The Wild Photographer

How to Get that "Pro Look" with your Nature Photography: 10 Tips and Strategies to Level Up your Game

• Episode 75

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Ever looked at a photo and thought, “Why does that look so much better than mine?” 

In this solo episode, I break down the real, practical ingredients that separate good photos from truly professional ones. I cover 10+ techniques, including special times of day, dialing in your gear, ISO, tripod use, shutter speed, black & white photography, high and low key photography, editing considerations and more.

The more of these techniques you stack, the more pro your photos will become!

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Court Whelan (00:00)
We've all been there before. are scrolling through social media or looking at an online photo website or heck, maybe even in someone's gallery. And we just notice those photos or there's a photo that you see that just, it just looks pro. It looks different. It may be even a similar setting or

animal species that you photographed in a similar setting before, but there's just looks different. There's something that makes it pop. There's something that makes it scream. This is a professional photo. We've all been there. I've distilled down what I believe to be the core ingredients of what pro photographers do and use the tricks, the arrows in their quiver to get those next level photographs. We're talking about the time of day.

Even things like gear, like the lenses, the sensor size, things like tripod use, the pros and the cons, the depth of field considerations, playing with shutter speed, the whole nine yards. And of course we go into editing as well. So this is a really deep dive into how to make your photos look really professional, like those that you may covet online on social media in actual photo stores. So let's get into it. Before I do so, I wanted to give a quick plug to my own

stuff. I am doubling down on my Lightroom and Camera Raw editing series on my YouTube channel. And I talk about editing a lot in these podcast episodes, but there's nothing quite like the visualization of going through a full editing scheme of a single photo. And that's exactly what I'm doing. So I'm taking raw photos from start to finish in real time within a few minutes.

So you can watch and follow along. can see the different considerations I make for different photos, the sliders I use, the masks that I use, the advanced editing techniques. And it's all on youtube.com slash at court whelan. Or you can just go on YouTube and search at like the little at symbol court whelan all one word. That's just ⁓ W H E L A N and court like a tennis court. So yeah, you can follow along in real time. Just wanted to plug that.

Also, on a similar front with YouTube, if you want to get in touch with me, I would love to hear from you with ideas for future episodes. If you have questions about something I've covered in an episode and you want some more details that warrants just a very specific response to you, the best way to do so is head on over to my YouTube channel and leave a comment on any of my videos. I see every single comment and I'll respond directly to you. I've found the best and easiest way to get in touch. It's very consistent, very easy for you.

And I'd love to hear from you, truly. Again, suggestions on new episodes, questions, I'm here to help. Okay, so now onto the show, how to get that pro look to your photos. We're starting off with time of day. And I should say these are in really no particular order. This is a really important one to start off with, but as with all things, the more you layer all these tips and techniques together, the more pro your photos are gonna look. So it's not just.

simply choosing the right time of day and forgetting the rest of these things. It's really aligning all these things together as much as humanly possible. But anyway, I digress. The key thing is time of day is where I'm starting. It's a very, important one. What you'll find is that pro photographers really narrow their photographic window into pretty discrete slots throughout the day.

We're talking about things like the golden hour, blue hour, how to handle midday, which is typically not an ideal time to shoot, but we all are out there and you you're on a photo trip and you don't want to not photograph when you're out there. So how to handle midday and also like how to enhance the weather, how to look at weather, how to use weather in your photographs. So I'm starting off with the golden hour as one of my favorite and one of many pro photographers favorite times of day.

The golden hour simply put is that time just after the sun rises and just before the sun sets. So the sun is in the sky. It's not pre dawn or post sunset. It's actually in the sky, but it's very low angled, soft, very colorful light. You notice that as the sun cuts through more haze and atmosphere, it's a little bit more subdued. It's not that white or strong yellow light at midday or even late morning. It's an orangey light. It's a golden light.

And that golden hour is, I think, the best time of day to photograph wildlife, landscapes, you name it, people, cultures, truly anything. You can take photos of doorknobs and beautiful golden light and they look really, really good. So golden hour is a colloquial term. You know, it's golden, quote unquote, hour. It's not 60 minutes across the world. That's the thing. The golden hour varies very much between seasons and also what latitude you're at. So

In short, the closer you are to the equator, the shorter that golden hour is going to be. ⁓ I was photographing on safari not too long ago and I was reminded and shocked at how quick that golden hour is when you're right on the equator. Like not in a good way. Like we want a long golden hour. That means we have more time to look for landscapes, more time to look for wildlife, to photograph them in ideal lighting conditions. The golden hour in

Tanzania was like the golden 25 minutes. The golden hour in the Arctic or the Antarctic is going to be like a golden couple of hours.

Now, when many of us are photographing in temperate or non equatorial or non polar regions, it is a little bit more like an hour. So the real hard and fast advice here is if you want the best photos, you want to prioritize those times a day. And yeah, unfortunately, if you're photographing in Rocky Mountain National Park in the summertime, that's going to be a really early wake up time. It's going to be a really early time to photograph. And I'm sorry, but that is absolutely what you need to plan your day around again.

We're gonna be talking about midday and considerations there, but you want to sacrifice your midday photography in favor of those two times a day, emphasize two times a day, just after sunrise and just before sunsets as the best time to photograph landscapes, wildlife, general travel, people, you name it. So remember, always prioritize that as if you're gonna get great shots, of course you want great shots, you want pro level shots, golden hour is it.

That's not the only hour of the day. It's not the only time of day to get great photos. Another time of day for really pro level shots is going to be the blue hour. And the blue hour is actually just before sunrise or just after sunset. And very, very similar to my example of photographing on the equator versus the poles. The speed of that blue hour is very much in tune with how the sun moves across the sky. So the reason I talk about the equator is the sun really moves in almost

perfect semi circle arc across the sky so it rises really fast and it sets really fast. That's why the golden hour is tough. The blue hour is the same way. What we're looking for is it's that roughly 30 minutes to an hour ⁓ before sunrise or after sunset when that sun casts this really soft blue hue in the sky. It's of course as you start earlier, it's a more darker almost more violet or indigo color in the sky.

And as it gets closer to the horizon, just before it peaks, it's been much lighter blue, but that whole hour is the blue hour. so a really, really great time. Now this does require slow shutters. It does often require a tripod. It requires some location scouting ahead of time. You know, if you're waking up at four in the morning to go try to photograph the blue hour, which might start at four 45 somewhere, you're going to be fumbling around in the dark. So you need to figure out where you're going to go.

