Intro
I’ve been photographing wildlife for thirty years. Grizzlies on salmon streams or high in the mountains. Wolves in the Alaska Range. Pumas in Patagonia. Eagles in winter storms on the Chilkat River. I’ve also been roaming around Alaska’s backcountry since 1998, and guiding here since 2001, which means I’ve spent hundreds, if not thousands, of days in the field with wild animals, in every kind of weather (well, most kinds of weather), in some of the most remote country in North America.
Most wildlife photography content on the internet focuses on camera settings and gear. Those things matter. But they’re only a part of what determines whether you come home with strong images. The other ninety percent is fieldcraft: knowing where to be, when to be there, how to read an animal’s body language, and what it’s about to do next. That’s the stuff that’s hard to learn from a YouTube video.
This wildlife photography guide covers all of it. Gear, settings, fieldcraft, behavior, composition, ethics, and the mistakes that cost you and me the shot. It’s not theoretical. Everything here comes from decades of doing this for a living, in wild places where often times the animals don’t know you’re there and the weather doesn’t care about your plans.
Two Days for a Few Frames
I once spent two days in the Alaska Range following a band of Dall sheep rams. From watching the ewes’ behavior on day one, I guessed where the rams were headed, hiked to that spot the next morning, and approached slowly and quietly enough that one ram eventually grazed to within inches of where I lay on the tundra. Two days of fieldcraft for a few frames with a wide-angle lens. That’s wildlife photography.
What Makes Great Wildlife Photography
Wildlife photography is two disciplines: photography and wildlife.
Within photography, you have to know your tools, but you also have to understand composition, exposure, depth of field, light, and how those elements work together. That’s a lot on its own. Then there’s the wildlife side. You have to know your subjects, or work with somebody who does. You’ll do fine with a strong foundation in one or the other. You’ll do a lot better with a strong foundation in both.
Which one you start with matters less than whether you keep building both.
Paul Nicklen puts it well: “You make an image by imagining what the light is you want and what your subject is going to be doing”. The difference between a reactive photograph and one you’ve thought through is everything. Reactive means something happens, you point the camera, you press the button. The other way means you’ve thought about the light before the animal appears. You’ve positioned yourself based on where the behavior will happen, not where it’s happening now. You’ve already decided on your composition before the moment arrives.
Frans Lanting frames it more directly: “You have to be analytical. If you don’t understand what you are photographing, you are just looking at the surface of things”.
Same animal. Same location. Same minute. The difference is entirely in what the photographer brought to the moment before pressing the shutter.
With all that said, let’s get going.
- Fundamentals
- Practice
- Gear
- Camera Settings
- Know Your Wildlife
- Ethics
- Fieldcraft
- Composition
- Visualization
- Processing
- Where
- Start Shooting
- FAQs
Section 2: Fundamentals
The fundamentals of photography are not complicated. They’re short and sweet. But you have to have them down cold. There’s no shortcut.
Three variables control every photograph you’ll ever take: shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. They’re connected through reciprocity. Change one and you change the outcome of the photo. If you don’t want to change the outcome, you have to adjust the others to compensate.
Together they determine your exposure, but each one also affects something else in the image. Shutter speed freezes or blurs motion. Aperture controls depth of field. ISO affects noise and image quality. Understanding what each one does is table stakes. Understanding how they interact, how to adjust all three on the fly when conditions shift in the field, that’s where the real work begins.
Why I Recommend Manual Mode
My strongest recommendation to anyone who wants to get better at wildlife photography: shoot in manual mode.
Not aperture priority. Not auto ISO. Manual.
Virtually everybody who’s ever come and photographed with me will tell you they heard that many times during the week.
I don’t shoot in manual all the time.
In many wildlife situations, aperture priority with auto ISO is faster and more practical. But manual is how you learn what’s actually happening inside your camera. John Shaw, one of the best nature photographers who ever picked up a camera, puts it plainly: “If the light remains the same, once you correctly set a manual exposure, it is correct for all subjects in that light regardless of their tonality”.
That’s the principle.
Once you understand it, every other mode becomes a tool you choose deliberately instead of a crutch you lean on.
Think of it like cooking. If you learn to cook with a pan, an oven, a pot, you understand that heat and timing and ingredients and a little bit of love are what make a meal work. If you only ever reheat frozen pizzas, you can feed yourself, but you don’t actually know how to cook.
Aperture priority is the frozen pizza of exposure modes. It works. It feeds you. It can come out really well. But it doesn’t teach you anything about why.
Or think about driving versus taking an Uber. Both get you home. But the Uber doesn’t teach you how to drive.
Learning to Drive – Know Your Camera
The second part of fundamentals is knowing your specific camera. Not cameras in general. Your camera. How to switch focus modes without looking. How to change your AF area. Where the ISO button is.
I can go out to shoot and come home with decent photographs with my camera. But I might not know the first thing about how to adjust the ISO or even turn on yours, because I don’t shoot with your camera. I don’t need to know your camera. I need to know mine. You need to know yours.
You can watch every YouTube video ever made about the Nikon Z9 or the Sony A1 or whatever you shoot. You can read every blog post and download every ebook. None of it replaces putting the camera in your hands and operating it.
I’ve talked to a lot of other photo tour instructors about this over the years.
The most common struggle they see among their guests is the same one I see: people don’t know enough about how to operate their camera. They can’t change their ISO quickly. They get lost trying to switch focus modes. They get bogged down in the mechanics, and it eats up the attention they should be spending on the animal and the light.
What’s more important than your choice of camera gear is your knowledge of how and when to use it.
Composition and light are the other pieces of the foundation. We’ll go deeper on both in dedicated posts. The principle is the same: there are a few basic concepts, not a long list of rules. Spend real time with them, with attention and intention, and your photography will improve faster than any piece of gear you could buy.
Section 3: Practice
Not enough photography instruction talks about practice.
Instructors talk about going out and shooting. They talk about which button to push. They talk about what aperture and ISO and shutter speed do. They talk about light, direction of light, quality of light. They talk about backgrounds.
Nobody talks about sitting on your couch with your camera for twenty minutes a day, metering on your living room wall, and running through adjustments. What if I want the aperture two stops wider? Okay, now I need to change the shutter speed or ISO to compensate. How fast can I do that while I’m looking at a deer in the woods?
That kind of deliberate practice matters more than any workshop or ebook. Modern cameras are sophisticated, powerful, and complicated. With all that sophistication comes a learning curve, and the best way through it is hands-on repetition.
Go to a local soccer field during a kids’ practice.
Photograph the ball. Try to keep it in focus. Get your exposure right. Then adjust your aperture by two stops and figure out what you need to do with your shutter speed or ISO to compensate.
