The 7 Photo Tips I Teach on DAY ONE of my Guided Photo Adventures

In this episode of The Wild Photographer, Court shares the core lessons he teaches at the beginning of every photography trip. These are the foundational tips that help guests quickly gain more creative control, troubleshoot challenging field conditions, and start making stronger nature and wildlife images from the very first outing.

Whether you’re heading on safari, photographing bears in Alaska, chasing landscapes in Iceland, or simply trying to get more out of your camera, these are the habits that can make a huge difference.

The 7 Things

1.  Move off full auto 
2.  Practice exposure compensation 
3.  Use center point autofocus 
4.  Work on composition and visual balance 
5.  Remember to zoom out 
6.  Choose your background 
7.  Choose your white balance 

Court's Websites

• Check out my photo portfolio here: shop.courtwhelan.com
• Sign up for my photo and conservation blog at www.courtwhelan.com
• Follow me on YouTube (@courtwhelan) for more photography tips
• View my camera kit and recommended camera gear

Sponsors and Promo Codes:

• MPB.com - Buy, Sell, or Trade Camera Gear
• ArtStorefronts.com - Mention this podcast for free photo website design
• BayPhoto.com - 25% off your first order (code: TWP25) 
• ArtHelper.com - a photo community to learn, share and be inspired
• Arthelper.Ai - Smart tools to promo and showcase your art.
• LensRentals.com - WILD15 for 15% off

Transcript

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Court Whelan (00:00)
Hey friends, welcome back to The Wild Photographer. As you may know, I have been guiding photo trips around the world for over 20 years. And while my advice and help throughout any nature adventure that I'm guiding is very tailored to the individual, there are lots of different skill levels, lots of different interests on my trips. There are some standard bits of advice, tips and tricks that I always start out every trip with to basically make sure my group is all on the same page.

It's no matter if folks have years of experience or are just starting out. As you can imagine, there are so many variations to how you can take and make great photographs, but these things I'm talking about in today's episode really work well for me. And I can just tell you from years of experience of seeing the improvement and the feedback from my actual photography trip guests, really just, these things instantly elevate their photography

I guess you could say you're kind of getting a crash course into one of my full photo trips in just this one episode. That's good stuff, right? Before we begin, I wanted to do a quick mention for my YouTube channel because I'm really doubling down on my Lightroom and Camera Raw editing series So if you want to check out my full workflow for how I begin editing a single photo of a single type and category, I basically

edit in real time with the screen share. It's really quite cool. I'm having a lot of fun with it and I've gotten some great feedback. It's visual, obviously. if you want to check it out, you can go to the link in my show notes or just go to youtube.com slash at court whelan And you can follow along with me in real time to see how I edit.

really a diversity of photos, whether it's jungle wildlife, astrophotography, night scenes, landscape stuff. It's just the whole gamut. And I'm trying to publish these like near weekly. So there's a lot of stuff coming out already, or there has been a lot of stuff coming out and I'm to be doing this in perpetuity. yeah, great, great tool there to kind of compliment this podcast to see visually what I do when I get back to the studio, and how I process my images. Cause

Let's be honest, that's a huge leg of the relay race we're talking about here. Also, if you'd like to get in touch with me, probably the best way these days, whether you want to ask a question, suggest a new episode topic, just leave a comment in one of my photography YouTube videos. It could be these editing videos. It could be anything else. I get a notification and I see every single comment. You know, frankly, it helps the YouTube channel to get comments too. So I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that.

but I do see them and it's a great way to be in touch. found it's the most consistent way to leave me a note, to ask a question, to suggest things for future episodes. I would genuinely love to hear from you.

Before we begin, also want to acknowledge a couple of the sponsors of this show. First up, it's arthelper.com. Art Helper's mission is to create a brighter future for human artists in this world of infinite AI content. We're hearing more and more of this. Art Helper is no longer just a powerful tool set designed to assist artists in things like promotion and distribution of their work. They've always been doing that. They started off with doing that, but now it's this kind of professional networking community via their community page.

for creators of human-made art. It's really an energizing, real-time feed of artwork, kind of like a social media platform where you can have discussion, critique, and stay on top of art world news.