It's also not a great time to photograph wildlife necessarily, but a phenomenal time to photograph landscapes. Great time to photograph things like travel photography with vehicles, with ecologues and just all the nuances of experiential type photography because it has this incredible cast in the sky of again, this really, really rich blue color. And I want to emphasize that just like the golden hour, there is a reciprocal to this time just after the sun sets.

Most people do their blue hour photography, frankly, in conjunction with sunset. You go out to a great place, you get golden hour, you get the sunset, then you get blue hour, all boom, boom, boom. But remember, there are two times a day for this. It just might be a little bit more feasible, logistically

to photograph that after sunset, but they are really at two times a day. Now, when I say the hour, just like it is with the golden hour,

If you are in the equator, it's probably gonna be a blue 10 minutes or a blue 20 minutes where it goes from sheer darkness to a really, really light blue sky just before the sun peaks over that horizon. So if you are close to the equator, you've gotta be more tack sharp on your scheduling and your timing. If you're in polar regions or really anywhere in between, you've got a lot more flexibility. The more north you go away from the equator, the more south you go away from the equator, the more flexibility, but that is a great time to get a different looking shot.

You know, lot of these pro shots rely on just photographing something different that people don't often get to see. And what a great way to do so by putting yourself through the wringer a little bit, getting up extra early, staying out a little bit later and putting yourself in places that, you know, it may not be the most comfortable thing to do to be out waiting for the blue hour at four 15 in the morning when you're in some sort of photo location. But that's what's going to get you to stack the deck in your favor for great pro level shots.

So what's it do about midday? So midday, again, we're talking about, you know, different seasons, different latitudes. Midday could be anywhere from 9.30 AM on the Serengeti of East Africa. Midday could be even like 1 PM if you're in North America or somewhere else where the sun rises a little bit slower. But midday is typically a quite harsh time of day to photograph. If you're a wildlife photographer, you might as well just, you know,

take a nap and charge the batteries because this is really not when you're gonna get your greatest shots. You're gonna get a lot of top down, harsh, very, very bright lighting, heavy shadows, heavy highlights. It's very, very difficult to work with. But here's a really good trick for getting pro level shots at midday. One would be that you aim to go out when the clouds are out or you conjure up some clouds. If you know a guy, you can ask to the heavens to bring you some clouds.

⁓ clouds aren't always available and possible. But if you're photographing midday in cloudy conditions, that can be just fine. if you're going at times of year, like green season, wildlife trips, you know, on the fringe of when, when the rains are just beginning or just ending and you might get some of those midday thundershowers, what a great time to photograph at midday because when you get sun filtered through big thick clouds, they might even be colorful clouds like blues and even purples.

with these thunderstorms, you're getting really nice filtered light. You're also getting some amazing texture and contrast and interesting stuff going on in the sky. But typically when we don't have clouds, I'm switching over to black and white photography. And I'm not necessarily doing this in camera. I'm still photographing in color. I don't think there's really a huge advantage for switching over to black and white in camera. In fact, not all cameras even allow you to do so. You can very easily do this on the computer afterwards.

You just hit the little black and white button in Adobe camera raw or Photoshop or Lightroom and it magically makes it black and white. But here's why it's so good at midday is black and white does really well with harsh contrasts.

those really bright spots, those really dark spots. In fact, I even boost the contrast in camera raw. I will exaggerate that discord between black and white because that's what is so interesting about these black and white photos is just showcasing the drama of a landscape when you kind of just let the environment do the work for you. So don't abandon all hope if you're a wildlife and nature photographer at midday.

realize that you need to prioritize those earlier and later times of day for the best pro looking photos. But midday can offer some really, really great rewards as well. Now, speaking of weather, you know, I mentioned clouds, I mentioned thunderstorms. This is something that is not easy, again, to conjure up. But if you do start paying attention to the weather, you start looking at the forecast, you have the time to plan and prep. If you go out and photograph in really inclement weather,

This can give you another leg up in pro level photographs. Again, what a lot of pros do is they look to capture something that not a lot of other people get to see.

a lot of other people are out there in the pouring rain or in really adverse weather conditions. And as long as you're doing it safely and not being susceptible to lightning and not staying on the edge of canyons and cliffs and not getting your camera ruined by pouring rain,

If you can photograph these times a day, it can give you very, very different, very interesting looks to your photos. so planning your trip, planning your day around weather can be a really great thing. At very least just going out on those days where it is going to be cloudy throughout the day. That's super iconic for wildlife. Even if you're just filling the frame with the wildlife space, because you're getting those soft lighting conditions, you're getting a little bit of light, you're getting some nice angled light, you're getting some soft light, some, some shadows.

but it's not all blown out like at midday. So paying attention to the weather and really maximizing your photo outings based on clouds. And if you can safely in thunderstorms or in rain or in really crazy conditions, maybe high wind or snow storms, it can give you that next level to your photographs that pros really, really focus on.

The next thing I want to talk about is a little more gear related and this may not be the greatest news to report because oftentimes it might mean that you have to upgrade gear or maybe you realize that you don't have the quote unquote best gear for maximizing your photos and getting that pro look. But nevertheless this is just the plain hard truth and this is the reality is that the sensor size of your camera has a big to do with what your ending photos look like as far as how pro level they look. Now I say this with a caveat that I've seen some amazing results.

and some incredible photos from crop frame sensors from the micro four thirds that OM system produces. In fact, a lot of my pro photo buddies have switched over to OM because of how incredible their lenses are

and the abilities these cameras have. So this is not a hard and fast. It's just if you go for the larger sensor size in your camera, you are going to have a leg up in terms of getting quicker and more pronounced in your pro level photography.

So simply put, the bigger the sensor in your camera, the higher the quality. The more megapixels you can put in your shot, which means the more you can crop your shot, which leads to composition tools. But ultimately when you can get more megapixels in your sensor and just have a better quality sensor from a more pro level camera, it's not rocket science, but it's going to give you a better looking shot.

