The Wild Photographer

How to Make your Wildlife Photography More Captivating and Creative

• Episode 59

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In need of a creative jolt for your wildlife photography and get better, more captivating images (and memories)? 

In this episode of The Wild Photographer, Court shares a dozen practical ways to make wildlife images truly captivating. We cover when to crank your drive mode for expressive behavior, how getting low and shooting at eye level transforms background separation, and the simple distance ratio that creates creamy blur even at f/8. You’ll learn to choose your background (not accept it), frame with natural elements, and zoom in on intriguing details for a story-driven series. 

Court also demos creative exposure tools—spot metering for dramatic light, in-camera white balance shifts for mood—and several motion techniques, from slow-shutter pans to zoom/rotate effects. Finally, we break composition “rules” on purpose, using exaggerated negative space and dead-center symmetry when the scene calls for it. If you’re ready to move from documentation to impact, this one’s for you.

Chapter Markers

00:00 Introduction to Captivating Wildlife Photography
00:44 Thanks to Sponsors
04:20 Introduction
04:59 Understanding Drive Motor for Wildlife Photography
08:23 Get Low (and on eye level)
10:27 Utilizing Shallow Depth of Field
15:09 Zooming in on Animal Details
18:16 Framing your Shots
20:02 The Allure of Spot Metering
23:28 Matching (or playing with) White Balance
26:23 Intentional Motion Blur Techniques
28:35 Other Uses of Slow Shutter
31:03 Composition Techniques
34:08 Choosing the Your Background
37:28 Conclusion

Court's Websites

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Court Whelan (00:00)
Hey friends, welcome back to The Wild Photographer. Today's episode is how to make your wildlife photography more captivating and creative. This is a really important episode. think that we as photographers often get easily, myself included, of caught in a rut of maybe documentary type photography, or sometimes I refer to it as like field guide photography where we're zooming in, we're filling the frame with a face. It looks great in the back of the camera. We like it when we get back home and put it on the computer, but

Really, I think our task as photography is elevated across multiple platforms, across multiple people, across the entire world, is how to make it more captivating, more creative. Well, this episode goes into almost a dozen different ways to do that. Before we get into the episode, I wanna thank our sponsors. First up, Art Store Fronts. They're an amazing all-in-one art platform for website building, for art sales, for everything from the posting to...

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The action X is what I have. It's pretty incredible. And if you want to get 10 % off, you can use the code Whelan that's W H E L A N 10 for 10 % off your order. finally lens rentals.com long time sponsors of the podcast. If you use promo code, wild photographer 15, you get 15 % off your entire lens rental order. I love renting lenses. I highly advocate for people to do so.

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Everything works so dang well. I'm always impressed when I rent camera bodies, lenses, you name it. Highly recommend. And again, 15 % off if you use promo code wildphotographer15. So it's pretty nifty there. Okay, let's dive into today's episode. So we're gonna be talking, like I said, zeroing in on like a dozen different really great tips that I've employed over a couple of decades of photography, but certainly more recently as I hone my own skills and develop my own photography.

ways to make your photos more captivating and creative. Those kind of go in tandem, but I really want to emphasize the captivating. These things will make your photography better. You don't have to use all of them, but you might find that a couple of them you're already using. You might find that the majority you're not yet using. So I hope this is gonna be a very, very helpful episode today for your wildlife photography specifically.

Okay, first thing we're gonna do, we're gonna talk about drive motor. so your drive motor tells your camera how many photos to take per second. We usually call it frames per second or FPS. And oftentimes cameras matter if you're on a point and shoot or big fancy DSLR or mirrorless, they're gonna have a range of how many photos it'll take in sequence as you hold down that shutter button. And the thing is, is we don't,

always want a super high drive motor. Like if we're out taking landscape shots and we're on a 30 frame per second, that's 30 photos per second drive motor, and we hold that shutter button down a little bit too long, you just got 15 more photos that you didn't want, didn't need, didn't want to edit, don't want to take up space on your memory card. But for wildlife photography, it's super duper important, or I would say really helpful in the captivating and creative mindset to get a lot of photos of the same scene.