Pick a different aperture. Do it again.
And again.
You’re trying to keep the exposure right while adjusting these other variables, and that will teach you more about the reciprocity and interrelationship of those three settings than reading this post will. Throw out every frame when you get home if you want. It doesn’t matter. It’s practice.
Repetition is the Key
If you ever watched Michael Jordan practice, he’d stand at the free throw line shooting the same shot over and over. He threw tens of thousands of those free shots. Over and over and over.
And again.
If that approach to fundamentals worked for the greatest basketball player who ever lived, it’ll probably work for you. It’s certainly worked for me.
The old adage about how you get to Carnegie Hall is practice. I’d say the same thing about how you become Wildlife Photographer of the Year. Every time you pick up the camera and put in twenty minutes, you get a little bit better. The friction goes away. Improvement compounds over time. Do that daily and it’ll do more for your photography than any piece of gear you could buy.
Section 4: Gear
Good wildlife photography is possible with mid-range gear. The photographer matters more than the camera body. I’ll say that upfront and mean it.
But gear does matter. Underpowered autofocus or a slow lens will cost you shots that no amount of skill can recover. A bear charges into a salmon riffle and your buffer fills after four frames? That’s not a technique problem. That’s a gear problem. Can you work around it by being more selective about when you push the shutter? Sure. But ultimately, that’s a gear problem.
Camera body priorities for wildlife, in order: autofocus speed and accuracy, frames per second, and weather sealing. Not megapixels. A 24-megapixel file with tack sharp focus on the eye is worth more than a 60-megapixel file where the focus landed on the shoulder.
I shoot Nikon. My primary body today is a Z9, with a Z8 as backup. Both handle high ISO well, both have fast continuous autofocus with animal eye detection that works well, and both will survive some degree of rain, salt air, and cold. I’m pretty careful with my gear, but I need equipment that can tolerate a little sloppy handling when the action gets going.
Lenses
Lenses are where it really gets complicated.
Telephotos are pretty much non-negotiable for most wildlife work. You need reach.
For large mammals like bears and moose, 400mm is my minimum. For birds, 500 to 600mm. My primary wildlife lens is the Nikon 400mm f/2.8, supported by the Nikon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6. Both Z lenses.
The 100-400mm is sharp, fast to focus, light enough to carry all day, and versatile enough to cover everything from a bear across the river to an eagle flying in to perch. The 400mm f/2.8 with the built-in 1.4x teleconverter gives me 560mm at f/4 when I need the reach and the speed. It’s a gem. For tighter work and environmental shots, I might go with the 70-200mm f/2.8.
The 24-70mm comes along too. It’s not generally regarded as a wildlife lens, but in the right situation, it’s gold. Landscapes, camp life, the in-between moments. Super useful.
I also carry a standalone 1.4x teleconverter for the rare situation where I need everything I can get.
But those lenses are just what I happen to use. There are a gazillion other options that do what I, or you, need them to do. Don’t get hung up on the specifics of this lens versus that lens. A 24-120mm, for example, is a perfect lens to carry and could replace one or even two of my options.
On the long end, the 400mm f/2.8, the 500mm f/4, the 600mm f/4, the 800mm f/5.6, all of the super telephotos are great. Every one of them. There’s no one that’s clearly better than the others across the board. It depends on the situation, how far you’re traveling, what other gear you’re bringing, and what fits in your bag. Quibbling over whether this $12,000 lens or that $13,000 lens is the better choice is pointless.
Field reality: bring fewer lenses than you think you need. Every lens swap in the field is a pain in the neck, if not a missed shot. Mobility helps a lot. The easier you can move around, whether on foot or otherwise, the better positioned you’ll be. A lot of people photograph wildlife from a vehicle or a blind or some kind of stationary setup, and that works great. My style involves more walking than most, but the principle holds regardless: if you can be more mobile, you’ll find more opportunities. Depending on the shoot, on most days I’m carrying one body with the 400mm over my shoulder and a second body with the 100-400mm in my pack. That covers ninety percent of what I encounter.
Tradeoffs
There’s no one right lens or wrong lens. There’s the gear you have, and there are tradeoffs.
A 400mm f/2.8 is faster and sharper than a 100-400mm at the same focal length. Two stops faster. In low light, that matters. For isolating a subject against a clean background at speed, that matters. But the 100-400mm is a lot lighter, a lot cheaper, and gives you a zoom range that a prime can’t touch.
Those tradeoffs are subjective and contextual. What’s the subject? What’s the situation? What images are you trying to make?
The deeper point is that gear works as a system. No one piece of equipment works by itself. How your camera handles high ISO might determine whether you’re better off with a fast lens or a slower one. If your body is clean at ISO 6400, you can shoot a slower lens in marginal light and still get sharp images. If it falls apart above ISO 3200, you need the faster glass. And “clean” is subjective. What one person finds acceptable, another might not.
You have to go with what works for you.
Older lenses are just fine, too. A 500mm f/4 from ten years ago will still produce excellent wildlife images. It might not be quite as sharp as the newest version, but it’ll do the job. And you can probably get one for a tiny fraction of the cost of a new lens. Don’t let the marketing tell you otherwise. You can pick up a used 500mm f/4 in the Nikon product line surprisingly cheap. (Don’t ask me how I know that.)
Buying Gear
When you’re deciding what to buy, stop thinking about individual pieces and start thinking about your system. Every lens, every camera body, every tripod is part of a kit that has to work together. A 600mm f/4 is a spectacular lens, but if you don’t have a tripod and head that can support it, or a bag that can carry it to where you need to be, or a body with the autofocus to keep up with it, then it’s not solving a problem for you. It’s creating new ones.
The question isn’t “do I want this lens or that lens”. The question is “what problem am I trying to solve”.
Maybe you can photograph everything in front of you just fine at 400mm, but you’re struggling with low light at dawn and dusk. That’s a different problem than needing more reach. Maybe your camera body is ten years old and the autofocus can’t track a bird in flight. That’s a different problem than wanting a sharper lens.
Sometimes the answer is a single lens. Sometimes it’s a combination of things. Sometimes it’s not gear at all. Sometimes the gap is knowledge or field time. But when it is a gear decision, root it in the problem you’re solving, not the spec sheet you’re reading. That’s how you build a kit that actually works instead of a collection of expensive things that don’t quite fit together.
Weather
I’ve come to photograph mostly in good weather. I don’t feel I miss much by avoiding crappy conditions. Nor do I feel that camera gear holds up spectacularly well in really wet weather.
Rain and dense fog can produce images with mood, drama, and saturated color that bluebird days can’t touch. But it’s pretty rare. Snow I enjoy, and often it can help make really strong images. Focusing can be tough in heavy snow, but it’s worth it when you hit a winner.