Most importantly, it is absolutely free to join. So go to www.arthelper.com and you can sign up, check out their amazing art communities, as well as their time-honored robust set of tools for promoting your photography, whether you have your own photo website, or whether you work with them on developing website. It's really an amazing, amazing tool. And I want to thank them very genuinely for sponsoring this show.

Next up, want to think MPB and I want to talk about something that is very constant in my photography career and really something that most photographers bump into sooner or later. It's that time when you are eyeing your next piece of gear, whether it's for a specific trip, whether it is just a wish list, whether it's just something you want to have in your kit forever. Who knows? Maybe your style is evolving. Maybe one of your previous lenses, your current lenses just isn't pulling its weight anymore. And you've got your eye on something new.

MPB is hands down one of the easiest ways I have found to buy, sell or trade camera gear without the usual hassle of online marketplaces. The really big thing for me is trust here because you're dealing with, you know, multi hundreds or thousands of dollars of equipment either on the selling or buying end of things. And with MPB, just, you're not rolling the dice on some random listing. And when you buy stuff,

Get the peace of mind that every item is very carefully inspected, tested, and photographed for their online website individually. So what you see is what you get. Plus there's a warranty and very easy, no hassle returns. On the flip side, if you've got gears sitting around on the shelf collecting dust, you want to start saving for your next lens. you want to start a little photo travel budget. MPB makes selling ridiculously simple as well. You get a quote fast, like instantaneous on their website.

You ship it off to them with free, insured shipping, and once they check it out, you get paid directly. There's no back and forth, there's no meetups, there's no guesswork. So whether you're upgrading your kit, simplifying what you carry, MPB is absolutely worth checking out. Buy, or trade, and keep on doing what you love out there with photography.

Okay, so now let's get into the show. The seven things I teach my guests at the start of every photo adventure. okay, first off, we are talking about moving off of full auto, going to P for program or aperture, or really the best combination of all is my tried and true settings, which is full manual mode plus auto ISO. Okay,

So this is a progression of things, especially if you are used to shooting on full auto, no shame, no hate, there's no problem with that. The cameras do a pretty darn good job most of the time. But as you're about to see in all the subsequent part of this list, you can't change these things if you're on full auto. So at very least you wanna go to P for program mode. This is gonna give you creative controls, things like I'm gonna talk about next. It's gonna dial in the shutter speed and aperture for you, so you do not have control of that.

but at least allows you to change things like exposure compensation and auto focus point and white balance and all that sort of stuff. Better yet, go to aperture mode. Aperture mode is something that I shot on for many, many years. It basically allows you to choose your own aperture, which is by far and away the most creative control you have over your camera. Aperture basically just changes your depth of field, whether you want something very, very shallow for portraiture work or...

for complex scenes where you want to blur that background and have the subject or something in the near foreground and tack sharp focus. Aperture priority mode is great. The only downside is that you have to ⁓ rely on the camera for choosing your shutter speed. And in the world of nature and wildlife photography, landscape photography as well, this is not really the ideal. You have very specific settings based on the movement of the wildlife.

You might want to have a really slow shutter if you're photographing on a tripod for an early morning landscape photo. So what I've found is best is to have control over your aperture, over your shutter speed, being on manual mode, but then letting your camera choose the ISO for you by setting your camera on auto ISO. So again, the transition here is getting off of full auto. I don't recommend shooting on full auto at all when you're getting into kind of pressing conditions and challenging conditions, which is

what a lot of nature and wildlife and landscape photography is, get to P, but better yet, if you can force yourself to get on full manual plus auto ISO, it's a brilliant combination of settings. So what this allows you to do is of course change the aperture so you can dictate the depth of field. You can choose a very deep depth of field. So everything's in focus, like an F8 or F11. You can do a very shallow depth of field, like an F4 or even 2.8 if you have a lens capable of that. And then the camera chooses ISO for you.

based on what it thinks is proper lighting conditions. And I know that some of you in the audience may be shooting on full, full manual mode where you are choosing ISO as well. And that's absolutely an option. But then to adjust exposure, you have to rely either on the histogram, rely on what the LCD screen looks like, which is, know, frankly not all that accurate. if you're shooting in dark dimly lit conditions versus bright conditions, that LCD screen might be completely out of whack.