It means you can blow it up to bigger sizes. It means that it's going to have more dynamic range. You have more abilities to edit because of the large format sensor. So sensor size is something to to not ignore

You also have more versatility with higher ISOs and noise. A lot of times with nature and wildlife photography, we are pushing our cameras to the limit, especially what I was talking about with just before, you know, the golden hour, the blue hour when we're photographing it.

more dimly lit lighting scenarios, we're pushing our ISOs higher. And when I have a bigger sensor in my camera, it allows me to have a higher ISO without decreasing quality. So,

your ability to deal with noise and grain from higher ISOs is improved markedly with full frame cameras. And this is one of the big reasons why I switched to full frame now 15 years ago. And I've never looked back because I am shooting and challenging lighting conditions all the time. Even if the lighting conditions aren't challenging, I'm going to be shooting at a bigger aperture. In some cases, I'm going to be letting in less light in my camera. So it just it's a whole suite of benefits.

when you have that bigger sensor to allow for higher ISOs to give you better quality. Simply put.

So speaking of gear and quality, lens quality is another big topic. This is one of seriously the most important considerations. This is why I think, you know, frankly, OM gets away with it so much with their smaller sensors is that their lenses are just the utmost quality.

camera manufacturer out there has really amazing glass. So investing in high quality lenses is another really easy, I shouldn't say easy,

because sometimes it's very expensive, sometimes it's actually harder to tote these things around, but it's a very push button way to just get instantly better pro looking results if you go for higher quality lenses.

And I should say, I would rather have a small sensor with a premium lens than the other way around. So if you are thinking about your camera set up and you're thinking, well, I've got a little bit of money to invest. I'm shooting on an introductory camera. do know it's a crop frame sensor, meaning it's a smaller size and I'm shooting with a more introductory kit lens or something that was more affordable in the telephoto range. And I want to make one upgrade. I don't want to upgrade everything, but I want to make one upgrade. Upgrade your lens first.

Not to put anything down to the full frame abilities, that's also very good, but having a high quality lens is probably going to be the best bang for your buck.

A really good thing about higher lens quality, not just the sharpness and the contrast and the natural colors and the aperture capabilities, but better lenses retain their resale value a lot better. So it's one of these things where you can kind of invest once and you end up recouping a lot of your investment when you go to sell that lens, even four or five, six, seven years later, it's been very routine where I invest a few thousand dollars into a top of the line lens.

And I have it for six, seven years, but because I invested in a new lens with a good bit of money, I took care of it. I didn't let it get dinged or scratched. I sold it for like 70 to 80 % of its value six years later. That's like renting that lens for five years for $400 or $600. that's, that's huge. So yes, it takes a bigger investment, but as they say, buy once.

cry once and it's going to be a really quick way to level up your photography to that pro level.

When speaking of lenses, do have to say I put minimal reliance on multi-purpose lenses. Let me tell you what a multi-purpose lens is in my book. Multi-purpose lenses are those that they seem really great when you look at the focal range. They might be an 18 to 400. They might be a 28 to 300. In other words, they cover the wide angle end of the spectrum all the way through to pretty decent telephoto. And I don't want to poo poo them too much because for some people they're really great.

someone's not gonna bring two, three, four lenses in the field and they need a lens that does it all. Ultimately, saving time changing lenses is a good thing. Ultimately, if this is the only way you're gonna get into photography, that's just how it has to be. But you will notice that you really can't have it all with these multipurpose lenses. When you get the advantage of the big focal range, you're gonna be dinged either on size and weight.

You're going be dinged on cost. Oftentimes they're more expensive than if you were to just get one lens, one quality lens in that range. And they're also going to be pretty poor on aperture rating. They're often variable apertures, meaning that if you have a 28 to 300, let's say it starts at f3.5, but when you zoom all the way in, you know, going from 28 to 300, at 300, it's 5.6 or 6.3 or maybe even the 400 millimeters. It's like 7.1.

So you're going to get dinged on those. more versatility in your focal range, the less you're going to have versatility in terms of having a good maximum aperture because we all like we all want as pros We all want those smallest F numbers for lenses like an F4. Gosh, like a 2.8. When you start getting out of that range, you're going to lose light. You're going to lose quality.

It's ultimately something that I'm relatively wary of and I don't want to go put a hard line in the sand that you should never have these lenses. Heck, I have a 100 to 500 millimeter lens and it's the same story. It's a f 4.5 to 7.1, but I am constantly aware that it gives me limitations. Now to get that same lens, that same ability in a much more pro level lens setup, it would not only cost me a kidney, but it would also mean that I have

probably a whole nother backpack that I have to bring with me on trips around the world. it's, you know, there just are limiting factors in place.

The last thing I want to talk about on the lens quality is that prime lenses are really the pros choice. They are cumbersome prime lenses basically mean they have a fixed focal length. So it's at a set focal length 200 millimeters 300 400 maybe even 600 and you cannot zoom. You have to compose your photos with that in mind. You can't just zoom in or zoom out to compose how you'd want. You can't shoot a landscape over to your left with

Beautiful wildflowers in a mountain and then zoom in on the mountain goat to your right the next second You're fixed at that focal length,

but they do give you a few main benefits. One is that they're always going to be sharper because there are less moving parts. There's technically less glass in some ways. So what glass is in there tends to be better. They're also almost always going to have a better aperture rating. Now there are a few exceptions out there, especially some of the more value lenses that are big primes like Canon, for instance, has a 600 millimeter and I think an 800 millimeter. One of them is like an F8 and one of them is an F11. Like that's not what I'm talking about.

But when you do go to those pro level primes, like a 24 millimeter prime, it's going to give you F 1.4. A 300 millimeter prime would give you 2.8. These are like the pinnacle of aperture ratings. You really can't do much better. And they not only give you more light, more quality, more background separation, which creates that really pro look, but they're ultimately going to be smaller in most cases, except for the really, really big primes like the 400 millimeters. But

They're going to be smaller, a little bit less versatile, but the quality just goes immensely up like it to an exponential degree. So consider primes. They have their place. For instance, I have a prime ultra wide angle lens in my pack for astrophotography because I'm not needing to do a whole lot of zoom.

big primes for wildlife safaris like the 300 or 400 F2.8 or the 600 F4, these are really the pinnacle of what you can get as far as primes go and as far as quality lenses go. But you will notice that while I might say that some primes are smaller and they cost less, those primes are the opposite. They cost several times more than the alternative and they are very, very big.