And the whole point is, think, taking a wildlife photo from good to great or great to superb or superb to otherworldly is really about the behavior and the expression of the animal. If we're shooting a full frame shot of an animal's face, what are the eyebrows doing? Where are the eyes looking? Is there catch light? What are the cheeks doing? know, for photographing gorillas, are they cracking a little bit of a smile or a smirk? Are they moving, et cetera, et cetera? ⁓ If we are photographing behavior of, sparring bears,

you can be certain that if you shoot 20 frames a second and you get 20 to 40 shots all within that brief moment, there are going to be one or two or three of those 20 to 40 shots

you're trying to portray the best. So the difference is, is if you're stuck on like say three frames per second and you're like, oh, I just want to get as many shots as I can, you're getting three to six shots and you might miss.

many, many milliseconds of behavior or wildlife expressions

that you're really going to, well, not capture and not benefit from. And I've been doing this a lot lately. Yes, it takes a bigger memory card. Yes, I have to worry about the buffering because, you the fastest memory cards can only process so many photos per second. So some of these really advanced cameras like in the OM systems that shoot like 120 frames a second. ⁓ Yeah, you gotta have a pretty beefy memory card, but it pays dividends in droves. So.

Having a high drive motor for your wildlife photography is going to be a really, really great way to get more captivating, more creative shots because you're gonna get better and more choices for expressions, for positioning, for behavior, for that moment. right, photography's all about capturing that moment. So if two polar bears or grizzly bears are sparring and you have 10 photos where they're just going about, they're sparring and it's cool, it's action, it's a great shot, but then that one shot.

one of them is looking back over their shoulder towards the camera or towards the horizon or towards another polar bear walking up, that's going to be the moment. And it's gonna be really, really hard to capture that if you don't have a high drive motor. So I highly recommend just take the bull by the horns, get the faster memory card, start experimenting with it, see what your tolerance is for how many photos you would like to edit after the fact.

but if you can get it on the highest drive motor of anywhere from 15 to 30 frames a second for most cameras, some cameras are now getting 60 frames or even 120 frames, it's going to give you more captivating photos, because it's gonna give you photos you probably otherwise wouldn't have of that superlative behavior of the superlative expression. Okay, next up, this one is taught in a lot of classes, but if you haven't heard it or don't employ it, ⁓ you're gonna really benefit from this one, and it is to get.

at eye level with your wildlife or to get low. So if you're photographing moose in Yellowstone National Park and Grey and Teton, yeah, sometimes it's not feasible. Sometimes it's not possible to get on ground level with wildlife. But if you can, let's say you see a red fox running across the road and it pauses in a meadow for a moment, instead of just getting at your car and shooting at that downward angle, see if you can just slowly get down on your haunches. Maybe you get down sit Indian style or get down on one knee.

crawl in your belly if possible and get low. This is going to make for an infinitely better shot. Not only is it going to change your background from shooting down an animal where the background is the soil, it is the terrain, it is the green grasses, to maybe the horizon line if you're shooting parallel to the ground, shooting at low level on eye level with this wildlife. It might give you the mountains in the background, it might give you a better separation of subject and background. So highly recommend trying to get low

Basically getting at eye level with the wildlife and shooting across it parallel to ground versus any sort of acute angle. And you know what I'm talking about here. I'm very, very guilty of it, especially in a rush, especially in these very special moments. But oftentimes I've found that I'm happier just taking an extra moment or two to find my position, getting low and taking that shot, than getting five more shots that are really not anywhere near as good. So getting low is a really, really good way to connect with that animal.

get more of the scene, more of the environment. And like I said, it's gonna give you better background separation because that background isn't the ground one or two feet from the animal's face. It's the rest of the prairie. It's the rest of the meadow. It's the rest of the mountain scene. And that background distance is gonna get you that separation, which is gonna give you that blur, which is gonna give you that really, really pleasing professional captivating and creative look.