And ultimately it just saves me time. So when I do want to adjust exposure, I can do that in the camera. And that's actually my next topic is exposure compensation. so when I do want to adjust exposure, I can use the exposure compensation meter and brighten the shot. And what it does is it doesn't touch aperture. It doesn't touch shutter speed. Cause I know what I want. I know I want a fast shutter speed of one over a thousand for that running cheetah or, you know, probably even faster.

I know I want a slow shutter speed when I'm really pushing dimly lit conditions, but rather than fuddle with ISO to change my exposure, I use the very easy, very handy exposure compensation tool in the camera. And so that indeed is the topic of number two. The number two bit of advice here is getting familiar and practicing with exposure compensation. I can't tell you how many times this is the biggest game changer for nature and wildlife photography. And again,

You can't do this if you're on full auto. You can do it if you're on any of the other settings, including P for program. But exposure compensation, it's not rocket science. You basically just dial your camera to the plus end in thirds of increments or thirds of a stop to brighten your photo. And you go down to the negative end if you want to darken your photo.

So each situation is really quite different. I can't say that for every time I go out the door, I'm setting my camera at a positive exposure compensation or every time going at negative. There are some very tried and true examples, like when I'm photographing polar bears on white snow, I'm going to force my camera to overexpose to adjust for those conditions. When you're shooting things that have a preponderance of white in the scene, your camera will meter.

to make it a little bit darker because it's trying to meter for this very fancy thing of 18 % gray across the pixels. I don't want to lose you here, but exposure compensation is a really, really big thing because you can adjust the light and the dark of your scene based on your conditions. So again, you would look to your photo guide, you would look to the settings, you would change. I've changed my exposure dozens, if not hundreds of times a day. But if you haven't.

dived into exposure compensation. If you haven't made it really easy for yourself to change that on the fly, frankly, without even looking at your camera, you know, go into your camera settings and change one of the dials that you're not using to exposure compensation. So you can quickly with your thumb or your index finger, increase the brightness, decrease the brightness to adjust your exposure and your scene on the fly. Again,

A lot of times I do leave my camera on an even exposure or just a slightly underexposed shot because there's the old adage that it is much easier to brighten a photo that's too dark than to darken a photo that's too bright when we're talking about Photoshop Lightroom Camera RAW. So if I'm gonna err on any side universally, it is to underexpose my shot by about one third, but ultimately even or zero is pretty darn good.

But I'm thinking in my mind of all these situations where I'm forcing one or the other, I'm forcing exposure to the positive side, I'm forcing it to the negative side. Like I mentioned, photographing when you have a preponderance of a lot of lights in a scene or a lot of darks. I mentioned the polar bear example, but going to the other end of the spectrum, if I'm photographing mountain gorillas in Rwanda or Uganda, there is a lot of dark in the scene, especially if I'm zooming in and filling the frame with the face of a gorilla.

Most of the scene is dark. So if you leave your camera on zero and don't touch it, your camera is gonna think it needs to brighten that scene because it's trying to adjust for the preponderance of darkness and actually achieve that 18 % gray across the pixels. So when I'm photographing things that are natively very dark, I'm going to underexpose my shot a little bit. When I'm photographing things that are just naturally very bright, I'm gonna overexpose slightly.

But there are so many other situations when I'm photographing, let's say midday in monarch butterfly colonies where the sun is radiating, is creating this brightness off of the butterfly wings. I'm going to underexpose significantly most of my photos, like minus one full stop. So this is not the time to tell you exactly every scenario to adjust your exposure compensation. Cause there are many, many, many, many examples.

But one thing I want every single guest of mine to be familiar with by the time we actually start a photography is how to quickly adjust exposure via your exposure compensation tool in your camera. And if you're new to this, one quick thing would be to find the little plus or minus button on your camera. It literally is a plus and a minus in a button or a little box. And that is going to be your shortcut to be able to dial exposure brighter or darker. So exposure compensation, cannot over...

state how important that is to be versed in when you're going on nature photography adventures.