Your gear needs to handle whatever you throw at it. Weather sealing isn’t perfect, but it’s useful. Rain covers similarly so. Just be careful with your gear when it’s wet out. Especially in remote country. If I’m on a two-week trip camped in the backcountry, I don’t have a lot of alternatives. If my camera electronics get wet out there, I’m usually just out of a camera. That changes when I’m shooting nearer to town.
Support
Twenty years ago, almost every photo I took was off a tripod. That’s changed dramatically. With the Z9 and Z8, I shoot handheld most of the time. Modern IBIS and lens-based VR have changed what’s possible. Lenses are lighter. Higher ISO performance means you’re less dependent on the stability a tripod provides.
I still use a tripod for landscape photography, aurora work, and bird photography when I’m set up in one spot. My setup is a Gitzo with a Kirk ball head. I don’t use a gimbal, though they’re a great tool. For the type of photography I do, where I’m often carrying gear on my back for miles, the extra weight isn’t worth it.
A monopod is a solid middle ground, and I think more people should consider one.
Flash
I’ve used flash for bird photography, primarily with a Better Beamer flash extender, but I don’t use it for other wildlife. My ethos has increasingly been “less is more” when it comes to equipment. Life is too short to deal with extra cables, plug-ins, and accessories when I could be focused on the animal and the light.
Natural light is the foundation of my work. That doesn’t mean it should be the foundation of yours. Flash in the hands of someone who really knows it can produce extraordinary results.
For the philosophical take on why gear matters at all, I wrote about that years ago on Skolai Images.
Section 5: Camera Settings
Settings are the part everybody wants to talk about first.
I get it. They feel controllable.
They also feel very definitive. Somebody yells out “f/4 at 1/600th of a second” and you feel like you’re under control, like you’ve got it figured out. That is not a way to become a better photographer.
You can dial in numbers and feel like you’re making progress. And you are. But keep this in perspective: settings are the foundation, not the building. Get them right so you can stop thinking about them and start thinking about the animal.
Shutter Speed Is King
If the animal is moving, few things matter until your shutter speed is fast enough. Everything else is somewhat negotiable. Shutter speed is not.
Real numbers, from real fieldwork:
- Walking mammals (bears, moose, caribou): 1/1000 minimum.
- Running mammals: 1/2000 or faster.
- Birds in flight: 1/2000 to 1/4000, depending on species and wingbeat speed.
- Stationary but alert animals: 1/500 is usually enough, but bump it up if they’re about to move.
Those numbers are useful starting points, but the real skill is understanding why they work in some situations and not others. There’s no definitive “walking mammals, 1/1000th”. It depends on what lens you’re shooting. How far away the animal is. Whether it’s walking toward you or away from you. Am I shooting a walking moose with a 24mm lens or a 600mm? I’d be perfectly happy at much less than 1/1000 with a wide angle and that same moose.
Those reductive approaches to “here’s your shutter speed for X, Y, Z” don’t teach you much about photography any more than pressing “high” on a microwave teaches you about cooking. Understanding why a number works in a given situation is the whole point. The numbers change when the situation changes.
Aperture
Aperture is where people get tripped up. Wide open is not the answer for everything. A grizzly walking toward you at 400mm and f/4 has inches of depth of field. The nose is sharp but the eyes are soft, or vice versa. Sometimes f/7.1 or f/8 keeps the whole animal in focus. Sometimes more. I’ve photographed polar bears up close and stopped down to f/16 just to get the tip of the nose all the way back to the ears sharp. That distance gets a lot longer than you think it is when you put a big lens on the subject.
The “best aperture for wildlife photography” depends entirely on the subject, the distance, the focal length, and what you’re trying to say with the image. Like with all things photography, there is no single right answer.
ISO
Don’t be afraid of ISO. A sharp image at ISO 6400 is worth infinitely more than a blurry one at ISO 400. Modern sensors, especially the Z9 and Z8, handle noise remarkably well through ISO 6400. Clean it up in post if you need to. Don’t sacrifice shutter speed to keep ISO low. That trade will lose you more images than noise ever will.
Autofocus
Back button focus. I use it on every body, every day, every situation. Decoupling autofocus from the shutter button means I can lock focus on a stationary animal and recompose without the camera hunting every time I press the shutter. When something starts moving, I hold the AF-ON button and the camera tracks. When it stops, I let go and the focus holds. Simple.
That said, I’ve got friends who are superb photographers and never use back button focus. They make a reasonable case for it. They like to focus and track an animal with their finger on the shutter and use the thumb on the back of the camera to move which focus point they’re selecting. It’s all trade-offs. There’s no one perfect way to approach this. Learn about the different systems and make choices based on what works for you. The best choices come from a broader understanding of all that they involve.
Continuous AF (AF-C) for anything that moves. Single-shot AF is generally better suited for landscapes and studio work. I tend to use AF-C all the time.
Focus area: single point for stationary subjects, dynamic area or wide-area for movement. Animal eye detection is good on modern bodies and getting better. I use it. But I don’t trust it blindly, especially when there’s clutter between me and the subject, or when multiple animals are in the frame. Know how to override it. My preference is single focus areas rather than dynamic ones. That changes with technology though.
Section 6: Manual Mode vs Aperture Priority
My default is manual mode. It’s what I recommend to the vast majority of beginning and intermediate photographers.
There’s no better way to understand how aperture, shutter speed, and ISO work together than to shoot in manual. It’s not the answer for every situation. But it is the best way to learn what’s actually happening inside your camera.
When you shoot in aperture priority and need more light, you hit the exposure compensation button and dial in plus one. Plus one what? Your brain processes “plus one” as an abstract adjustment. You don’t think about which variable changed or why. In manual mode, you open the aperture by a stop, or slow the shutter speed, or raise the ISO. You’re doing the thing and thinking the name of the thing. Your brain organizes that information more clearly because the connection between the adjustment and the result is direct.
I come from a music background, and the parallel is exact. As a musician, I practiced scales and arpeggios and harmony at home. Ran them all day long. I’d never walk on stage and play scales for an audience. On stage, the goal is to make music. But I could only make music because I’d done the practice. Manual mode is scales. You do the work there so that when you’re in the field, whatever mode you’re shooting, you understand what’s happening and why.
Aperture priority with auto-ISO works. It works well, and in a lot of situations it’s exactly the right tool. If you have a solid grasp of exposure, you know the variables, you know how they interrelate, and you’re comfortable with all of that, by all means, shoot aperture priority all day long.
But if you’re trying to learn, if exposure isn’t clicking for you yet, or you want to understand it at a deeper level, my advice is shoot in manual mode. You will learn faster. Go back to aperture priority later if you want. You’ll be better at it because you’ll understand what the camera is doing for you and what it’s not.