Nevertheless, just wanted to put it out there that that is the way pro photographers do get pro level shots as they've got those big primes.

I want to take a quick break and thank the sponsors of this episode. First up, I want to talk about the importance of printing your work because honestly, this is one of the simplest ways to elevate your photography and frankly love what you do more. This is where Bay Photo comes in. They are one of the top professional photo labs in the country and their quality is absolute top level.

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I'd also like to thank MPB and talk about something that every photographer bumps into sooner or later. It's that moment when you start eyeing your next piece of gear. And this is quite applicable to today's conversation. We're talking about lenses and cameras. Maybe your style's evolving. Maybe a lens just isn't pulling its weight anymore. Or maybe you're eyeing something new for an upcoming trip. Whatever it is, that upgrade cycle is a real thing. And this is exactly where MPB shines.

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Check out mpb.com. Okay, let's get back to it.

So I mentioned a couple of times in this episode and I've mentioned throughout the years of these episodes that background separation and depth of field is a huge thing for quality photography and the pros know this and the pros use it religiously. So background separation depth of field this is basically a way to get your subject to stand out from the background and this is something that you might be visualizing in your mind right now.

You're thinking of that photo of a bear in Alaska and it's tack sharp, know, just high quality. But then everything behind it is just nicely blurred. Or maybe there's some grass in the foreground that would otherwise be a distraction. And it's also nicely blurred. So when you get that shallow depth of field in your photography, particularly wildlife photography, you get instantly a very, very pro level look. So having a shallow depth of field

comes down to a few different things. One, you can get a lens that's capable of this. You can get one of those big primes like an F 2.8 or an F4, or you can position yourself and choose your own background. This is something I talk about a lot, is that if you create a much further distance between your subject and the background, you're gonna get a better background separation. So if you can pivot to the left or the right of the subject and get a background that is much further away than the alternative,

background separation is just going to be exaggerated even further and you're just going to get a beautiful background blur even with a kit lens, even with a simple lens, even with one that has not so great of an aperture rating like an f7.1 or even an f8. We do love our big apertures like our 2.8s and our f4s, but ultimately the biggest and best way to create that background separation

isn't the lens, it's you. It's you the photographer as you set up your shot, as you look around and see, well, if I move 30 feet to my right, I can actually change the background. So instead of the forest that's only 30 feet away from the subject, I can move around such that then the background is actually a mountain range that's like 10 miles away. That's gonna be the shot. That's what's gonna give you that pro level look. That's what's gonna give you that background separation that we all really, really covet.

Now with this lens blur as we call it, you can actually replicate this in your editing process. And there's a new feature in Camera Raw and Lightroom and Photoshop that is just simply put the lens blur feature. And you can click this on. It takes a few seconds to analyze the scene. It will actually try to replicate what a more shallow depth of field would look like through digital processes. And it's pretty great. I actually have an editing tutorial that is online right now on my YouTube channel.

that goes over a real time example of what this looks like, the challenges, the

but also ways to really make this pop. And yeah, it's a really nice tool. I will say that you can replicate lens blur in Camera Raw, in Lightroom, but not as well as you can in camera. So don't rely on it. Don't lean on it as your only tool. Think about that background separation. Think about the distance to the background. Think about

having that shallow depth of field that's achieved by a smaller F number, AKA bigger aperture, but also you can ramp it up a little bit more in Lightroom afterwards.

I should say caveat that not every scene actually benefits from having a shallow depth of field. We're really talking about wildlife portraiture and wildlife shots. When we're thinking of big landscapes, when we're thinking about things where you actually want everything in focus, no, a shallow depth of field really isn't gonna get you very far as far as a pro level look goes. But whether it's wildlife or

or single subjects and you really wanna get that beautiful

blur in the foreground and background, having that shallow depth of field is a sure fire way to create a pro level look in your photos.

Okay, so I want to dive into a bigger topic here and this is your shutter speed. So shutter speed is probably the number one way, especially for beginning and intermediate photographers

nail sharper photos. So of course the focus has to be right on the animal or the thing you're photographing. And of course you have to use depth of field appropriately, but nine times out of 10, at least when I was first starting out,

When I get back from a trip and I noticed that all this whole sequence of this amazing sighting, whether it was in a culture village visit in Papua New Guinea or with wildlife in Kenya, I found that I was oftentimes shooting at too slow of a shutter speed. was looking in the back of the camera in this little one inch LCD screen. I'd say, that looks pretty good. Okay, I'll keep on shooting.

with my 300 millimeter lens at 1/60th of a second. And mind you, this was 15, 20 years ago. So the image stabilization was nowhere near what it is today. But I found that.

I was oftentimes shooting on too slow of a shutter. So the rule of thumb, if you want to absolutely be sure you're shooting fast enough to freeze your own hand movement, is called the inverse focal length rule. And this is where you take your focal length, like I was shooting at 300 millimeters, maybe you're shooting at 200, maybe you're shooting at 400, and you shoot no slower than one over the focal length as your shutter speed. So that means on a 200 millimeter lens, you're shooting at 1 200th of a second with 300.

Do the math that's one over 300 400 millimeters is one of our 400 et cetera et cetera. So that's the surefire way. Now this doesn't talk about wildlife movement. We'll get to that next. But making sure you freeze your own hand movement is the first thing you got to do. You have to freeze your own hand movement before you consider anything else. So the inverse focal length rule is really really good. I will say that that rule was quote unquote invented or discovered or whatever you want to say before the world of image stabilization.

This is also not pertaining to tripod use because you're stabilizing some other way. This is all handheld shots. But with image stabilization, we do get some flexibility there. So if you have a lens that boasts a three stop image stabilizer in it, that means you can go three stops slower than the one over focal length rule to get the same stability in your shot. So as an example, if you're at one over 200 and you have a three stop stabilization, that means one over 100.

is one stop down. One over 50 is another stop. One over 25 is your third stop. So technically speaking, and notice the exaggeration of my tone here, technically speaking, you can shoot with a three stop image stabilized lens at one over 25, just like you would if you didn't have image stabilization on your lens or if it was turned off as if you were shooting at one over 200.