Speaking of that shallow depth of field, that background separation, this is something that you really wanna pay attention to. And we talk about it a lot when we're thinking about apertures and f-stops. The reason why we wildlife photographers love the f2.8s and the f4 big beefy telephotos is because it gives you that background separation. It makes it so your subject is tack sharp, but your background is really, really nice and blurred. Think of this like a smartphone portrait effect.

It's going to give you that blurred background and foreground, but then your subject is tack sharp. Now we like that for a few different reasons. One is a lot of wildlife is often found in really, well, complex, dynamic, very contrasty, very distracting habitats. Let's be frank, if I'm photographing orangutans and Borneo

There's gonna be vines and branches and leaves and trees and all sorts of stuff in the background, sometimes in the foreground as well. And being able to have all that extra stuff still remain in the scene, great color, great texture, but just blurred slightly, it makes my scene less distracting. It helps the viewer become more captivated because it finds, the viewer finds your subject a little bit faster and zeros in on that subject and doesn't search the background and doesn't get distracted by all that.

extra color, extra texture, extra contrast, extra shadows and brightness. So it's a really, really great thing for that reason. The other reason is that it actually makes your subject look sharper. When you have that background blur, there's noticeable out of focus parts of your scene. And therefore the thing that actually is in focus, i.e. what you focus on, your subject, your animal, because it's in focus, contrasting with that blurred background, it's gonna make your subject look even sharper. Technically it's not, you're not.

doing anything different with sharpening. I'm not talking about going into post-processing and sharpening the animal, but because it is sharp compared to the blurred around it, it's going to look even sharper. And that's a really, really good thing for captivating wildlife photography.

So how do you do that? Well, the one way is to get a big fancy lens aperture at 300 millimeters, 400 millimeters. That's gonna do the job for sure. But what happens if we're stuck at like a 500 or a 600 f6.3 or f7.1 or even f8? Like one of my go-to wildlife lenses is a 100 to 500 and it tops out at about f7.1. That does not give me a ton of blur in the background. Well, there's this great ratio.

that you have to kind of think about in your mind as I describe this, I realize this is a podcast, so you're have to visualize it with me. But what we're looking at is three elements to the scene. We have the tip of our lens, i.e. you the photographer, one and the same. We have the wildlife subject, that's the second part. And the third part is the background. If the ratio between you and your subject is much smaller than the subject to the background, meaning you are a lot closer to the subject,

than the subject is to the background, it's gonna be blurred each and every time. You can shoot it F8 or F11 and there's still gonna be some blur. Now of course as we get to smaller F numbers, i.e. bigger apertures, there's gonna be more and kind of better quality blur, but that ratio means that you can shoot on any old lens and if you continually look at how distant that background is and try to maximize that distance, that's what I was talking about with the getting low and getting at eye level.

If you can extend the distance of the background behind the wildlife subject as much as humanly possible, it's going to add more and more really high quality blur to your shot. Now contrast this with if the ratio between you and your subject is very large, very, very distant, the subject is right in front of the background. Let's say it's you 20 yards to a lemur, and the lemur is sitting in a tree where the background is one yard away.

It doesn't really matter how fancy of a lens you have, that subject and the background, because they're so close, relative to how close you are to the subject, it's not gonna be blurred. You can be shooting at f4 all day long. Even f2.8 isn't gonna make a huge, huge difference. we're gonna get to more of a quote unquote, choosing your background section later, which I think is one of the most important topics here.

But basically if you can pivot, if you can move to your left, your right, maybe you need to go uphill a little bit, a little bit downhill and extend that background, meaning wait until that background as you pivot around this animal is even greater. you know, going from 20 yards in the distance to 40 to a hundred yards, maybe even, you know, in a big meadow, could be miles to the mountain scene behind it. That's going to add that blur. It's going to use kind of optical mechanics, no matter what your F number is, to give you that pleasing blur. And that is

Definitely gonna make your photo more creative and more captivating.

