Wildlife Photography

Wildlife photography is a genre of photography concerned with documenting various forms of wildlife in their natural habitat.

As well as requiring photography skills, wildlife photographers may need field craft skills. For example, some animals and birds are difficult to approach and thus a knowledge of the animal’s and birds behavior is needed in order to be able to predict its actions. Photographing some species may require stalking skills or the use of a hide/blind for concealment.

While wildlife photographs can be taken using basic equipment, successful photography of some types of wildlife requires specialist equipment, such as macro lenses for insects, long focal length lenses for birds and underwater cameras for marine life.

The name of the game in wildlife photography whether you’re trying to capture a herd of elephants on the Serengeti Plains or squirrels in your backyard is patience. Wild animals are going to do what they’re going to do. Unfortunately, you can’t ask them to look this way, do something cute, or stand where the light is better. You have to be there, and ready, when they decide to look cute or do something interesting. Be prepared to wait, and wait, and wait it takes a long time to get good wildlife shots, even longer to make great ones.

But it’s not wasted time. The longer you spend with an animal or a group of animals, the better you get to know them and their habits. You get to see the personalities of different individuals, and you’ll get to the point where you can anticipate what they might do at a particular time of day or in a certain situation. Knowing which cubs are more playful or in which spot a male likes to lie up will help you get your images.

And, as is true of all kinds of photography, the more time you spend with your subjects, the more likely your images will be intimate and revealing. You know them better, and it will show.

It is important to remember when photographing wildlife is that the old “push/pull.” Animals have personalities, and you want to show that. But you don’t want to be working really tight with long lenses all the time. You need to show their environment too, habitat says a lot. Back off and use wide-angle lenses to give viewers a sense of where the animals live forexample there’s a lot of information about Cape buffalos in this wide shot. We see that they live in large groups, that the land is pretty dry, and that they visit water holes. But we don’t get much of a feeling about Cape buffalo personality. That’s when we need the tight shot.

When you’re out photographing wildlife, don’t just pay attention to what are called the charismatic megafauna, the big animals that get most of our attention. Of course we all want good photos of the big guys, but there are many other forms of life around. Some of them are really beautiful, and all of them are interesting. Whenever you’re out there, whether hiking or sitting in your car waiting for something to happen, look around. You’ll be amazed at what you might discover. Photograph that too.

There are quite a number of places in Africa and East Africa in Particular where one can capture amazing moments of the wildlife and nature and this is because of the wide variety of game and amazing natural features.