Now the big caveat here and the big reason for my hesitation and exaggerated tone here is that it doesn't really work quite like that all the time. Like to think that you can take a shot at 1 25th of a second, that's gonna be the same as 1 200th of a second. Just no way. So you can go a little bit slower than the 1 over focal length rule, but my advice to you is if you want to.

overcompensate, which is really the trick here and make sure you've got your hand movement frozen. One over the focal length is really the tried and true form. You can go one stop down from that. So instead of one over 200, you can get a one over 100. But more than that, I just get really, I get really twitchy. Like I don't, I don't trust myself. I don't trust the camera body. I don't trust the system. Like I don't go much more than half of the one over the focal length.

You want to be rock solid and make absolutely sure stick with one of the focal length. If you want to push your limits, go down by a half and anything beyond that, you're just going to have to do your own lens tests for. Remember, we all have different locomotion abilities in our hands and our bodies. Some of us are more stable than others. So you have to do some tests if you really want to push the limits here, which is why I'm giving you a relatively long winded, somewhat ambiguous answer here.

But nevertheless, that's the key. Remember, one of our focal length and maybe go by half if you're really pushed and needing to do so.

Now with wildlife, ⁓ usually you're shooting faster than you're one over the focal length rule because you have to freeze wildlife movement. So if you've got things that are walking or moving or running or bears sparring, you got to shoot a lot faster. Birds in flight, super fast. So my general rule of thumb here is to freeze motion of wildlife is if you get an animal that's just kind of moving on the ground, maybe it's a lion that's moving its head.

from left to right, just slowly, just kind of looking around, sort of blinking. You know, I would say one over 320, one over 400 is pretty good. It's a pretty good starting point. You want to be really safe, go to one over 500. Now, if that animal is actually moving, like walking, you want to go instantly to one over 500, maybe one over 640. Now, if that walk turns into a trot or a run or anything really dynamic, I'm going one over 640, one over 800, maybe even one over a thousand.

Now I realize that we're talking about fast shutter speeds here and you heard me talk about shooting in low light conditions and ISOs and all that. You have to push the limits in some ways but I'm just giving the ideal scenario. So oftentimes when I'm in front of wildlife I'll actually be changing my shutter speed based on what movement it's exhibiting in that very moment. So think about a polar bear.

walking on the tundra. starting, shooting at 1 over 320. I'm reviewing my shot. I'm zooming in. Okay. Wasn't sharp enough. I'm going with a 1 over 500. It continues to walk. Oh, it's sitting down and it's laid down. Oh, now it's motionless. I'm back down to 320. Oh, it's not doing anything. It's sleeping. Okay. I'm down to 1 over 200 because every time I slow my shutter speed down, I'm getting a lower and lower ISO in my camera.

hear in a little bit,

Low ISOs are another way to get really, really pro level looking photos. But the trick here is that any sort of blur in the wildlife is going to botch the shot. You don't want blur in your wildlife when you're trying to get that crisp, sharp image. So getting those settings dialed in, shooting maybe a little bit faster than you think, ramping up quickly. I mentioned birds in flight. That's one over 1600, one over 2000th of a second. So there's a huge variability here.

and where you're going to start from and where you might end based on the exact species, the exact behavior, but making sure you shoot fast enough is a really, really good way to get that pro level look. It's not so much that the faster you shoot, the more pro it becomes. It's more like, if you don't shoot fast enough, you can do everything else I'm talking about in this episode. And it's going to instantly ding it down from pro level If that wildlife is blurred now,

Another big caveat here, let's talk about slow shutter with wildlife photography. Let's talk about intentionally doing the blur, intentional motion blur with wildlife. I said earlier that you don't want any blur in wildlife. That's not always the case, but there is a sweet spot, or I should say there's an unsweet spot between a slightly blurred wildlife and where you start to get into an intentional blurred scene. Intentional motion blur in photography is a beautiful thing. And probably the most common example is

is when you see waterfalls that are blurred, you get that silky waterfall effect. I've got a whole episode on that. ⁓ You might see a plane taking off and it's got some blurred background to it. The switch away from nature photography, if you see bike races or motorcycle races or auto races and there's some blur and some motion blur with the vehicle, that's really nice because it imbues this motion, this action in the shot. You're getting something that...

People don't often see in photography and you're leveling yourself up to that pro level.

So again, I think most people when they think of the proper shutter speed for a given photo, they start off by thinking, how do I freeze motion of my hand and of the subject that I'm photographing? And that's great. That probably is a good starting point. But to get a really next level photo, adding some motion blur in your shot can give you that real game changing look. So start thinking outside the box and inject motion blur into your photos. Some example would be moving people, a busy market.

⁓ wildlife that's running across a grassland, vehicles, even clouds. Like maybe you have a tripod and you set your shutter on a 10 second exposure as the clouds are whipping by or maybe you're photographing a palm tree in the wind and you shoot it one fourth of a second and you get just enough

motion in the scene to do something different. I can't say what each and every shot needs but nevertheless thinking to the other side of the equation and actually injecting some motion blur in your shot can be a really great thing. I recall back to a photo I took a number of years ago, I was fortunate enough to be seeing two big male polar bears sparring in the tundras of the Canadian Arctic.

and know, big paws were flying and swatting each other. They're just play fighting. This is what sparring is like in the Arctic. But nevertheless, I thought for a second, well, I've got all the frozen motion shots that I want. I've got the moment that the paw made contact with the face and the expression of the polar bear and the snarl with its canines exposed. And I said, well, what could I do differently? Because I've now taken the shot that I want and I started slowing my shutter slower and slower and slower. I was starting off by shooting it.

you know, 1 800th of a second and then went down to 100. Then I got a little bit of blur and I thought, well, that's that unsweet spot where the photo is a little bit blurred. So I started going slower and slower. went down to 1 15th of a second and it got to the point where there was enough motion blur that myself and the viewer of the photo knows exactly what was happening. This is intentional motion blur and it turned out just so beautiful and it's still one of my favorite photos of polar bears.

because I thought different, I thought outside the box. So the real takeaway from this is get into that slow shutter photography. To me, slow shutter photography really starts more or less in an arbitrary level around 1/40th of a second, but it can be down all the way down to 10 seconds, 20 seconds, but roughly 1/40th to like 1/5 of a second is kind of where you can most reasonably be handheld.

And I should say, 1 fifth of a second is only if you're shooting with an ultra wide angle lens, otherwise very, very hard to hold 1 fifth of a second shutter speed completely still, especially with telephotos.