The next thing I want my guests to dial in is a center point auto focus. So a lot of times when cameras come new out of the box or especially if you're shooting on full auto mode is your camera is gonna choose where in the scene the focus is achieved. Like there's a little moving box, maybe it's a green box or a red box depending on your camera making model. As you press that shutter halfway down to get your camera to focus, that box might move.

That is bad. That is not what you want for nature photography. It might be good for people photography because cameras are particularly good about picking up people. But when you're trying to photograph a little brown bird deep in the bushes, you need to have a very reliable, very specific, very center point autofocus to achieve what you're trying to get out of that. So usually you go in your autofocus settings. It's oftentimes a button on your camera and you can choose.

Essentially a spectrum from the full frame autofocus all the way down to a very middle point in the dead middle of your frame. yes, cameras are advancing at an incredible rate and there's these amazing tracking autofocus abilities. That's really, really good. Like I use that, but not anywhere near as much as I use center point autofocus. Like I might use tracking autofocus 10 % of all my photography when it's, you know, birds in flight, breaching whales.

Subjects that are on the move and I can't actually use my center point autofocus So the point here is that I default to just having one very very small box to autofocus in the dead middle of my frame So when I am tracking a lion on the savannahs of Africa or looking at polar bears wandering the tundras of the Arctic I want to make sure that I know which box where in my frame I need to focus on to achieve perfect focus and then recompose

So obviously if we have a center point autofocus and you just hold the shutter halfway down and take the shot, your subject is going to be in the dead middle of your frame each and every time. And that's usually not what I want. not saying it's wrong. Some shots are beautiful with the subject in the middle of the frame, but oftentimes I'm trying to offset it a little bit, but going into your camera and setting just the smallest center point autofocus is something that I want everybody to be on by default. You're going to find if you're not already using this, that you achieve perfect focus the vast majority of time.

much quicker than you otherwise would be able to.

The next thing I want to talk about, and this is a bigger topic, but is compositional techniques. This is how you compose your photos. This is how you make your photo. This is where things are placed in your scene, where in the frame is the tree versus the leopard versus the rocks versus the distant mountain range. How do you place all that stuff together? And ultimately, from a great guest I've had on recently, Will Patino, he kind of coins this as finding

balance. So I often talk about things like the rule of thirds and leading lines, things like the phi grid, the Fibonacci spiral as mathematical ways to essentially set up your photo. Do you break your scene down into thirds? Do you offset things? But when he talked about this, it really resonated with me in that ultimately what you're trying to achieve is not perfect mathematical precision because you know, this is art and every landscape, every photo is going to be different. But what you're really trying to do is find balance in your shot.

So you might have a scene that has a lot of stuff going on, know, trees and mountains very much weighted in the left-hand side. How do you create balance on the right-hand side to offset that? Do you have something very big on the right-hand side, much closer to you? Do you try to even your mountain range across the scene from left to right? So ultimately you're trying to find balance, but I do think that especially for folks that are either just starting or are not.

real natural with this idea of finding balance or you haven't been photographing enough for this to come intuitively to you, I do think adhering to or starting with traditional rules of composition is a really, really great way to begin. And I often like to talk about the rule of thirds. And usually by this point, when I have a show of hands in my small groups to say, hey, who's heard of the rule of thirds? The vast majority of people do raise their hand. Then when I ask how many people use the rule of thirds religiously, a lot of hands go down.

So when I talk about the rule of thirds, it's not that I want you to adhere to it every single time, but I do think it's a really great way to begin your concept of photography, your understanding of creating balance, because it breaks the scene into thirds from left to right and top to bottom. You just sort of imagine a tic-tac-toe board over your scene. And the most obvious way to use this is when you're photographing things with a horizon or strong horizontal or vertical lines. A vertical line might be a tree trunk.

