Perhaps I’m being a bit flippant here in saying wildlife photography is easy. Just fill the frame and you’ve got a great shot, right? While I might be stretching the “easy” part quite a bit, considering the hard work, time, patience, and expense that often is involved in getting that frame-filling shot, portraits often demand little more than having good timing or luck to catch just the right pose.
Capturing a sense of place, the environment or habitat that an animal lives in, I find to be a lot more challenging. For these types of shots, one has to look beyond, or rather around, your subject and take in the scene, rather than solely fixate upon the animal. That’s easy to write but not necessarily easy to do, especially if you’re photographing something new and exciting where, almost by habit, you’re going for that portrait.
Sometimes, even if I’m hoping to capture that sense of place, it just doesn’t work, either because the surroundings add nothing to the scene or are downright distracting in some way. In those conditions, going for the close-up makes perfect sense. But I love making the types of shots that capture that sense of place whenever I can.
At one of the lodges we visit in Brazil’s Pantanal, when the water of a roadside pond drops to a critical level, birds congregate by the hundreds. Egrets, jabiru storks, snail kites, large-billed terns, and black skimmers converge in a distractingly prolific assortment of subjects. On one visit, I was particularly drawn to the black skimmers (Rynchops niger) that offered multiple chances for near-water-level shots as they skimmed by. After capturing several great poses, I think I finally took the time to actually look and take in the entire scene. One of the skimmers frequently passed by quite close to the decrepit boat dock I was sitting on, giving me the chance to try a wide-angle scene that showed the entire pond. The shot that resulted tells far more of that experience than any of the close-ups, which could have been taken almost anywhere within the birds’ vast range.
In Svalbard, Norway, most successful polar-bear photography is done from a boat or Zodiac, and during late spring, this shooting can occur at any time of day or night as the sun never sets. In what would be our sleeping hours, our ship anchored beside a stretch of fast ice as we hoped that a far-off polar bear (Ursus maritimus) might grow curious and visit. We were lucky, and after a long wait, the bear approached, so close that at one point, it rested its front paws upon the ship’s hull. Every photographer had been using their telephoto to capture the bear as it sauntered in across the ice, but I had another camera with a 16-35mm wide-angle lens mounted as well. As the bear lost interest and headed off, I was struck by the emptiness and the dark, brooding clouds and, rather than going for a tight back-end view of a retreating bear, I tried to capture this vastness, with the bear a small but significant focal point in the image.
Until jaguar-based tourism became routine in the Pantanal, photographing a wild jaguar (Panthera onca) was nearly impossible. A photograph I‘d seen of a jaguar lying on a log in the Peruvian Amazon always spoke to me, and subconsciously, I think I always wanted to make a similar image. Accomplishing it was not a given, since the lure of getting that frame-filling shot often closes our eyes to any other possibility. Fortunately, that didn’t happen in this case. When we were motoring upriver and spotted this jaguar, most of those in the boat initially had trouble even seeing it. The vibrant river grasses, the twisted log, and the forest background practically overwhelmed the cat, and that’s what struck me. Instead of grabbing my big telephoto, I grabbed a smaller focal-length zoom to capture the entire scene. Cropping to a panorama, I feel, directed a viewer’s attention first to the log.
I love when my photography participants recognize the potential of a shot and don’t need me to do all the directing. Not that I’m avoiding work — it’s just great to experience photographers really seeing. On one trip to Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve, we drove toward a cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) lying flat on a termite mound. Behind us, the nearly black clouds of an advancing thunderstorm crawled across the grasslands. Before I could say a word, one of the photographers asked if we could drive around the cat so that the clouds would be in the background, even though the cheetah would be facing away from us. I was thrilled that he recognized the potential, and we moved into position. The cat obliged by sitting upright and faced our way. While this image doesn’t have the same sense of place as the other examples I’ve used, it certainly illustrates the value in recognizing potential and passing on the easy, and possibly mundane, shot.