For slow shutter photography, is the final thing I'm going to mention here, is that you might need what's called a neutral density filter or an ND filter. If you're trying to shoot midday of a waterfall or of busy traffic or a palm trees blowing in the wind, you might find that you get down to one full second of exposure. You you're putting your ISO all the way down to 100, meaning it's the least amount of light and your aperture is all the way up at F 22. So you've dialed your camera into the least amount of light humanly possible.

and you might find that it's still overexposing your shot. These neutral density filters or ND filters, just ND, is a great solution to this. It's not something that I use all that often, but when I need it, I'm so glad that I have it in the kit. So getting a neutral density filter basically blocks out the light. It's like a sunglass lens for your camera. So that way you can get that light just right in camera and also frankly not have to shoot at F22 to get that pinhole aperture.

So ND filters are a great thing to invest in, to put in your bag and to have ready when you see those slow shutter opportunities.

Okay, so let's talk about tripods and stabilization.

You want to sure fire way to level up your landscape photography to get to that pro level. A tripod is going to be your best friend. Now this is also coming from the guy that often is in the camp of not using a tripod. I tend to be handheld for 95 % of my shots. I really only use a tripod when I absolutely have to.

But when I'm in front of something gorgeous, I'm in a golden hour in a beautiful valley in one of the US national parks, and I just want to nail this shot, a tripod is going to be that next level component. It's going to be that next level piece of gear. So having a tripod and using it in those scenarios where you know you want to get a low ISO, we're going to talk about ISO here very, very soon.

but getting those landscape shots where you can get on F11 and ISO 100 and not worry about the shutter speed is huge. Again, I'm overusing this term in this episode, but it is a game changer.

So thinking about

tripods for next level pro level landscape photography is a really, really great thing. My advice for tripods, again, I have a whole episode on this, but I think, you know, get something that is big, something that's kind of heavy. It's got to be stable. And most importantly, it's got to be easy and friendly to use. Far be it for me to say whether you should prefer a twist lock type leg system.

or whether you'd rather have a snap clip like leg system, whether you want four extensions or three extensions to the tripod, whether you need something super small and travel friendly. But the gist here is that tripods can be a great, great tool to get to that pro level, but you have to be willing to use them. Simply put, I think that investing in a cheap tripod that's not very stable, that is not very travel friendly is a really good way to never use your tripod. So if you want to get those pro level shots,

and you want to use your tripod, invest in something good. know, aluminum is a great material, but carbon fiber is better. It's a heck of a lot more expensive, but it's better. But I guarantee you, you're going to use your tripod more because it's easier, because it's better, because you get better shots from it. So to stack the deck in your favor, think about tripods, invest in a good one and start bringing it to a lot of places. And again, the whole idea here, I'm just going to underline this point and then we'll move on.

is that it gives you the ability to shoot on the aperture you want, which is usually, you know, F8, F11 for landscapes and a very, very low ISO, like ISO 100, the lowest it'll go and simply not worry about shutter speed. If you're worried about freezing that hand movement, like I talked about in the previous section, you're going to be limited. You're going to be limited to bumping your ISO up to 1600 or you can't go above an aperture of 5.6 and those little choices, those little decisions

will drop your pro level status of that photo down to just really great, which is fine. That's a okay. And I'm pretty happy with that. A lot of times when I'm photographing is I don't need perfection. But if you want something pro, you want something that's going to be, you know, in a gallery on your wall, get picked up by media, do really well on various platforms. That pro level

is something that oftentimes require tripods,

particularly with landscape photography and low light photography.

I want to take a quick break and thank art helper.com. Art Helper's mission is to create a brighter future for human artists in a world of really infinite AI content these days. And it's just kind of getting more and more, especially on social. Art Helper is no longer just a powerful tool set designed to assist artists in the distribution and promo of their work. It's always been great at that, but it's now a professional networking community for creators of human made art. It's an energizing real time feed of artwork discussions.

critiques and art world news.

Most importantly, it's absolutely free to join. So go to arthelper.com and sign up and check out their amazing art communities. You can even start your own. And they also have, as you'll probably see, a very, very robust set of tools for photographers, like I mentioned with the promo and wall mockups all sorts of really, really cool stuff when it comes to visualizing your art in the home.

So next up, want to talk about something that involves a little bit more of the creative side of pro level photos. And this is making use of high and low key tonalities. This means really, really dark shots or really, really light shots. Essentially, these are improper air quotes, improper exposures. I think that we're often pigeonholed into getting perfect exposures because that's what our cameras usually set on. That's what we usually expect to be the right thing.

things that are just evenly exposed. It's like what the eye sees. However, we're not making use of a very, very artistic tool, which is again, setting very high and low keys for your photos. This can give you on the low key end of things, a very dark and moody scene. On the high key, it can be very light and bright. ⁓

There are lot of really great ways to force yourself into experimenting with high and low key photography, but one of the things I've found best for me is just spending a little bit of time on any photo trip or any photo day or any photo walk and just forcing myself to do this via the spot metering tool. So I'm very often on a full scene metering when I'm taking my photographs. This means that the camera is evaluating the entire frame to figure out where the exposure should be set.

how much light and dark is in the scene. And it's doing a pretty good job averaging. However, with spot metering, you go into your exposure metering section and you're just choosing the dead middle of your frame. So what this allows you to do is

viewfinder over a subject, over a mountain, over a sky, over a sunset, it's going to expose for only that dead middle of the frame. And what this often allows you to do is get perfect exposure for that thing in the middle, but it's going to ignore the rest of the scene. So when you have these really dynamic range, like very, very varied lighting conditions,

you're gonna get some really interesting high and low key photos from it. So I think this is a really good entry point for folks that haven't tried high and low key photography is using spot metering to basically select, you know, hover that middle part over the brightest part of the scene, take that photo and see what it looks like, hover it over the darkest parts of your scene, take the photo and see what it looks like. And you'll find that it changes the exposure so much. I'm not saying it's gonna be great every single time, but you're gonna get the hang of it and start to realize that,

I didn't realize that when these monarch butterflies were sitting in perfect sunlight, but the forest around them is quite dark. I can actually expose much darker just for the monarch butterflies. This could be a butterfly in your garden. It could be actually in the migration colonies in Mexico, but it could be really anything where something's in the sun. You expose for it using a spot metering tool and the background gets even darker than what you're seeing in real life.