The next subject is to zoom in on, let's just say, obscure parts of the animal. We have this ability in today's day and age, almost like ⁓ a non-negotiable ability to post multiple photos at once. This might be creating a gallery on your photo website. This might be doing a social media post. This might be, who knows, maybe making a photo album or a photo book. These are all ways that we have today to share and showcase our photos.

And it's getting to the point where it is very rare for us to just show one photo at a time. The days of getting one big framed printed photo in a gallery standing alone amongst a bunch of other photographers, it's not really there. Even if you're gonna do a gallery show, I have a great podcast on this with Marlo Shaw, ⁓ you're gonna be kind of owning that gallery show. You're gonna have multiple images. So what I'm getting at with this long diatribe here is that we have this ability to showcase multiple photos at once.

And so getting that quintessential full frame edge to edge perfect shot of the whole animal, the whole face of the whole neck of the giraffe, whatever it might be, ⁓ isn't necessarily always the best outcome, isn't always the best goal. What we can do with this creative tip is we can start looking at components of the animal. I'll think back to a few years ago, I was photographing Galapagos tortoises in, well, obviously the Galapagos Islands. Of course, I guess it isn't that obvious. There's some in like San Diego Zoo and all that.

But nevertheless, it was in the Galapagos Islands and I just started noticing how amazing the kind of like the beak, the nose of this tortoise was. And since we get quite close and if you have a moderate telephoto lens, I was just starting to take a number of zoomed in photos using a big deep depth of field to almost kind of take like a macro shot from far away. A lot of texture, a lot of patterns, a lot of really kind of foreign look to this animal. I wasn't necessarily photographing its eyes and its face all in one.

took a photo of its beak, its nose, took a photo of its foot pads, its toenails, I took a photo of the patterns on its carapace, I took a photo of the whole animal and I kind of built this whole sequence where, you know, here's the animal, but then also here are the various components to make it so dinosaur-like, so ancient, so interesting looking. So a really creative way to kind of train yourself to think beyond the obvious photo is to start thinking about if you are close enough to an animal,

How can you photograph things like the patterns of its fur? Maybe you're with a chameleon and you can get the whole shot of course, which is beautiful and captivating. But then you can also zoom in and just photograph nothing but the patterns in the chameleon, just the colors. You can photograph just the curly tail. And again, you know, maybe 20, 30 years ago, if you were getting one photo in one magazine or one photo in one gallery, that's not the tip top choice, perfect photo.

But now when we're posting four, five, six, seven, eight photos in social media, on websites, making photo books, all of a sudden you have this really dynamic range of different components of the animal that I think make for really, really creative photographs.

The next thing we're gonna be talking about is finding ways to frame your shots. And this is definitely on the creative end of it. When you are out in nature, when you're out photographing animals and wildlife, almost always there's gonna be some sort of habitat around you. It may not be a massive rainforest, it might be more of a desert environment. It might be grasslands or plains. But if you can start to train your brain to look for framing element, it's going to add even more captivating aspect to your photos. They're gonna get more creative.

And what I mean by framing element is can you put some sort of naturally occurring thing, whether it might be a tree branch or a look through a rock, a hole in the rock and do something creative where there is a natural frame that your animal sits inside of. Like the picture frame is the natural landscape. It might be a horizontal branch that elbows up to a vertical branch that kind of curves around.

And as you start to look for these things, you'll start to notice them more and more in nature. And essentially it is this framing aspect. So you might have a very blurred out green foliage that's sort of encircling the animal. I'm thinking back to photographing tigers in India a few years ago, and there's a lot of brush. There's a lot of scraggly branches in the way. And I thought, well, gosh, this is going to be hard to deal with because I really want to photograph this tiger. I really want to get that perfect shot of.

of its face looking at me with those amazing eyes and incredible fur pattern. But as I started to realize these branches could become frames. I zoom in and shoot on a certain opening of these branches, I can have a nice angled structure going around the tiger or some of them were actually circular because there were so many branches. So looking for ways to frame your shots with things found in nature can really elevate your wildlife photography.

