if you’re using a long lens, so that’s a good reason for using a wide-angle or intermediate zoom. You can easily check the numbers using a smartphone app like SetMyCamera. This says that at 600mm and a distance of 20m from your subject, your depth of field will be 26cm at f/4 but still only 1.03m at f/16. That’s not really much good if you want to show the mountains in the distance!
However, if you switched to a 70-200mm lens and zoomed out to 70mm, your depth of field would be 25.5m at f/4 and infinity at f/16! That’s a big difference…
One of the other useful features of apps like that is their ability to calculate the hyperfocal distance. This is the distance to focus on to make sure all objects will remain acceptably sharp all the way to infinity. At 70mm, the hyperfocal distance is 10.3m, so focusing on something that far away means that everything from 5.2m to infinity will be acceptably sharp.
If you tried to do that with a 600mm lens, you’d have to focus on something 752.7m away!
In the days when I had two Nikon DSLRs, I used to go out on game drives with my 800mm lens and my 80-400mm zoom (see above). The ‘Big Dog’ was great for birds, close-ups and distant subjects, but the 80-400mm was perfect for just about anything else—barring wide-angle close-ups of elephants!
I now have a ‘mix and match’ policy with my equipment. That means I have a Nikon Z8 and a 600mm lens with a built-in 1.4x teleconverter, plus a Sony ⍺1 with either a 24-70mm or a 70-200mm zoom. The different lenses are good for different things, but the zooms are obviously more useful for environmental portraits.
If I’m taking a long-distance shot or a close-up with my 600mm lens, I can quickly switch cameras and use my 70-200mm lens to zoom out and take an environmental portrait of a pride of lions on a kopje, say. The focal length range of the 70-200mm is ideal for this kind of thing, and the shorter focal length make it much easier to keep everything in focus. In addition, zoom lenses make it much easier to frame the scene—which is especially important in environmental portraits.
Settings
Eddie the Penguin
I generally shoot in manual with auto ISO, but I sometimes switch to aperture priority if I’m taking silhouette shots at sunrise or sunset. When it comes to the main exposure parameters of aperture, shutter speed and ISO, the main change needed for environmental portraits probably involves the aperture, but let’s take a look at all three.
Aperture
The aperture is usually the camera setting that matters because you’re trying to show your subject’s surroundings. The human eye is naturally drawn to objects that are sharp, so your depth of field needs to be enough to stop the trees, mountains or clouds from becoming blurred. You could even say that it applies to other animals in the frame, such as the group on the left in this photo of Adélie penguins (see above).
You can read more about it in my Depth of Field article, but there are three ways to control what’s sharp and what’s not in your images:
Aperture
Distance from your subject
Focal length
The most powerful methods are actually the distance from your subject and your focal length, but there are times when you just can’t do anything about those in the field, so let’s concentrate for now on the aperture setting.
If you want to keep the surroundings sharp in your photos, you’ll need a narrow aperture. In other words, the higher your f-stop, the higher your depth of field. If you’re using a mirrorless camera, the WYSIWYG electronic viewfinder will show you exactly what’s sharp and what’s blurred, but if you’re using a DSLR, you might have to take a few test shots.
A good example of an environmental portrait where the aperture is critical is a silhouette shot at sunrise or sunset. You probably want both your subject and the background to be sharp, but you also want to keep your ISO as low as possible to reduce noise, so what can you do?
You might try switching to aperture priority. You can then dial in an aperture of f/16 to keep both your subject and the sun and/or clouds sharp and set your ISO manually to the minimum value of 64 (Nikon) or 100 (Sony/Canon) to maximise image quality. You can get away with such a narrow aperture and low ISO because the sky is almost always going to be bright enough—especially if the sun itself is in the frame.
Theoretically, you could increase your f-stop even more. Lenses these days might have a maximum aperture of f/22, f/32 or even f/72 in some cases, and dialling in f/22 is a good way to create ‘sun stars’. However, you start to get noticeable diffraction effects that reduce sharpness beyond that, so I wouldn’t advise it.
Shutter Speed (or Time Value)
Your shutter speed shouldn’t have to change much if you’re taking an environmental portrait rather than filling the frame, but there may be an indirect effect if you zoom out. The shorter focal length means any movement from your subject is effectively ‘damped down’ as it doesn’t take up so much of the frame. That means you shouldn’t have to use quite such a fast shutter speed.
In addition, you might find yourself in a very specific situation that demands a slower shutter speed. For example, you might want to include a waterfall in the background, and that means you’d have to shoot at 1/4 of a second or so to get the ‘creamy’ look you’re after.
ISO
Again, there shouldn’t be a direct effect on your ISO when you start taking environmental portraits, but there probably will be indirect effects. If you use f/16 with auto ISO, say, the ISO value will tend to rise to compensate for the narrower aperture. That’s fine within reason, but it’s worth checking in your viewfinder as you compose the shot—especially if you’re shooting in low light at sunrise or sunset.
Technique
Eland Horizon
Apart from changing a few of your camera settings, nothing much should vary in terms of your technique. You still have to be aware of the changing light, keep an eye on what’s happening in the whole scene (not just what you can see in your viewfinder!) and experiment with portrait and landscape aspect ratios, different focal lengths and different apertures.
Verdict
Rock, Tree, Leopard
Environmental portraits are popular, and they’re a great way to bring something a little bit different to your wildlife photography. I probably don’t use them enough, but I’m starting to realise what I’m missing!
However beautiful a cat might be, it’s not always just about that. Sometimes, it pays to show the animal’s surroundings to fill out the picture. Rocks, trees, grass and mountains might not be that interesting on their own, but put a leopard into the scene, and then you might just create a three-dimensional environmental portrait that wins a photo contest or two…!
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