a horizontal line might be the ocean or it might be the top of a mountain range is the basic gist is we try to avoid putting anything with a harsh line in the dead middle of your frame such that it bisects your shot, such that divides your shot into two, you know, a left half and a right half. What you're really trying to do is create a little bit of intrigue with breaking your scene into thirds. So you might have a very dominant heavy weighted subject on the left side of your frame. Like if you're photographing

a tree trunk at relatively close range, let's say that takes up the entire left third of your frame from top to bottom. That means that your right two thirds will be open for your subjects, for your other things that might be interesting in the shot. But rather than placing in the middle, do your best to place it on one of sides. Now you can look at the rule of thirds and go a little bit deeper and say, well, okay, so with this Tic Tac Tow Board, we now have these two lines in the middle of the shot from top to bottom.

and two lines in the middle of your shot from left to right. One of the great things, this is probably how I personally use it more, is when I do have a single dominant subject, let's say it's an Arctic Fox in the tundra, and I can actually fill the frame with it or actually get it to be a pretty good size in the frame, rather than putting it in the dead center, I'm trying to put it at one of those crosshairs, at one of those intersecting points. Depending on your own...

artistic vision. could be the top part. It could be the bottom part. You know, again, the upper crosshairs and the lower crosshairs, but generally

of aesthetics and rules of composition and frankly, mathematics, the human eye likes when things are just a little bit offset. So it's over one of those intersecting points of horizontal and vertical lines.

The other thing I love to talk about is leading lines and I do this really in conjunction with the rule of thirds, but I try to find lines in the environment and with nature photography, this could indeed be tree trunks. It could be the road that you're on. It could be Jeep tracks from your Safari truck. It could be a meandering River.

What I try to do with leading lines is I want to include them in the scene and I want them to force the viewer's eyes to take a journey through the photograph. So beaches are a great example as well. You you might want to use the contour of the beach and actually angle it. So if there's something in the distance, you know, I'm thinking of a scene that I took with a an old church on the coast of Iceland a couple of years ago and there's this beautiful

kind of one room church in the distance. And I wanted the viewers eyes to take a journey through the grass, through the black sand beach, through the crashing waves towards that church. The church was my subject, but I'm using the coastline as my leading line, kind of angling it towards the church. So that might mean that I need to move around, move left to right. I might need to even angle my camera, like pivot it like 45 degrees. So it's not a level horizon, but just kind of leading the waves, leading the shoreline.

through the photo to the ultimate subject. It could be that church, it could be a very distant mountain range, but ultimately taking the viewer on a journey using leading lines. I think probably one of the best examples, frankly, is using meandering rivers in nature and having that sort of corkscrew kind of shape meandering through a valley into that distance is a great example of how you can use a line naturally found in nature to point towards your subject, to point towards that thing that kind of.

ties the whole frame together and ultimately is the reason you're taking a photo. You know, talking about a friend and a previous guest, Jason Edwards, his saying, he's a very famous, very great Nat Geo photographer. His saying is Jace's rule, as he calls it, is you can only have one thing in the scene. Now, obviously we all have multiple things in the scene. If you're photographing a beach with a church in the distance, you know, you've got the black sand beach, you've got the waves, you've got the grasses, but

one thing is that church or the one thing is that mountain range or the one thing is that wildlife in the distance or it's the vehicle in the distance and you're trying to set that up as an anchor point to have everything else in the scene sort of putting the viewer's eyes on that journey meandering through the scene to ultimately get them to see and really focus on that thing that might be in the distance but is still a powerful one thing to anchor the rest of your photo.

Since we are talking about grids and rules with composition, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention another great compositional technique. It's very, very similar to the rule of thirds, but it's known as the phi grid, just P-H-I, the phi grid. And this is essentially the rule of thirds, but the tic-tac-toe board is kind of squished. It's squished in towards the middle in all lines. And this is a really great tool.

Not necessarily to overlay on your camera, because if you do find a grid, whether it's on your smartphone or in your camera settings to actually put digitally on your screen, it's really just going have the one option. You have a grid or no grid. The five grid is if you can imagine that Tic Tac Tow Board just a little bit squished so that interior middle box is a little bit smaller. Those lines going from top to bottom are squished towards the middle. Those lines going from left to right are squished towards the middle.