This next one is one of my favorites. I'm just gonna lay it out there. It is using spot metering. So it's not something that I use very often. I find that oftentimes spot metering is really the wrong way to go for most photography. But if you need to quickly inject something that adds a heck of a lot of creativity and adds a lot of captivating essence to your photographs, using spot metering is kind of one of these silver bullets.

And so generally most of us will probably be on what's called evaluative or Nikon calls it a matrix metering. I'm not sure what Sony calls it, but there's some sort of word and usually a little icon that basically says, hey, the camera is choosing the whole frame and intelligently figuring out the amount of light that should or should not be in the frame, meaning how much light it's letting in the sensor.

Spot metering basically zeros in on the dead middle of your frame. So you're only metering based on the exact dead middle.

what this necessitates us to do is frame the shot or compose the shot rather with the subject in the dead middle of the frame, unless we're using some sort of advanced auto exposure lock, which I'm not gonna go into here. But the trick here is if you can put the wildlife in the middle of your frame using spot metering, it's only going to expose for that animal itself.

usually I advise to zoom out a little bit so you can then recompose and adhere to some sort of traditional compositional rules like the rule of thirds, cetera, But when this is really, really useful, I find, and this is what you can kind of key your brain into next time you're on a wildlife photo expedition, is when animals are in the shadows, but then everything else is sort of normally bright around it. I'm thinking of like wildebeest underneath a shade tree in the savannas of Africa.

The wildebeest will be in the shadows, in the shade, but then everything around that solo acacia tree on the savanna is gonna be normal lighting. So if you can spot meter and put that wildebeest in the dead middle of your frame, what it's gonna do is it's actually gonna brighten the whole scene quite a bit. It will ultimately blow out a lot of the highlights around the tree, around the wildebeest, but I can tell you it makes for this really, really captivating type image. And you can go.

for the other end of the spectrum. And if you see a beam of sun or if you see like sun shining through the trees on a certain animal, whereas everything else is just a little bit more in the shade. And if you expose for that animal using spot metering, you're gonna find that it darkens everything. So it creates this really, really captivating, very natural looking harsh contrast, which I think makes for some really, really cool creative photography. And it sends your photograph to the next level, but there are...

litany of other instances when you can use spot metering but sometimes when I'm in front of a wildlife scene and I've been photographing this one critter for a long time like we often do if there's a sleeping polar bear in Churchill, Canada or might be a lazy lion I'm just gonna do some alliteration here for the fun of it a lazy lion in Africa ⁓ Well leaping lemur now we need sedentary stuff but the idea here is if you're photographing something and you have like minutes and sometimes we even spend like 30

minutes to 60 minutes at a single wildlife subject, because it's just, you we're waiting for it to engage in behavior. And you need to inject some creativity, and you're like, my gosh, I've already gotten 80 photos of this thing in every which way possible. Try spot metering, see what it does, see if you like it. It's a great way to experiment and at least practice with it. And I bet you you're gonna really, really like the outcome.

The next thing is a little controversial because when I mentioned white balance, the very first thing or the very next thing that any photographer, experienced photographer will say is, why would you do that? Can't you just do it in Photoshop, Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw? Can't you change the white balance after the fact if you're shooting in raw? Yes, you can. So you don't have to change it in camera, but if you wanna spur your creativity, if you wanna think outside the box and do something a little bit more artistic that...

often ends in something more captivating, I do play around with my white balance in camera. And I usually toggle between three different settings. Auto for sure is just a nice easy middle ground. It's not extreme on either the warm or the cool end, but then I'll put it on a daylight setting, which will inject more blue into the scene or a shady setting that will inject more yellow in the scene. So it's a spectrum of cool to warm.