Section 7: Knowing Your Wildlife
The more you understand about the animals you photograph, the better your images will be. Not because knowledge makes you a better photographer technically, but because it puts you in the right place before the moment happens instead of after.
In Patagonia, I work with a puma tracker named Jorge who spent years as a researcher studying the cats. We’ll sit with a puma for two hours while it does absolutely nothing. Lies down, rolls over, stretches, yawns, walks to a bush, comes back, sits by a rock. To most people it looks like waiting. To Jorge, it’s information. When that cat is ready to move, he knows. Something in the posture shifts, some micro-signal most of us would miss entirely, and he’ll say we need to reposition now if we want to be ahead of it. He’s wrong sometimes. Nobody reads animals perfectly. But being right more often than not is the difference between being in position for the shot and scrambling to catch up.
That kind of awareness isn’t exclusive to puma trackers. It’s what happens with any species you spend enough time around. After years of watching bears work the same stretch of river, you learn where individual animals prefer to enter the water, which pools they check first, where they pause before committing. You start reading the small signals that precede the big moments. The principle is the same whether you’re watching shorebirds on a mudflat or elk in a mountain meadow. Animals telegraph what they’re about to do. Your job is to learn the language.
Here’s an example. You’re photographing an eagle on the ground, working a salmon it dragged out of the river. You’re zoomed in tight for a portrait. Then you notice a second eagle circling overhead. If you understand how eagles interact around food, you know what’s coming. That second bird is going to drop in, and the one on the ground is going to spin around with wings flared and talons up. If you’ve already zoomed out and adjusted your framing, you capture the whole confrontation. If you’re still tight on the portrait when it happens, you clip wings and miss the moment. Knowing the animal gave you three extra seconds to prepare. That’s often all it takes.
Those great shots where somebody seems to be in exactly the right place at exactly the right time? Very rarely does a photographer end up there by accident. Most of the time, it’s because they knew what was happening ahead of time.
How You Actually Learn About a Species
Wildlife photography is two distinct disciplines, and most photographers only invest in one of them. They’ll spend weeks comparing lenses and camera bodies and almost no time learning about the animals they’re going to photograph. If that ratio were even close to balanced, the average wildlife photographer would improve overnight.
You learn about animals the way you learn about anything worth knowing: time with the subject, spent with intention. Not just watching, but thinking while you watch. What does that animal do repeatedly? When does it do something different? What are the patterns in how it moves through its environment, interacts with other animals, responds to the time of day? That kind of attention, accumulated over many sessions, is how you start to anticipate behavior instead of reacting to it.
Field observation is essential, but it’s only half the equation. There is an enormous body of research available on the species most of us photograph, and too few photographers take advantage of it. Read books written by working biologists. Dig into academic papers. Watch documentaries made by people who spent years with a single species. The preparation you do before a trip can matter as much as what you do once you’re there.
If you’re heading to Alaska to photograph grizzly bears, Frank Craighead’s Track of the Grizzly is the place to start. It’s the product of the Craighead brothers’ thirteen-year field study of grizzlies in the Yellowstone ecosystem. Some of the field practices described in the book are outdated (nobody today would recommend running from a charging bear), but the information about bears themselves holds up remarkably well. Bear behavior is consistent over time.
If you’re planning a trip to photograph tigers in India, Valmik Thapar’s work is essential reading. Thapar spent forty years studying tigers at Ranthambore National Park, and his books on their behavior, territory, and social dynamics will change how you see those animals when you’re in the field. Heading to Rwanda or Uganda for mountain gorillas? George Schaller’s The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behavior was the first serious field study of the species and remains foundational. Dian Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist, based on eighteen years of direct observation at the Karisoke Research Center, is equally important and more widely available. For elk, Jack Ward Thomas and Dale Toweill’s Elk of North America: Ecology and Management is the definitive scientific reference, covering everything from seasonal behavior to habitat use across seven hundred pages. Thomas went on to become Chief of the U.S. Forest Service.
The point isn’t to read every book on every species. The point is that whatever animal you’re about to spend time and money traveling to photograph, somebody has probably spent a career studying it. Find that work. Read it. The understanding you bring into the field will show in every decision you make out there, from where you position yourself to when you choose to be patient and when you choose to move.
Talk to biologists, too. Every time I’m at Katmai National Park, there’s often a bear biologist somewhere nearby. I make a point of finding those people and asking questions, even biologists I’ve been talking to for a decade. Every conversation adds another layer to what I understand about how bears live. The same applies to any species and any location where researchers are working. Ask what surprises them. Ask what they’ve changed their mind about. Then take that knowledge into the field and see if it changes what you notice.
Reading, conversation, and intentional observation. That’s the combination that builds the kind of understanding that eventually shows up in your photographs. The two halves of wildlife photography, the craft and the natural history, should develop together. You can’t build on only one foundation.
Section 8: Ethics
The welfare of any wild animal matters more than any photograph. I want to say that clearly up front.
But I’m not here to lecture you or scold anyone. We’ve all been in situations where it didn’t go the way we expected. You’re photographing a shorebird and it flushes. You realize you were closer to something than you thought. An animal reacts to your presence in a way you didn’t anticipate. That’s the wild in wildlife. It happens, and it’s happened to every single one of us who does this. Learn from it. Try to be better next time. We’re all human.
This stuff matters. But preaching about it doesn’t help anyone. If you do enough wildlife photography, you will find yourself in situations that don’t go the way you planned. What matters is that you recognize it, learn from it, and try to do better. Simple as that.
Reading the Situation
Most places you photograph wildlife, there will be regulations of some kind. Distance minimums, interaction guidelines, seasonal closures, permit requirements. They vary by agency, by park, by refuge, by country. Know what they are before you go. Follow them.
But regulations are the floor, not the ceiling. And distance is only one small piece of a much bigger picture.
How an animal responds to you depends on far more than how many yards away you are. It depends on the other animals nearby. The number of people in the area. The terrain and how much space the animal has to move. The time of year. Whether it’s feeding, resting, with young, or already stressed by something else entirely. All of that context matters, and reading it is your responsibility.
Here’s something worth thinking about honestly. You’ll hear phrases like “keep wild animals wild” or warnings about wildlife “losing its natural wariness” of people. And those ideas come from a good place. But think about what we actually do. We sit in boats while humpback whales surface fifteen feet away. We watch tigers walk jungle roads in India without a glance in our direction. We photograph mountain gorillas in Rwanda from arm’s length. Steller sea lions haul out on rocks and barely register the kayakers drifting past. These animals are very aware that we’re there. They tolerate us because they’ve learned we’re not a threat when we behave a certain way.
