No discussion on photography would be complete without visiting the genre of wildlife and nature photography. Capturing wildlife in their natural habitats, eavesdropping on their unpredictable and dynamic interactions with nature, give us a visceral insight into their irreplaceable impact on our world. And finding exotic specimens of the myriad species of trees, plants and flowers affords us the opportunity to showcase their unique, soul-touching beauty with photography.
Although I cover these two photographic endeavors in this one article, shooting wildlife differs greatly from that of relatively still nature. Gear can be different. The preparation and approach to each often requires very different thought processes. And the intended stories told by your photos of birds and animals vary widely from those of flowers and trees. Lastly, wildlife must be captured at a reasonable distance in order to ensure the safety of both the subject and the photographer, and also to not allow human presence to adversely affect the scene. Photographing flora, on the other hand, usually requires getting very close to your subjects in order to remove distracting elements of the background.
Photographing wildlife, it is often desirable to show movement, perhaps pulling back the shutter speed just a little to reveal the slightest motion blur. This can also be accomplished in a scene of water fowl moving through a pond or stream, showing motion by creating trails in the water’s surface. But other times the photographer might want to stop motion completely for telling a different story, stopping a bird cold in mid flight or a black bear feeding on river salmon.
Setting out to photograph nature, the photog envisions capturing very quiet, serene, still images of trees or flowers or perhaps barley reaching for the sun in an open field. He often plans to shoot a very shallow depth of field to separate the subject from its surroundings. Or maybe he will stop down the aperture in order to render tack sharp the trees both close and far away.