And what I find is so special about doing this in camera is that oftentimes when we make white balance adjustments after the fact, like in Photoshop, Lightroom, Camera Raw, et cetera, it changes the color so dramatically, like it can, it can change the color so dramatically that we often, again, when we're changing it after the fact, at least I do, I start to think, my gosh, this is fake. This is not genuine. This is not a-

I'm just doing some crazy art stuff here. Whereas when I take it in camera and I start editing it and see that shot that is a little bit on the warm side, a little bit on the too cool side, my brain doesn't work the same way. And I start to think, yeah, that's kind of what the vibe was that day. That's where my creative mind was at. That's the scene that my eyes saw. And so I'm less likely to react negatively to that photo. Whereas again, if I take a

auto white balance shot and start making it really warm or really cool, I tend to not like it as much. So if you want to do something a little bit weird and wacky, definitely on the artistic side of things, playing with your white balance in camera, really just toggling between daylight and shady, it's going to be from a blue to a yellow end of the spectrum with auto in the middle. Those three options will give you really three very, very different looks. If you are photographing in sunrise and sunset times a day,

this is going to create a dramatically different look. And I'm telling you, the best thing honestly is to try all three. And I think that at very least you're gonna really like what you see in the back of your camera. It's really gonna expand your awareness of sort of like color theory at those times a day. So highly recommend if you're looking for more creativity, play with your white balance as you're taking the shots. You can, as I started with, you can always change it back. If you don't like it and you're shooting in raw.

You can change it back to an auto setting and it won't be quite as extreme, but I have a lot of fun with it and I know you will too.

Okay, now we're getting into some even weirder, wackier, creative stuff, but it's really fun, it really is. So again, maybe not the thing to do right when you see your first lion in Africa on day one of the safari, but over time, as you start to see more and more wildlife and you wanna get more more creative with things, you can start by adding a little bit of intentional motion blur with your camera itself. And what I love doing, again, it's weird and wacky, but what's so fun is it's really difficult.

to replicate these effects in Photoshop or Lightroom. So having this in camera really gives you a very, very creative, powerful tool. And what this is, is as you're taking the shot, you can actually zoom in on the barrel of your lens while you're taking the shot. Now you can't have super duper fast shutter speeds with this, but just moderate shutter speeds, you one over 100, one over 200. And as you're zooming in, it's gonna add this sort of like tunnel vision blur to your scene. And sometimes if you nail it right,

With some practice you can actually get the animal in focus But then all the other surroundings kind of out of focus blurred as if you're going through a bit of a tunnel there And it's a really really creative look similarly you can rotate your camera and I find this actually Allows your your wildlife subject to remain in focus a bit better But if you let's say we go back to the lion example and the lion sitting there in the grasses and you're moderately away You put it kind of in the middle of your shot

and you're on a moderately slow shutter, you put it, know, one over 80, which is not gonna have a whole lot of hand motion blur. And as you're taking the shot, you kind of rotate from horizontal to vertical access, meaning ⁓ you're either starting with a landscape oriented shot and going towards portrait or starting with portrait and going landscape. The point is that you're kind of like clockwise or counterclockwise as you're taking the photo. And this is again, a form of intentional motion blur.

Is this gonna go on the cover of your photo book of the trip album? I don't know, but sometimes it turns out ridiculously well and it makes, you know, your top 10 photos of what you like best. And it adds a lot of the art and creativity back into photography. And I play around with this a lot and have a lot of fun with it. So sticking with a slow shutter theme, this is another form of intentional motion blur is having very, very slow shutters of moving wildlife. So I think back to this photo, I was judging a photo contest one time.