And so the reason I like this is not just that it has roots in the Fibonacci spiral and this golden ratio that we find in nature of this ratio of I'm going to get a little bit nerdy here of 1.6 to one. But basically it says that yeah, the rule of thirds is great. But if we're really trying to tap into the mathematical rules of aesthetics, we kind of want those lines a little bit squished in. So again, I'm using the rule of thirds. I'm using my imagination.

to basically put the subject not quite dead middle of those intersecting points, but maybe just slightly towards the middle. But you know, honestly, I've got to end this section with saying you can throw all those things out the window because what you're really trying to do is develop and employ a sense of balance in your shot. And there are as many times to break these rules as there are to follow them. So ultimately it's finding balance. It's using tools like the rule of thirds.

and the squished in phi grid and leading lines when you can to ultimately create what you think innately intuitively is balance in your photo across the scene.

The next thing I advise guests is to always think about zooming out slightly. So I think that it's very tempting in this world of super telephotos where we can get to 500 millimeters, 600, heck even 800 millimeters pretty easily with the lenses that are on the market today, like affordable, very high quality lenses.

may not always want to zoom into the absolute extent of your zoom

that's for a couple of reasons. One is that

lens quality is usually best just slightly interior, just slightly inside of the extent of your telephoto. Meaning if you're shooting at 500 millimeters, it's going to be a little bit sharper at like 490 millimeters. this is just kind of a, an optical rule with how these lenses are built. So you can have a little bit more sharpness, especially if you plan to crop.

because that extra little percentage of going all the way to 500 versus 490 isn't all that much if you do plan to do like a 50 % or 100 % crop, but you are gonna retain sharpness a little bit better if you don't push your lens all the way to the end. Now, caveat here, I push my lens to the end a lot, so I'm not saying you have to bake this into your workflow each and every time,

But sometimes, especially if you're shooting to crop, like you're shooting a scene, knowing you're going to crop in because you can't quite get the distance or can't quite get the reach, zoom out a little bit wider to give a little bit better quality. But equally important is the idea of zooming out even more than slightly. Again, when we review our photos in the back of the LCD screen, we kind of make instant judgments based on how it looks on like two square inches of screen.

And the reality is when you put it on a computer, when you print it out, when you put it on a website, on social media, it's bigger than that. And you start to realize as you put photographs on different media that you actually didn't need to zoom in as much. And zooming out would actually have made a more impactful photo. You're getting more of the environment, more of the black sand beach, more of the, the Serengeti and yes, full frame photos of wildlife faces are great.

but always remember, kind of bake it into your memory that, yeah, take that shot, but don't forget to zoom out. Whether it's slightly, in order to improve the quality of your photo, or zoom out quite a bit, zoom all the way back out to 200 millimeters, or 300, or 100 millimeters, try to not shoot every shot at 500 millimeters, because you might like some of those zoomed out shots a lot more.

I love printing my photography work. gives me such satisfaction by seeing my top one or two photos from every trip that I do in print really no matter the size, whether it's, you know, I just printed off a big 48 by 72 from my living room wall. I printed off little eight by tens and

This is why I've partnered with what I believe to be the premier photo printing lab, Bay Photo, simply put, is one of the top professional photo printing companies that I've found. And they've been around for a long, long time. So trust is a big part of this equation here and their quality is absolutely next level.

And gosh, there are so many options to choose in terms of the type of media you print on. But one thing I really love is how intuitive their online ordering system is. It's built specifically for photographers And there are tools baked right into the ordering process To help you visualize the final product, including custom wall previews.

You can actually see and share what your images will look like on a wall before you even place an order. Bayphoto offers an incredible range of display options from metal prints, acrylics, frame prints, canvas wraps, all made with top quality, sustainable materials and turnaround is fast. And here's a great bonus for listeners of the Wild Photographer podcast. You can get 25 % off any one wall display order with the promo code TWP25.