That tolerance is what makes wildlife photography possible. It’s not a problem.
The real work is understanding the rules the animal has set. Every species, every individual, every situation has a set of behaviors that tells that animal you’re not a threat. Your job is to learn what those are and stay within them. When you do, you get to observe natural behavior. When you don’t, the animal tells you. Maybe it changes posture. Stops feeding. Moves off in a direction it wasn’t heading. Watches you instead of doing what it was doing. When that happens, you adjust. You back off, change your angle, give it more room. Sometimes you leave. That’s not failure. That’s fieldcraft.
The Gray Areas
Baiting is a contentious topic, and the conversation deserves more nuance than it usually gets. Using live bait to lure a raptor into a kill shot for your camera is a line many people wouldn’t cross. But birdseed at a backyard feeder? Most of us don’t think twice about that. Somewhere between those two is a line, and it’s not in the same place for everyone.
Scale and context matter here, the same way they matter with everything else in wildlife photography. Someone setting up a bait station in a 10 million acre Arctic wilderness hoping to see a lynx is probably not creating much of a problem. Someone baiting a predator in a suburban area or just outside of one is a different situation entirely, with a lot more consequence and a lot more likelihood of trouble. It also depends on how many people are doing it. One person doing something in a remote area where it won’t become busloads of people repeating the same thing is very different from a practice that scales and gets repeated by dozens of photographers in the same spot.
The Audubon Society’s position is clear: never lure raptors or predators with live or dead bait. They also advise against audio lures and call playback, which can disturb nesting birds and waste energy animals need for survival. Those guidelines are worth knowing regardless of where you stand on the broader debate.
Drones are worth mentioning. In U.S. national parks, for example, they’re illegal. In most wildlife contexts, flying a drone near animals is going to cause stress. But a photographer using a drone responsibly and not disturbing the animal is a different thing than someone buzzing a nesting raptor for an Instagram clip. Like everything else here, context matters.
John Marriott, who sits on the International League of Conservation Photographers ethics committee, offers a gut check I think about: if you’d feel embarrassed explaining how you got the shot when you post it, that tells you something.
The harder question, and the one worth sitting with, is one Melissa Groo asks: “Is it really something so unique, so singular, that doesn’t already exist in your archive? Is it really necessary?”
Most of the time, the answer is no. And that’s okay. There will be another morning, another animal, another chance. The shot you didn’t take because you chose the animal’s comfort over your portfolio is never one you’ll regret.
Section 9: Fieldcraft
Fieldcraft is the part of wildlife photography that doesn’t show up in the EXIF data. It’s everything you do before you press the shutter: where you position yourself, how you move, how you read the light and the landscape, how you earn an animal’s tolerance.
Working With Animals, Not Just Photographing Them
Wild animals see and smell us the moment we enter their world. They’re alert to everything around them, and they’re reading our body language constantly. Paul Nicklen puts it simply: with animals, you can’t act scared and you can’t act aggressive. They will always let you know how they’re feeling. If you’ve stressed the animal, you’ve lost your photo.
This is why fieldcraft matters more than focal length. The photographers who consistently come home with strong work are the ones who’ve spent enough time with their subjects to read what’s happening and respond to it. No lens compensates for not understanding the animal in front of you.
Move slowly and deliberately. Erratic movement triggers a prey response. Slow, predictable movement registers as non-threatening. When I’m working toward a group of animals on a river, I move like I have nowhere to be. Because I don’t. The animal has somewhere to be. I’m trying to be nearby when it gets there.
Watch how animals move around each other. That’s the best tutorial on approach you’ll ever get. When an animal charges toward another, that means something. When we charge toward an animal, it means the same thing. If you can learn to move the way a non-threatening animal moves, you’ll find that wildlife tolerates you at much closer distances.
We understand domestic animals intuitively. When a dog curls its lip and bares its teeth, everybody knows what that means. Wild animals are just as communicative. The signals aren’t always that obvious, though. A bear that shifts its body angle slightly toward another bear, no open mouth, no huffing, just a subtle change in posture, is saying something very specific. To a human observer it looks like nothing. To the other bear it’s a clear message. A moose that flattens its ears back is agitated and very likely to charge. Body language and posture are how animals talk. Learning to read it is one of the most important things you can do as a wildlife photographer.
Sometimes you go to the animal. Sometimes you go to where the animal will be, and you wait. The stalk versus the sit. Both work. If a group of caribou is working its way across a valley toward a river crossing, you don’t follow. You get to the crossing and wait. If you’re tracking tigers in Bandhavgarh, more often than not you’re reading signs in the forest with an experienced guide who has a good sense of where the cat is likely to come through. You get into position ahead of the animal, not behind it.
Frans Lanting describes his relationship with wildlife as a dance. “There’s an interaction that goes on between animals and myself, and I’m working with them. It’s not as simple as sitting there and aiming a large telephoto lens from a great distance”. His wife and partner Chris Eckstrom describes the feedback loop: if you watch carefully, the animals are letting you know how comfortable they are with your presence. Read their language, and you’ll know whether it’s okay to move closer or whether you should back off.
The camera is the last step. Everything before it is fieldcraft, patience, and respect.
Patience
Paul Nicklen was asked for his best advice on wildlife photography. His answer: whenever you think you’ve waited long enough, double that.
He’s not exaggerating. Nicklen takes roughly 50,000 images for a 12-picture assignment. He’s spent months waiting for a three-day window with spirit bears. He saw narwhals only after years of trying.
Tom Mangelsen, whose work from Yellowstone and the Tetons is among the finest wildlife photography ever made in North America, describes the same discipline. Most people don’t take enough time. He might sit and watch an elephant or lion all day. He’s not there to grab a shot and move on to the next species. He’s not collecting numbers.
That’s the gap most people don’t cross. They want the dramatic behavior, the perfect light. But they don’t want to sit in the cold for eight hours for the possibility of that happening.
Mangelsen grew out of what he calls the “trophy animal” phase: wanting to collect a photograph of every species, checking boxes. He replaced that with something deeper, trying to catch the spirit, the character, the gesture of an animal. That shift doesn’t happen in an afternoon. It happens after hundreds of hours in the field.
Reading Light
Light is the raw material of every photograph. The word photography literally means writing with light, and learning to see it, to read what it’s doing and how it’s changing, is as fundamental as learning your camera. Everything else in the image follows from it.
Direction matters less than most people think. Quality matters more. Any kind of light can produce a strong image, and the photographers who limit themselves to golden hour are missing most of the day.
Soft overcast is wonderful for most subjects. Even illumination, no harsh shadows, saturated colors that pop without processing. Fur and feather detail renders beautifully. That said, overcast can fall flat when your subject is in or near water. The sky reflects off the surface and creates a dull sheen that’s hard to work with. A dark-furred animal standing in a reflective tidal flat under grey sky can look lifeless no matter what you do with exposure.