And I believe this was the ultimate winner is it was a cheetah running across the savanna. It was probably, you know, one third of the scene in terms of the space it took up in the frame. But the photographer chose to shoot at something

one 20th of a second to one 40th. I can't remember the exact shutter speed, but both of those would work in this scenario. As that cheetah was running, the cheetah must've been running, you know how they go, they're like 20, 40, 60 miles an hour. The main body in the head,

was relatively in focus, like enough in focus, but then the legs just had this incredible locomotive look, like this rotation, because the legs were moving so much, so fast, that at that shutter speed, it got the rest of the animal in pretty good tack sharp focus, but then the legs were moving and it turned this picture into like almost a video look. It wasn't a video, it was just a single photo, but having that slow shutter of fast moving wildlife is really, really captivating. And I have to say it's,

It's hard to master this technique. I've played around with it a lot. Some of my favorite photos using this technique did not have the animal in focus whatsoever. One photo that I come back to very often, it's a very popular photo of mine, is a wild dog, an African painted wolf, as they're sometimes called in Africa, running across grasslands in the green season of Botswana. And the whole thing is blurred and even my camera itself is moving. I'm panning my camera as I take the shot.

at 1.20th, 1.40th of a second, and it creates this beautiful artistic blur of the green grasses, some brown grasses in there, and this beautifully colored, mottled, black, white, and tan wild dog with the big ears, with the big legs extended, just kind of a wisp across the scene, and it's a really, really cool shot. So playing with slow shutters with fast-moving wildlife, again, it's a little bit risky if it's the very first time you're seeing a wild dog in your life, and you really wanna get a beautiful kind of...

proper photo of it. But if you've seen a couple of times, if you are on a polar bear Safari and this is going to be your 500 photo polar bears and you see one kind of walking across or see a couple sparring having that slow shutter between again, I'm going to advise between like one 20th and one 50th of a second. That tends to be the sweet spot adds that motion blur and creates a really, really creative, interesting, interesting image.

The next thing we're gonna talk about, the next two topics actually are gonna be about composition. And the first thing, these are gonna both break the rule of thirds, obviously. Rule of thirds is for another episode. We're talking about the weird and wacky stuff now, captivating and creative. Yes, rule of thirds adds more aesthetics to your photography, but this is not the time or the place to talk about it. So the first is going to be exaggerated composition. So I love this when I have wildlife in landscape shots.

and I have a beautiful scene. might be a rainforest, it might be a desert, it might be a mountain, and I have an animal or a group of animals that I can position just at the very, very lower sliver of the frame. I've done this with elephants in Africa, and it turns out so well where you have these massive creatures, of course, and typically we take them, take photos to make them look very big, make them look very powerful and towering in the landscape, but to minimize them, to go the other way.

is really quite fascinating. I've done this with elk in the National Elk Refuge, just outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And basically when you have an interesting scene, know, the environment and landscape has to be interesting enough. That nine tenths of your photo is that. But then that animal, that wildlife species, if you just place it well outside the rule of thirds at the bottom sliver of your frame, I think it provides this really creative way of kind of minimizing the animal in an otherwise really grandiose landscape.

The other way I'm going to break the rule of thirds with my penultimate suggestion and idea for creative and captivating photography is center focused. When should you use center focus or when, when would you want to put the animal in the dead middle of your frame? well, typically I do this when I want to provide an uncanny amount of emphasis to the animal, but more often than not, the real X factor or the real justifying reason to do a center.

type photo, a center composition photo where the animal's in the dead middle of the frame, is when I have some sort of symmetry. It might be very symmetrical leaves. It's in the dense forest and the leaves are all sort of uniform around this animal. Maybe I have trees that are sort of angled in from the right and angled in from the left. I'm looking for that symmetry. As soon as I can find symmetry to the left and the right and or top to bottom,

I think it makes for a really captivating image to break the rule thirds. Don't put the animal at one of the right thirds, left thirds, that upper third, lower, et cetera, et cetera. Place in the dead middle and try to, if possible, try to create symmetry with the animal as well. Maybe it's looking at you, maybe it's looking directly away from you. But I think that's one of those things, if and when I wanna provide even more emphasis to my wildlife subject by putting the dead middle of the frame.

