Photographing wildlife can be challenging. But with a few tricks the photos can turn our a lot better than expected.

In three articles we are looking at what you need to take good travel photos on safari:

• Camera gear
• Camera technique
• Settings and configuration of gear

Safari in Southern Africa is one of our best travel memories and prints on the wall is a constant reminder of this. Good technique can make the difference between an out of focus shot of some grass or a razor sharp shot of a bird in flight or a majestic lion.

Supporting the camera

This might sound basic, but it is important to hold the camera right. Many people hold the camera body with both hands, but this has two major drawbacks: It is unstable and with a large lens you risk damaging your gear. Keep one hand on the body and one on the lens. If you mainly shoot hand held you can detach the tripod mount to get a better grip, most lenses support this. Alternatively you can turn it upside down, making it easier to re-configure when mounting on a tripod.

As mentioned above: Most larger lenses have a tripod mount. There is a good reason for this, lenses often become heavier than your camera body. When mounting your gear on a tripod it is important to use the lens mount and not the camera mount. If you support the gear on something else (like a window or fence) the same applies. The camera body can hang off the lens, they are made to survive this; however, the opposite is not the case.

Composition

Most people have probably heard that your main subject should not be dead center in your photo. Rule of thirds, golden ratio and similar techniques are good to make the photos look more appealing and natural. However, on safari there is an exception to this, that is if you are going to crop you photo in post production. As mentioned in part 1 you rarely have enough reach on your camera, causing the need for cropping later on. This changes the composition, which also means that the need to frame your subject correctly is not that important. There are also two reasons to position your subject in the center:

1. All lenses are sharpest in center: By focusing at the center of the lens you get the best image quality. The further away from center you get, the less sharp the lens is.
2. Autofocus works best in center: Cameras usually have special points where the camera can focus (you know, the red squares in the viewfinder). These are scattered around the center of the viewfinder, but the center one is always the best. There are some cases where other ones works as well as the one in center, but never better than it. In low light conditions or cases where locking focus is hard you increase your chances by using the center focus point. As lenses are also sharpest in the center, it makes focus even better.

If you are not cropping in post production you do have to think about the position of your subject and do everything “right” in camera. It is not worth sacrificing a good composition for a slightly better autofocus or sharpness in center (unless the conditions are so bad that you have no other choice), but if you are going to crop anyway, take advantage of your camera’s best image area for your subject.

Camera settings

It is easy to set your camera to Auto and shoot all day long. Unfortunately the technology is not good enough to always understand what you are trying to do. Spend some time understanding the different modes of your camera and test it before you are going to use it in the field. When we travelled around the world we learned a lot and improved our technique, but we would by no doubt have benefited from knowing this before we embarked on our journey. Most people interested in photography probably knows the difference between auto, shutter priority and aperture priority, but do you know how much sharper your lens is at f4 versus f8 or how long your shutter time must be to make a bird in flight sharp? More about the specific settings is covered part 3, setup and configuration.

Tripod

Tripods are usually made rock solid and as immovable as possible. When photographing wildlife on safaris the sturdiness of the tripod is of course important, but let the tripod head be loose. If you cannot move the camera when the subject moves you will not get any good photos…

Take many photos

Tiny movements in camera, wildlife and other factors means that some photos will turn out sharper than others. Especially at long distances vibrations can cause blurry photos. By taking bursts of photos the chance of getting a sharp one increases. If you shoot wildlife in motion you also get the benefit of having multiple motion captures to choose from. One huge advantage of digital cameras is after all the ability to delete photos, so don’t be afraid of taking a few extra ones. When we travelled around the world we shot almost 18 000 photos, but saved just north of 2500.

One thing to keep in mind that you need to have time and space for all the photos. We manually sorted 18 000 photos and developed the ones we were satisfied with. Needless to say this took a fair amount of time. If you are not planning on spending much time on the photos after they have left the camera you might end up with so many photos that they just end up in a drawer and is never looked at again. However, if you are not willing to put some effort into the photos, you cannot expect them to turn out as good as they have the potential for either! Storage is also a factor, you do not want to be in a position where your memory card is filled with 400 photos of a squirrel and when a lion walks past you, your camera says that you cannot take any photos because you have no space left…

Light

Light changes photos a lot. No matter how great your Photoshop skills are it cannot replace a sunset or sunrise. Many safari photos can look a bit dull with dry grass, sand and a gray-ish look. Red light from the sun can provide life to the photo and most animals are more active at this time of the day as well. It is also critical to understand how to best utilise your camera in low light. It is by far much harder to shoot in the evening compared to mid-day, but the result can be so much better!

Autofocus

It might go without saying that autofocus is a must on safaris. It might be tempting to pick up a second hand manual focus lens for  a low price (Nikon 600mm f4 is available for just over $1000 second hand!), but manually focusing on wildlife in motion can be incredibly hard.

A less obvious choice is what kind of focus mode to use. Most cameras have two options, single focus (focus until something is in focus, then stop) or continuous focus (keep focusing as long as the shutter button is half pressed). However, our recommendation is to take a different approach. There is a hybrid of these two focusing modes called back button autofocus. It is a technique that does require some time to get used to, but it is absolutely brilliant. In short it decouples the focusing from the shutter button and reassigns it to another button (like the AF-On button that you might not have used before). In practice it allows you to combine single and continuous focus without changing any settings. If you wish to try this out or read more about the benefits, we have covered this in details in part 3, settings and configuration of gear. The video below also explains it well:

Know your subject

Okey, this isn’t really a camera technique, but it is key to good photos. If you know how the animals behave, where they usually are and what is unique about them you can get so much better photos. Luckily the majority of this job can be handed off to a guide – who probably knows this a lot better than you will ever do anyway.

Patience

BBC wanted to capture an arctic fox leaping through the snow to hunt mice. The result is amazing, but few are probably able to guess how much time it took to get the shot. The correct answer is 2.5 years. Yes, years! We are not saying that you should quit your job, move to Africa, build a house and wait a year for the right moment, but a bit of patience can come in handy.