Frontlight gives you detail and color saturation. Sidelight gives you texture and dimension. Backlight gives you rim light, drama, and separation. Each one changes the story the image tells. A rim-lit animal with light pouring through fur or antlers in velvet is a completely different photograph than the same animal front-lit against a dark tree line. Backlit spray from a whale’s blow, backlit breath from an elk on a cold morning. Some of the most striking wildlife images I’ve made are backlit. The trick is knowing the difference between good backlight and glare. You want light wrapping around the subject, not overwhelming it.
I look for spotlights constantly. An animal in a shaft of light against a darker background, that interplay of shadow and illumination. Joni Mitchell had it right. Shadows and Light.
Read the light before you start shooting. Spend a few seconds looking at how it falls on the landscape, where the shadows sit, where the highlights land. Then position yourself relative to the animal so the light works in your favor. Most photographers find the animal first and deal with whatever light they’ve got. Flip that. Read the light, then find the position.
Pay attention to edges. The boundary where light meets shadow, where the animal meets the background, where one texture transitions to another. Those edges create visual contrast, and they’re what the eye is drawn to. Photographs with strong edges feel alive in a way that evenly lit, evenly toned images don’t. Once you start noticing edges in the field, you’ll start seeing compositions you didn’t see before.
Hides and Blinds
I’ve used hides and blinds sparingly. Most of the shooting I do, whether backpacking in remote Alaska or working with mobile wildlife in open terrain, makes them impractical. I either don’t want to carry one or I’m moving too much for a fixed position to make sense. That said, if you’re in a situation where they work, use them. Hides are common in European wildlife photography and for dedicated bird setups, and your situation will determine what’s worth the investment. It’s just not my area of expertise.
Section 10: Seeing and Composition
Learning to See
Most people walk through wild places and don’t see photographs. Not because the photographs aren’t there. Because their brains aren’t trained to notice them.
Guy Tal, a photographer and writer whose thinking I respect, describes something called inattentional blindness. The default programming of the human brain doesn’t consider certain things important enough to pay conscious attention to. Colors, textures, patterns, the way light falls on wet moss at a particular angle. They’re all there. You just haven’t trained yourself to see them yet.
The same thing happens with wildlife. People come out on tours and they’re looking for the animal. They find it. They start shooting. And they miss everything else: the light raking across the fur, the reflection in the water behind it, the way the animal’s ears just rotated because it heard something upstream. The photograph isn’t the animal. The photograph is the moment, the light, the behavior, the environment, all of it together.
Art Wolfe teaches a concept he calls defining your subject. He’ll show a wide landscape, a beautiful mountain valley, and ask: what’s the subject? The honest answer is there isn’t one. It’s a travel snapshot. But within that scene there are a dozen photographs if you slow down and look: the architecture, the prayer flags, the cultivated fields, the monastery. Each one has a clear subject. Each one says something.
Wildlife photography works the same way. The obvious subject is the animal. But the photograph you remember, the one that stops people, is the one where you saw something beyond the obvious. A white-tailed deer standing in a small clearing in the forest, dappled light falling across its back. A bull elk with its breath curling up in the morning frost. A mountain goat standing on an impossible ledge with a thousand feet of nothing below it.
Frans Lanting says something that sticks with me: if you don’t understand what you are photographing, you are just looking at the surface of things. He’s talking about the science and behavior underneath what we see. But it applies to the visual, too. If you’re only seeing the animal, you’re looking at the surface. The photograph lives deeper than that.
You can train this. It takes time and repetition, same as everything else. But it starts with slowing down and actually looking at what’s in front of you before you press the shutter.
Composition
Composition in wildlife photography is simpler than landscape work in some ways, because the subject is obvious. The animal is the subject. Your job is to present it well.
The most common mistake I see isn’t a technical one. It’s that people don’t think about composition before they shoot. They find the animal, raise the camera, and start firing. The framing is an afterthought. Flip that. Before you put your camera to your eye, decide what you want the image to look like. Where does the animal sit in the frame? What’s behind it? What story are you telling?
Eye sharpness. If the eye isn’t sharp, the image fails. It doesn’t matter how good the light is, how dramatic the behavior is, or how rare the species. An out-of-focus eye kills an otherwise perfect frame. Focus on the eye. Always.
Space to move. Leave room in the frame in the direction the animal is looking or moving. An animal pressed against the edge of the frame with nowhere to go feels claustrophobic. An animal with a wall of dead space behind it looks like it’s walking backwards. Neither one works. Give the animal room to breathe in the direction it’s headed.
Environment versus isolation. A tight crop shows behavior and expression. A wider frame shows habitat and sense of place. Both are valuable, and the best wildlife photographers use both, often of the same animal in the same session. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking every wildlife photo needs to be a tight headshot at 600mm. A pronghorn small in the frame against a vast prairie at sunset tells a story that a frame-filling portrait can’t.
Marsel van Oosten says something that most wildlife photographers resist hearing: his perfect wildlife shot is a great landscape photograph with an animal in it as a bonus. That’s a radical reframe. Most people pick up a long lens and try to fill the frame with the animal. And there’s nothing wrong with that for behavior and action. But the images that stop people, the ones that communicate something about an animal’s life, usually pull back.
Art Wolfe’s teaching on horizon placement applies directly. Where you put that line changes everything about how an image reads. A low horizon gives the sky dominance. A high horizon grounds the image. When you’re photographing a mountain goat against a massive glacial backdrop, those choices tell completely different stories. Both are valid. The mistake is only doing one.
Backgrounds. A clean, uncluttered background can make a mediocre subject look stunning. A busy, distracting background can ruin a once-in-a-lifetime moment. Before you press the shutter, look behind the animal. Can you shift two feet and clean up that branch? Can you drop lower and replace the cluttered hillside with smooth sky? Those two seconds of thought before the shot save hours of frustration after.
Get low. Camera angle changes the relationship between the viewer and the subject. Shooting down at an animal from standing height is the perspective we already have. It’s what we see with our own eyes every time we look at a fox or a dog or a bird on the ground. When a photograph looks exactly like that, it doesn’t feel like the photographer put any thought into it. They just took a picture of what was already in front of them.
Getting to eye level changes everything. The viewer meets the animal on its own terms. For small mammals and birds, that means belly on the ground. For larger animals, sitting or kneeling. And if you can get lower than the animal and shoot upward, even slightly, you give the subject a sense of authority and presence that a downward angle never conveys. A wolf photographed from below feels like a wolf. A wolf photographed from above feels like somebody’s pet.