I am looking for that symmetry in the environment. How can I frame the shot such that the left, right and or top to bottom has some sort of uniform landscape feature? Again, patterns of nature. might be leaves. It might be a uniform sand, a uniform color, uniform texture, symmetry, uniformities are what I'm looking for. And sometimes it's really quite captivating to put animals in the dead middle of your frame.

Okay, the last thing I'm talk about here is one of my favorites. It's something I teach.

on almost all my photo trips. It's worth a whole photo lesson in itself, but it is choosing your background. And the idea here is, you with wildlife photography, the ability to, wish and hope and pray that the background would change when you have a backlit animal or it's just not a very captivating background. You can't just wish and hope for it. You have to move specifically. Now I realize this is sometimes easier said than done.

But oftentimes when I'm teaching this in the field and we're with a wildlife subject and I start pointing out the background, which usually people honestly aren't really looking at a whole lot. They're looking at the animal. They're looking and waiting for the expression. They're waiting for the other, the mate of the animal to come up and there might be some sort of interesting behavior interaction. What I'm talking about here is if you start to pay attention to what is behind your subject and that's gonna change dramatically if you're standing.

if you're kneeling, going back to that whole get low lesson, but also if you pivot left and right. And what I've found, I do this a lot with like macro photography of butterflies, you monarch butterflies, macro photography of insects, but definitely with other wildlife too, lemurs and, toucans, I mean, you name it, the list, it's pretty much every species could play a part in this conversation. But if you start moving to your left and right, especially in these

varied landscapes of the environment, your natural habitats, you might find that if you move five feet to the right, what was kind of a light brown background all of a sudden turns into dark green. Or maybe if you move to the left, all of a sudden a little bit of sky appears. You may or may not want that. If you stand up or sit down, all of sudden you notice the background is going to be sort of a gray silt color. If you kneel down, you're gonna notice, oh my goodness, it's just a really interesting pattern.

of ⁓ branches and green leaves behind it, this beautiful symmetrical pattern. So choosing your background is really a way to say, as you look at your wildlife subject, how could you make things different? And I'm not necessarily saying, know, green is better than brown or anything like that. They're both good, but why not get two different photos of the same subject in two different ways with a.

pattern in the background, a texture, a different color, part of the sky, no sky. This is particularly useful with backlit animals, of course. So if we're photographing into the trees, like we often are with primates, sometimes when you have that sky in the background, even if it is a nice rich blue sky, it's too bright for the shaded animal and it's going to blow it out and it's going to look very, very bright and kind of un-aesthetic. Now, if you could move to your left, your right, so the background is no longer the sky, but it's tree branches.

Maybe it's a mountain in the background. Maybe it's a desert cliff. All of a sudden that background is not gonna be that sky. Maybe the lighting's different and it's gonna make for a very, very different photo. And hopefully with practice, with trial, with choosing more and more of your backgrounds with a single subject or just doing this over time over the course of your trip, over the course of the next year, you're gonna find that you're able to get more photos, be able to choose your background more with just slight bits of movement.

paying attention to, key thing here, paying attention to the background and noticing the colors and the patterns that come out in your photo after you take that shot.

so there we go, folks. That ⁓ was a lot of creative and captivating tips for you. I hope you enjoyed. I hope some of these were new to you. And I hope you enjoy listening to this podcast. If you wish to support the show, the number one way you can help out is not monetary at all. It's just leaving a review. So if you're on Apple Podcast, if you're on Spotify, there's a pretty easy way to click leave a review. You can leave up to a five-star review, hint, hint.

Adding a comment is really great. It helps other people find this show. And that's kind of my whole mission here is to get more photographers enjoying what they do, showcasing the beauty of our wild world. So once again, thanks so much for joining and I looking forward to talking to you next time.


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Court Whelan

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