Just head on over to bayphoto.com slash the wild photographer to create your next high impact print today. And trust me, seeing your work printed beautifully changes everything.

okay, so number six in my list of things I teach at the start of every trip, this is choose your background. so when photographing wildlife, the background may not be intuitively obvious as like a big component of your shot,

but it is a hugely important part of your photo. And most importantly, you get to choose it in most cases. Even if you're in a safari vehicle where you have to drive around or pivot or wait for the next shot, what is behind your animal? What is behind your landscape? What is behind your foreground element makes a big difference in your photo. I'm talking about the texture. I'm talking about the distance of the stuff behind your wildlife subject. I'm talking about the color. There are so many times when I'm photographing

let's say a monarch butterfly in the overwintering grounds, and I can literally move to my left by one step or two steps. And instead of a brown or green background, I get a nice light blue background, or I get a mottled purple background with wildflowers. So this is a huge one that you have to bake into your workflow of thinking about your background. What is behind the thing you're photographing and what choices can you make to move yourself to choose your background?

Obviously you can't move the animal. You can't put the animal to the left or the right. So you ultimately move yourself. But what you can do is think about your body movement in multiple axes, meaning you can move left or right. You can move forward and back and you can move top to bottom. You might need to hold your camera a little bit higher.

So that way the background isn't the sky, it's actually some trees in the background or it's the mountain range. You can move to the left and instead of wildflowers being 10 feet behind your subject, all of a there's a clearing and the wildflowers are 30 feet or a hundred feet. And these make huge differences to your photograph. I've said multiple times that the distance behind your wildlife subject is probably the most important thing for getting that beautiful background blur,

the background separation, the, the bokeh or bokeh however you want to pronounce that B O K E H is the quality of that blur. And so if you move around and choose your background, again, I can't tell you the use case for every single time you're out photographing, but you'll find very quickly, if you start to bake this into your workflow, that if you move a little bit left or right, or heck a lot left and right, you get a very, very different color, texture, and distance to your background that might be better. It might be worse.

Or it simply just might be different. You might be able to photograph that lion or photograph that bear in three different ways. If you move to the left or to your right of your subject, even if it means waiting for your vehicle to reposition, you're getting more shots, more opportunities to make a really great photograph from just one scene. So choosing your background, I can't overstate this one. You certainly might be limited sometimes. Maybe there's ⁓ a trail that you cannot go off of.

but you can certainly move up and down the trail. You can go further into the trail and you can back out the way you came from. but really what I'm trying to get you to do is think about your background as a very key component and think about how you get to choose your background. Once again, thinking about color, texture and distance.

The next choice you get to make is your white balance. And I know what you're thinking. If you shoot on raw, you can change your white balance, however you want in Photoshop, in Lightroom, in camera raw. And that's absolutely true. You lose virtually nothing in your shot when you change that from raw settings. However, I've mentioned this several times on this podcast is that when you choose your white balance for the day or for the scene, you are getting

your vision in the photograph, I think, a lot more accurately. Because what happens is, well, let's step back. So

With white balance, what you're doing is you're basically choosing some point on a spectrum of cool to warm, which is a very blue tone to a very yellow, almost orange tone in your photograph. And this really corresponds to the feeling that you get, like a cool tone, a cool blue tone is great for Arctic conditions and making the photo look very steely and cool and cold.

You can then go to the other end of the spectrum and inject a lot of yellows and oranges into your scene. Not only does it make the photo feel warmer. So like when I, for instance, go to Borneo or tropical countries and photograph landscapes and wildlife, I love that warm tone because Borneo as a tropical country feels very warm. It's very natural. It's part of my artistic vision to imbue that sense of environment and feeling into the photographs.

And what you're going to notice is as you choose white balances along that spectrum, that white balance is going to help almost saturate and bring to life the colors that are naturally found in an environment. So for instance, greens and yellows, if you shoot on a warm white balance, those are going to pop out. It's going to be warmer, more saturated, more poppy, more dramatic. If you're photographing with a lot of white and kind of cool, subtle blue tones, that cool white balance is really going to make those blues come to life.