Tom Mangelsen describes growing out of the trophy animal phase of his career and starting to ask: what would a wider lens do? What about the surroundings? That question, simple as it sounds, is the beginning of stronger composition. The animal gives the landscape scale. The landscape gives the animal context. In Alaska, the surroundings are the story.
Section 11: Visualization
Visualization is one of the most discussed concepts in wildlife and nature photography, and one of the least understood. What it means, most of the time, is shooting what is not in front of you.
You don’t set out to photograph what you can already see. You set out to photograph what is yet to come into being. You make predictions about what might happen, position yourself accordingly, choose your lens and settings accordingly, consider your light and your angle, and then you wait.
What that looks like in practice: you notice a small clearing in the forest where the morning light is going to cut through the trees in about twenty minutes. You can see the composition before anything is in it. If a deer steps into that clearing when the light is right, you know exactly what the image looks like. So you get into position, pick your lens, dial in your settings, and wait for the scene to come together. It might not. But if it does, you’re ready. That’s visualization.
The most common mistake I see is people walking out into the field and, when they spot their subject, whether it’s a moose or a caribou or a bear, they immediately plant their tripod, point it at the animal, and start shooting. They hope it does something interesting right there. But the reality is you’re probably not in the best spot to capture what’s going to unfold. Your job is to imagine what might unfold and position yourself ahead of time.
Almost every time we go out to photograph, I spend the first ten or fifteen minutes just watching. Where are the animals? What are they doing? Are they settled into a spot, or just passing through? There’s no point walking fifteen minutes upriver to get into position if those animals are going to leave before we arrive. If I can tell they’re committed to a spot, we go. If they’re heading somewhere else, I walk to where they’re going and try to get there first.
Visualization is about looking at where an animal might be heading and what kind of light you might want, what perspective might work, what shot you’d want to make if a particular behavior happens. Something that may not even occur. But if it does, you want to be in the right position and the right frame of mind to capture it.
That’s what good photographers do. The people who walk out and start shooting whatever’s in front of them are the ones who come home wondering why their images don’t look like the ones they see in magazines.
I’ve written about this at more length, with examples and field stories, here: Photography Tips for the Timid: See What Isn’t There.
Section 12: After the Shutter
RAW
I shoot RAW almost exclusively. There are times when I just need JPEGs and don’t need a complicated workflow, but for wildlife photography, it’s RAW 99% of the time. I recommend the same for anyone serious about improving. Shooting RAW forces you to engage with the image after capture, and you’ll learn more about photography and processing by doing it than by letting the camera make those decisions for you.
Processing Philosophy
My general philosophy on processing is to get it right in camera. That’s a personal preference, not a rule. I’d rather spend my time photographing than sitting at a computer. I’ve also very rarely seen heavily processed photos turn into truly great photos. “Really great photos” are a dime a dozen today. The volume of photography is enormous, and for an image to stand out, it needs to be somewhat exceptional. Most of the time, an exceptional photo is pretty exceptional right out of the camera.
I don’t have strong opinions on AI tools like Topaz Denoise or sky replacement. Use whatever works for you and your photography. Compositing animals into scenes they weren’t in isn’t something I pursue, but that’s because it doesn’t interest me as a serious endeavor, not because I think it’s unethical. The ethics that matter to me in wildlife photography are about how you behave in the field and how you represent animals, not about what you do in Photoshop.
Software
My workflow starts with Photo Mechanic on the front end, then RAW adjustments in Capture One Pro, and from there into Adobe Photoshop. I don’t have a strong recommendation on which software is best. What I have a strong opinion on is this: pick one tool and learn it well. The learning curve on any of these applications is steep and the investment of time is real. Jumping between Lightroom and Capture One and whatever the next thing is costs you more than it gives you. Find the tool that works for you and go deep.
That said, AI and software tools for photography are changing so rapidly that recommending a specific workflow almost feels pointless. What I use today may not be what I use in a year, and the tools that are about to arrive will likely change how all of us work. The principles matter more than the products.
One thing I’d add: put real weight on customer support when you choose software. Photo Mechanic, in my experience, has been excellent on that front for twenty years. Adobe has not. When you inevitably run into something you can’t figure out from YouTube or a forum post and need to reach out for help, the quality of that support matters more than any individual feature comparison. That applies to camera gear, too. The companies that stand behind their products are the ones worth sticking with.
Culling
When I come back from a day in the field, everything goes into Photo Mechanic first, where it’s automatically backed up to a second hard drive and then to Backblaze in the cloud. Three copies of everything before I touch a single frame.
Then I cull. First pass: delete anything that’s obviously awful. Out of focus, bad crops, the frames where you bumped the shutter by accident. Get them out. Second pass: color tag the obvious keepers. A “1” or “2” label for the photos that immediately stand out. Third pass: I look for images that just aren’t worth keeping. A lot of them will be perfectly sharp and properly exposed, but if they’re mediocre photos, they get a “7” tag and are queued for deletion.
I try to get the collection as small as I can. I’m certainly guilty of keeping photos just because I almost got a great shot and something went wrong, but once you’ve got a couple hundred thousand images on your hard drives, you start realizing you should probably be more aggressive about letting things go. How many frames I shoot in a day depends entirely on the situation. Some days it’s thousands. Some days, particularly with subjects I’ve photographed a lot, I don’t press the shutter at all.
Section 13: Where to Go
You don’t need to fly to Africa to photograph world-class wildlife. North America has extraordinary subjects, many of them in places you can reach without a safari budget. And some of the best opportunities might be closer to home than you think.
Alaska is my home base and my favorite wildlife photography destination anywhere. Coastal brown bears at Katmai National Park, Lake Clark, and Admiralty Island offer reliable access from June through September, with bears fishing salmon streams often at remarkably close range. Homer and the Chilkat River near Haines are two of the most accessible eagle photography locations in the world. Southeast Alaska and Prince William Sound are excellent for humpback whales, sea otters, and harbor seals. And the interior, the Brooks Range, Gates of the Arctic, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is home to caribou, wolves, Dall sheep, and muskox in some of the most remote landscapes on the continent.
What I like most about Alaska is the space. Fewer people in any given situation than you’ll find at comparable locations in Florida, the Smoky Mountains, or Yellowstone and the Tetons. It’s easier for me to photograph and focus on my subjects when I’m not standing next to 200 people along a boardwalk.
Patagonia has become one of the best places on Earth to photograph wild pumas. Torres del Paine National Park and the surrounding private ranchland support a population of cats habituated enough to tolerate vehicles and photographers at reasonable distance. The landscape is extraordinary, and with condors, guanacos, and the Torres themselves as a backdrop, the photographic opportunities go well beyond the cats.