And the converse is possible with things that are in the shade. So I took a photo a number of years ago where a group of wildebeest, a I suppose I should say, a herd of wildebeest was huddled under a shade tree. And so they were relatively dark, whereas the rest of the setting, the rest of the scene was quite bright, big Serengeti sunlight. And so I exposed for those dark shaded shadowy wildebeest, it brightened them up to normal exposure. And then everything else was very, very bright all around it. This is normally

not what we like to do because a lot was overexposed. It was a very high key photo. But what it did is it had this beautiful glow to it that almost made it look like an infrared photo. If you've ever seen those out there and it's a really artistic way to inject some creativity in your scene

get some pro looking shots from it.

Now, this is also a great thing to do at those midday times of day. Remember I was saying this is a challenging time. often photograph in black and white because of the harsh shadows, the harsh

the harsh highlights. But what a great time of day to experiment with these high and low key photos to force yourself into some real interesting artistic looks.

Now one thing you may be wondering is, well, court, if only the dead middle of my frame chooses the exposure and you're saying put that in front of the

doesn't that mean my subjects just can be in the dead middle of my frame each and every time and doesn't that fly in the face of good balance and composition and rule of thirds and creative composition photography? Yes, absolutely, it does. So you have a few options. One is you can just do that and.

you know, hope for the best and plan to crop later. Another great thing about these these big sensors, you can crop later or you can find your auto exposure lock button on your camera. And in Canon systems, the little asterisk in Nikon and Sony, it's a little AEL button, I believe AEL for auto exposure lock. And you can hit that when your little center point of your viewfinder is over the wildlife. So it is exposed and it locks the exposure from anywhere from eight to 15 seconds.

You can technically customize that in your camera for however long you want, but it locks in your exposure. So then you can recompose your shot, take the photo with the rule of thirds with some sort of balancing composition.

and you get to more or less have your cake and eat it

exposure lock is a really great tool for that.

Next up I want to talk about ISO. This is a very, very important one for pro photos.

And this goes for whether you have a big sensor or a small sensor. Simply put, the lower the ISO, the better the quality. So you want to be at the lowest ISO possible all the time. That's why I often talk about pushing my shutter speed a little bit lower than I would otherwise liked, because what I'm trying to do is get my ISO to be lower and lower and lower.

This is also why I'm saying using a tripod for landscapes is great because you can get your ISO lower and lower and lower with these new fancy cameras, especially with full is tempting

be shooting on ISO 400, 800 heck even 1600 most of the time because it gives you incredible abilities. You can have run of the show with your shutter speed and the photos look pretty darn good. Like they're not noisy.

You know, a full frame camera shot at 1600 ISO with a new camera as of today looks like what a camera many years ago would be at with ISO 200 or 400. It's that good. But as a result, ISO 200 of today's cameras looks even better. So just because you can get away with a high ISO doesn't mean you should. The lower the ISO, the better your photo. Not only is it a better quality photo, but it also gives you a lot more editing capabilities.

Okay, so the lower the ISO, the more you can edit and tweak your photo afterwards, you can adjust the highlights and the shadows and the contrasts and all sorts of stuff. So simply put, if you can aim for an ISO of one or 200, that's going to give you the best quality photos. Now I'll be the first to say you do not get to have that all the time, especially in low light conditions. And we're talking about a golden hour. We're talking about having fast shutter speeds. These are all mutually exclusive,

very head butting type concepts. So even though I'm saying this is ideal, I realize it's not always possible or practical, but nevertheless, one great way to get a very pro level look is to get lower and lower on your ISO. This might mean getting a better lens to have a smaller F number. This might mean using a tripod in a scenario that you wouldn't normally use a tripod, but if you can get that ISO lower, start thinking about

just a couple hundred in your ISO increments, that's marginally better. If you can slice it in half and then half again, that's gonna be demonstrably better. So just really think about getting that low ISO and it's gonna serve you really well in the future of your photo career.

So I mentioned editing and this is gonna be the last topic I speak of today because editing is really the final leg of the race and great photographers, pro photographers edit like pros as well. ⁓

also say that photography is art and art is very subjective. So what I think one should do for editing is not always what is a one size fits all for everybody else. I might like really bright colorful images. You might want something more subdued. We talked about the high and the low key stuff. You might say, I really hate the low key stuff. I don't like dark, moody, gloomy shots. I really only want the bright things. That is up to you.

But editing can give you more tools than ever via today's Lightroom and Camera Raw. And it's just a huge part of the pro level look.

But nevertheless, here are some considerations. The first one is I recommend, you know, to get that pro level look, don't over edit. Simply put, the more you edit an image, even at those low ISOs, the more it degrades your photo. The more you can keep the integrity, the clarity, limit the noise and grain in your shot, the better your photo is going to be. That also means the more you can get your photo right in camera, the better your photo is going to be on that pro level spectrum.

But one thing I want to call your attention to, particularly when it comes to over editing is over editing your shadows. We've seen some game changers in editing capabilities in the last three to five years, particularly with the ability to pull light out of shadowy areas. And it's very, very tempting to increase the light in shadows. There's a slider in Lightroom. There's an auto shadow button. You know, if you hold down shift and hit that, like it's just, it's really easy. And I will be honest,

when you start playing around with that, it might make photos look better at first as you start to see more detail and more colors, but it's so easy to abuse. And I'll be honest, when I see pro-level photos, I'm always amazed at how many people leave in the highlights, leave in the overexposures and the underexposures.

I don't think our job is to get the histogram absolutely perfect every time. Our job is to create art that's compelling and interesting to look at. That's sort of our mission. So trying not to make a photo perfectly exposed, trying not to increase the light and shadows and heck, even reduce highlights all the time. I think it's something that we easily fall into a trap of, and I just wanted to call that out specifically.

The next thing is calibrate your monitor.

