Wildlife photography skills

Introduction: wildlife photography skills. No matter your professional or amateur position in photography, as long as you are a person who loves nature, in most cases you will not miss any opportunity to shoot wild animals, and you will be willing to share this rare experience with others with your excellent photos. Let's take a look at wildlife photography skills!

But don't go out yet. You know, it is much more difficult to take an attractive photo of wild animals than to just include animals in the photo. If you simply press the shutter on the animals in front of the camera, you will find that what you are shooting is either a disaster or there is no visual impact. You still have a lot to learn before you hit the road. Let's use five unique skills of professional wildlife photographers to help you get started with wildlife photography faster and teach you how to take better photos.

1, read more and learn more

For a person who has just come into contact with wildlife photography, the experience in this field is probably zero, and experience is only an essential tool for photographers. Therefore, as a beginner, we should read more and learn more. First of all, we need to make it clear that there are all kinds of wild animals in the world, and their habits and characteristics may be very different. You can't photograph all animals in the same way. But if you can calm down and take time to observe them, you can grasp their movements and know when to press the shutter in your hand to capture the wonderful moment.

The success or failure of wildlife photography depends on whether you can record special moments, whether it is flying, walking, foraging, or even eye contact and interaction with other animals, it can be the highlight of your photos. Just like making friends. How can you get to know someone without spending enough time? Once you observe and understand the behavior of animals, all that remains is to wait patiently for the wonderful moment to come. We usually think that wildlife photography is an exciting thing, but on the contrary, those wildlife blockbusters are usually created by calm waiting and a lot of experience.

Step 2 use a high-speed shutter

It seems nonsense, but the more obvious it is, the easier it is to be ignored. Accurately predicting the shutter speed is far from being as simple as we thought. I don't know how many photographs with great potential for wildlife photography were destroyed because the shutter speed was lower than the moving speed of animals. In most cases, you can't see the photos when you paste them. It should be noted here that, unlike landscape photography, the principle of wildlife photography is to improve ISO, sacrifice image quality and ensure sufficient shutter speed.

Even if your project stays the same, we can't take it lightly. You never know when they will move, and some animals are even motionless and amazing. Maybe when they move, it's the wonderful moment you've been waiting for. So to be on the safe side, the shutter speed should be at least above1/500 s.

3. Take two cameras

In fact, wildlife photography is not as fun as we thought. Shooting wild animals can be said to be a double test of our patience and physical strength. Except for heavy ones? Gun head? Besides, if your goal is to shoot wonderful moments, you'd better take two cameras to avoid anything you may regret. Every camera is equipped with the most commonly used lens, so we don't need to change the lens frequently when shooting. We just need to put down one camera and pick up another camera, which usually takes less than a second. My most commonly used lenses are 70-300mm lens and 400mm lens.

4. Practice hard and don't let your skills rust.

Don't get into the habit of not photographing non-rare animals. Practice makes perfect. We need to practice and polish our shooting skills with some animals that are common in life. In the process, you may be surprised that you can shoot such a great work one day. If you prefer to shoot birds, you can usually shoot more birds like magpies and sparrows, so you won't be in a hurry when you meet macaws.

In order to facilitate shooting at home, we can set up a bird feeding area outside the window to attract birds and then practice.

5. Try various compositions

Usually, when we shoot wild animals, we tend to use the composition that presents animals as completely as possible. But we shouldn't go all the way to the dark, sometimes we can get unexpected results by changing our thinking. Learn to try some different compositions, such as highlighting only a certain part of an animal. We can just shoot our eyes or highlight some other interesting details.

Then zoom out and take some pictures of animals and the environment. In addition, you can also try shooting from different angles, such as low-angle shooting or head-up shooting.

Generally speaking, the tools needed to shoot wild animals include knowing the subject, excellent shooting techniques and rich experience. If you have all these conditions, congratulations, you have laid a solid foundation for taking wonderful wildlife photos. The rest depends on your luck and creativity.