And it's just really another way of saturating your photo without using the saturation slider, which let's be honest, can be very, very dangerous. It's very easy to overdo saturation, but white balance using it in the scene, shooting on a cool or a warm white balance, I think is a dimension to really bring your photos to life. And let me tell you, there is not a perfect way to do this. I'm not saying when you're in the Arctic and photographing snow and cool blue scenes, you always have to be.

on a cool white balance and conversely, you when you're in tropical countries, always shooting on a warm white balance, you could do the opposite and do something very different, very unique, very artistic. I highly recommend getting a little bit weird and wacky with all this, like experiment with it. You can also shoot on auto white balance and that's fine, but your camera is gonna be constantly adjusting. Whether it's cloudy that day or really sunny, it's gonna make incremental adjustments really from a photo to photo basis.

and it's going to choose what it thinks is the proper representation of white. And again, there's nothing technically wrong with photographing auto and then changing it in your camera after the fact. But I think the biggest reason I like choosing it in camera, in the scene, in the field is that when I go back and I have an auto white balance and I change it to something very warm, to me, it looks really fake. It's like, whoa, I'm injecting way too much yellow in the scene because I just saw the photo.

with much more muted colors. And so I think it restricts my creativity. It restricts my creative control over the photographs when I don't choose my white balance. know, full caveat, I shoot on auto sometimes, you know, maybe a lot of times for a certain shoot when I can't quite pick the right white balance. But I do think

setting it in camera is a way to quickly elevate your photography. And I'll just give you a couple presets here is that if you want to shoot with a really warm tone, you set your camera on a cloudy white balance. If you want to shoot a very cool tone, you set your camera on a daylight white balance. And the reason that these might seem counterintuitive is that when it's cloudy, like actually cloudy in the environment,

the sunlight, the orange yellow sunlight is being filtered by clouds to give the overall scene a much cooler look, like just naturally it looks cooler. So when you sit in a cloudy white balance, you're telling the camera, hey, this scene looks a little bit more blue than I otherwise would like, let's inject some warmth. Conversely, if you're shooting on a daylight white balance, it's going to basically shift the tides towards a more blue scene because you're trying to essentially buffer against the intense yellow orange sun.

So you're essentially compensating with white balance. But I won't go on too much longer about this. The basic gist is I find it to be more artistic, more interesting to shoot on a white balance for my day, for my trip. Set it on cloudy to make it more warm and yellow. Set it on daylight to make it more cool and blue.

Okay, so I gave you seven things there, but there is a bonus, and this is probably the most important tip of

that is to focus on the eyes. When you're out there photographing wildlife, people, potatoes, focus on the eyes. No, not potatoes, of course, but always focus on the eyes. I cannot overstate that enough.

times when

you may prefer to not focus on the eyes or you might want to do something really artistic and focus on the nose, the ears. But the gist is, is that with that center point autofocus, you have to focus on something. And if you do not get the eyes in focus in your wildlife photography, it's going to instantly feel off 99.8 % of the time. There's always a little bit of artistic thing, know, break the rules when you feel appropriate, but

If you botch the eyes, if the eyes are not in focus, but the nose is in focus, you know, we're talking about, close up wildlife photography here or very zoomed in wildlife photography. If you don't focus on the eyes, it's just not going to come together. It's going to frankly look like a botched shot. So once again, whether it's bears in Alaska, whether it's a hummingbird in Costa Rica, Whether it's a fellow traveler.

when you focus using that center point auto focus, always focus on the eyes and really there's almost almost no times you want to break that rule. So that's a really, that's a really big one here.

Okay, so there you go. Seven things plus a bonus that I teach at the outset of every single photo trip, like at the welcome dinner, like before I even go out in the field with my guests. These are the things that I want to share because they've, they've all individually and collectively made massive differences to my work. We're talking about getting off a full auto and ultimately making the migration to manual mode plus auto ISO. We're talking about getting very versed in exposure compensation, making sure center point auto focuses on

learning practicing and trying different compositional techniques, finding balance, always remembering to zoom out slightly, choosing your background, choose your white balance and always focus on the eyes.

So, folks, I hope you enjoyed and learned something from today's podcast. This is always going to be a free podcast. So, you know, we have sponsors, but one of the best things you can do if you want to support the show is to rate and review the podcast on your

podcast listening platform of choice and you can leave up to a five star review hint hint that really does help me out it gets more listeners it gets more reach to ultimately help me with my why which is showcasing the beauty of our natural world for everyone to enjoy so once again thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you next time