Pro photographers calibrate their monitors very often because what you're seeing in the monitor with a backlit screen with how the black values are portrayed and the bright values are portrayed, how colors are portrayed, the white balance of your screen may not be perfect. It may not be the white balance that Photoshop or your camera is giving you. So you can start to see skewed colors, not because of what your camera is doing, not because of what you, artist is doing.

but simply because you haven't calibrated your screen. And I have to say, I just picked up one of these Spyder Pro monitor calibrators. Wasn't cheap, it was a couple hundred bucks, but within five minutes, my monitor was perfectly calibrated and it's actually been a pretty big game changer for me. Same thing goes for the monitor brightness. This Pro level Spyder actually adjusts brightness too. But one of the quick ways, if you don't have a calibrator to adjust brightness when you're editing photos,

is usually aimed for 70 to 80 % brightness on a monitor, and that's gonna be closest across a spectrum of media, whether it's print, whether it's social, whether it's online, various things. It's gonna be the closest like what the eye sees. However, close only counts in horseshoes. If you really, really wanna nail your brightness and your color values on your monitor as you're editing, you do need to think about editing for the exact medium you are gonna be putting your photo through.

In other words, if you're going to be largely posting your photos online where other people are looking at them from backlit screens, you don't need to think as much. You you're looking on a backlit screen, a monitor, they're looking at it on a phone or a tablet or a laptop. If you start to print your work, Another great thing about these monitor calibrators is you can actually preview what your work would look like on print, on your screen, through all the technological gizmos and software that it has.

And I can tell you when I first started printing my photos back in the day, I was a bit dismayed that in print my photos looked substantially darker than they did on screen. And when you think about it, that's kind of obvious. You're looking at it from a backlit screen, a light, even in the darkness, even in the black spots are exuding light into your eyeballs. And so when you're looking at on paper, it's not backlit. You're just seeing the color values for what they are.

So if you start to pay attention to how your photos will ultimately end up, like what you're doing with your photos and start either calibrating your monitor for this or just simply editing for it, realizing that you might need to make them a little bit brighter if you're printing these things, it's going to make it a huge game changer and the pros absolutely do this.

You might want to consider working with presets. A lot of pro photographers, especially commercial photographers, if they're printing for magazines or for hotels or for people photography or even for pro nature and wildlife photography, they they pick a style. And I'm not talking about like a photo style or a picture style in your camera.

They pick a style that's in Lightroom. They like to go for certain hues and tones, almost like a color palette. I'll be honest, this is something that I have not been very good at over the years. My style has changed and evolved. You'll probably note, I ask a lot of my photographer guests when I do have conversations on this podcast, that it's one of the things I ask every single person is, what is your photo style and has it changed and has it evolved? And I do find that for many, many people I talk with is, yeah, their photo style has evolved throughout the years.

So I don't want to say that you have to pick one and stick with it, but that is a consideration is to work with those presets. Think about standardizing your photos across the board because one of the really cool things about pro photographers, like the really ultra pros is when you look at their photo, you can say, ⁓ that's a such and such photo. And you can tell because they tend to have more muted tones in this end of the spectrum. They tend to have more high key values in this part of the S curve, et cetera, et cetera.

really dial all that in so you can become known as a photographer because you have a certain look to your shots. Again, something I, in full transparency, have not been very good with. I don't think people can really tell, that's a court whelan shot. But nevertheless, it's something that if I were just starting out, ⁓ I might pick a very specific style, at least for the next few years,

and stick with it to allow my images to sort of transcend individual shots and create a little bit of a portfolio around a mood that I want to imbue into my style of photography.

The final thing I'm to mention with editing, I realize that I'm talking more about kind of exceptions in warning signs than the rules, but I want to talk about being careful with denoise So denoise, once again, the last few years has just had a meteoric rise. It's increased our ability to reduce grain and noise out of very high ISO shots. Programs like Topaz, Lightroom now has

Camera Raw now has it. And it's really kind of miraculous when you take a shot that's

12,500 ISO or 25,600 ISO and you denoise it and you rescue it. And it's like a pretty good shot at the end. ⁓ Sometimes we just have to use it. Sometimes this is an unworkable, unshareable, unpostable, uncontributable image if you're working with ⁓ magazines and whatnot. Like they just won't take it. So in some shots, it's really a requirement, but I'm gonna recommend that.

Even in those cases, you do need to be very, very careful because what denoise does is it ultimately unsharpens your image and then resharpens it. And so there is this kind of look around heavily denoised images. I think honestly, it's starting to look a little bit like how AI does. It's just a little bit soft and it's a little bit weirdly sharp in certain ways. And so this isn't to say don't denoise at all. This isn't to say don't rescue those shots that wouldn't otherwise be usable.

but it is to give you a warning that when you're using denoise on shots that don't really need it, but you're doing it just to play it safe, you might be degrading your shot and you might be reducing it from that pro level look. Sometimes noise is okay. Honestly, like noise, it's part of the art. It's the imperfections. I mean, there are cameras and filters and even lenses that now give you that vintage camera look. So I wouldn't be afraid of it in all cases. And certainly I don't use denoise when I'm...

you know, under a certain ISO range where it just isn't necessary. Like there's just not enough noise to really worry about it. So just keep in mind, Denoise, it's a great tool.

having a moment, but it's not a be all, end all, save all type tool.

And the last thing I'll mention

did talk about this in previous section, but is the lens blur feature. I think this is a really cool tool. It works best when you start off with a photo that already has a nice background separation and already has a nice lens blur, but it's pretty impressive at what it can do. can just add a little bit more background separation, a little bit more umph. It's very easy to abuse it. You don't want to go full tilt on

But if you want to take your photos to the next level using a little bit of lens blur on those already great portrait like shots, it might take a shot that was shot at f4 and make it look like it was shot at f2.8. Again, bigger primes, higher quality lenses. So lens blur is a really good thing to consider in editing.

All right, and there you go. Deep dive into various ways to get that pro level look. We talked about using slow shutters, the time of day, lens quality, all sorts of stuff. I hope you enjoyed. As I mentioned, if you would like to comment on this episode, I'd love to hear from you. Bop on over to my YouTube channel. That's just at Court Whelan Leave me a comment, leave me a question, leave me ideas and suggestions for future episodes. I've got a number of good ones in the hopper for the rest of this year.

but I would really love to hear from you all as to what is most important to you, what topics, what directions you'd like me to take. And maybe most importantly, if you'd like to review this podcast, it definitely helps me. This podcast is absolutely free. But the one thing you can help me with in return is if you'd like to leave up to a five star review, know, hint, hint on Apple or Spotify, it really does help me continue to grow this podcast and keep on helping you out as photographers out there. So.

Once again, friends, it's been great and looking forward to talking to you next time.


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Court Whelan

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