Yellowstone and Grand Teton remain excellent for elk, bison, wolves, and bears, with the infrastructure to support extended trips. The Canadian Rockies offer grizzlies, mountain goats, and bighorn sheep in dramatic mountain scenery. Cades Cove in Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of the more accessible spots in the eastern U.S. for whitetail deer and elk. Custer State Park in South Dakota is great for bison and other Great Plains species. Florida is underrated for bird photography, particularly the Everglades and coastal rookeries. Bosque del Apache in New Mexico is one of the great waterfowl spectacles in North America.
Internationally, the options are staggering. India offers tigers, leopards, multiple species of deer, and if you head into the Himalayas, snow leopard and high alpine ungulates like blue sheep and ibex. Brazil’s Pantanal is one of the best places on Earth for jaguar photography, along with their prey species and a staggering diversity of birds. East Africa remains unmatched for the sheer density and variety of large mammals. Borneo for orangutans. The Falkland Islands for penguin colonies and albatross. Antarctica for a photographic experience unlike anything else on the planet. Costa Rica for tropical birds and reptiles. The world is full of extraordinary wildlife photography destinations, and the list grows every year as conservation efforts open new opportunities and habituated wildlife populations expand.
But here’s the thing: there are probably great opportunities right where you live. Local parks, wildlife refuges, rivers, coastlines. Shorebirds, raptors, songbirds, deer, foxes. You don’t need a lottery permit or a five-figure trip budget to get started. You need to go where the animals are, at the time they’re active, and with enough patience to wait for the moment.
Section 14: Start Shooting
Camera settings are the easy part. You can set up aperture priority with auto-ISO, configure back button focus, and dial in a minimum shutter speed in twenty minutes. That’s the foundation, and it’s covered earlier in this guide.
The hard part is everything else.
Knowing why the light at your back isn’t always the best light. Noticing that a herd of zebra just stopped grazing and turned to face the same direction, and understanding what that means before you see the lioness. Waiting out an entire grey morning on a riverbank because you’ve watched this stretch of water long enough to know the otters will be back. That’s the work that turns competent photos into good ones, and good ones into the kind that stop people mid-scroll.
That takes time. There’s no shortcut. But you can shorten the learning curve by getting into the field with people who know the animals and the landscape. Whether that’s a local birding group, a workshop with a photographer whose work you admire, or a guided trip to a destination you’ve been researching, the fastest way to improve is to spend time alongside someone who’s already made the mistakes you’re about to make.
That’s a big part of why I run small-group wildlife photography tours in Alaska and Patagonia. Five photographers maximum for most trips. We go where the animals are, at the right time, with a guide who’s been doing this since the late 1990s. If you want to see what that looks like, our photo tours page has the details.
Newsletter
If you’re not ready for a trip but want to keep learning, I write a newsletter called Ramblings. Field stories, photography notes, trip planning, wildlife updates, and the occasional entirely fictional award ceremony. No spam, no sales pitches. About once a month.
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Most Common Mistakes
- Prioritizing gear over fieldcraft. A $12,000 lens won’t fix bad positioning, poor light, or an animal that’s already been spooked.
- Shooting from standing height. Eye level changes everything. Get low.
- Not thinking about composition before pressing the shutter. Find the animal, then decide what the image should look like. Not the other way around.
- Ignoring what’s behind the subject. A busy, cluttered background will ruin a technically perfect shot. Shift two feet. Drop lower. Fix it before you shoot.
- Approaching too fast or too close. If the animal changes its behavior because of you, you’ve already failed. Back off.
- Planting the tripod and firing at the nearest animal. Move. Work angles. The first position you set up in is almost never the best one.
- Not learning the animal before photographing it. Knowing that a bird leans forward before takeoff, or that a predator’s ears rotate toward a sound source, is the difference between capturing behavior and missing it.
- Chasing sharpness at the expense of everything else. A super sharp photo of a boring moment is still a boring photo.
- Skipping overcast days. Flat light is even light. No harsh shadows, saturated color, freedom to work from any angle. Some of the best wildlife images are made under grey skies.
- Trying to photograph everything. Pick a subject. Commit. Spend an hour with one animal instead of ten minutes with six.
Section 15: FAQ
What camera settings should I use for wildlife photography?
Start with aperture priority and auto-ISO if you want to come home with sharp images right away. Set a minimum shutter speed of at least 1/1000 for general wildlife work and faster for birds in flight. Use continuous autofocus (AF-C) and back button focus to separate tracking from shooting.
If you want to learn photography, not just capture images, start with manual mode. Manual forces you to understand what every setting does and why. It’s slower at first, but the understanding you build carries over into every shooting situation you’ll ever face. Both approaches work. They just serve different goals.
What lens do I need for wildlife photography?
A telephoto in the 100-400mm range is the most versatile starting point. It covers large mammals, environmental portraits, and gives you room to grow. For birds and smaller or more distant subjects, you’ll eventually want 500-600mm of reach. Image stabilization helps for static subjects, but a fast shutter speed matters more for anything in motion.
Spend your money on glass before you spend it on camera bodies. A good lens on a mid-range body will outperform a mediocre lens on a flagship camera every time.
How do you get sharp wildlife photos?
Shutter speed solves most sharpness problems. A sharp image at high ISO beats a blurry image at low ISO every time. For stationary animals, 1/500 is a reasonable floor. For anything moving, push to 1/1000 or faster. Birds in flight may need 1/2000 or above.
Beyond shutter speed: use continuous autofocus, focus on the eye, and practice tracking moving subjects before you need to do it for real. If your images are consistently soft, the issue is almost always shutter speed or focus technique, not your equipment.
What is the best time of day for wildlife photography?
The first and last two hours of daylight give the warmest, most dimensional light and coincide with peak animal activity. But don’t pack up when those hours are over.
Overcast days are, by far, my favorite conditions for wildlife photography. Even light from every direction, no harsh shadows, saturated colors that pop without processing. I can move to any side of a subject and not worry about where the light is coming from. Most photographers avoid overcast. I seek it out.
Bears fishing, whales breaching, and caribou migrating don’t follow photographer schedules. Some of the best wildlife images are made in weather and conditions that most people avoid.
Do I need expensive gear to start wildlife photography?
No. You need a camera with continuous autofocus and a telephoto lens. A used body from the previous generation paired with a 100-400mm zoom will get you started for a fraction of what a new flagship system costs. The technology in cameras from even a few years ago is more than capable of producing professional-quality images.
The things that actually limit most wildlife photographers have nothing to do with gear. They’re fieldcraft, patience, understanding animal behavior, and knowing how to read light. A photographer who understands those things will make better images with a mid-range kit than someone who doesn’t understand them with $15,000 worth of equipment.
