By Crystal Cockman

August 23,2016

I am a very amateur nature photographer, but I’ve been able to get some pretty good shots thanks to the fact that I spend a lot of time outdoors and I’ve got some decent cameras, and a lot of patience. I’d like to share just a few of the things I’ve learned while photographing nature and wildlife in particular.Try getting on an eye-level perspective or even lower. Getting a picture of an animal standing upright from ground level is a great shot that really makes the subject matter stand out. Even photographing a wildflower from at or below eye-level makes for a better image. From below eye-level looking up allows you to take in the background habitat for the species and makes the photograph much more interesting. A picture of a pink lady slipper showing the pine forest blurred in the background is one good example.

Try to get multiple subjects in the same shot, such more than one of a bird species for example. This is one time where being patient comes in.  As with deer hunting, a lot of times the mother deer sends in the younger deer first and she comes out later on. Waiting to see if more wildlife will follow suit provides a more interesting shot, particularly if they exhibit an interactive behavior with one another, such as flapping their wings.  The action or sport setting is good for catching birds in movement or flight.

One camera I have is the Canon PowerShot SX50 HS. It is 12.1 megapixels
with a 50x optical zoom. I use this camera for bird photos, as the large optical zoom allows you to get a close-up picture without being very close to the bird. You sacrifice some clarity for the long-range shot, but it still does a great job. I also have a good close-up of a rattlesnake I took with this camera, much closer than I’d ever venture to get with a camera with less of a zoom.
Another camera I have is the Canon PowerShot A1100IS. It is also 12.1 megapixels but has only a 4x optical zoom. It has an optical image stabilizer and a really good macro setting, which helps me take pictures of things like wildflowers where I am already close to the image without the image being blurred. One advantage of this camera also is that it uses 2 AA batteries, so there’s no special charger involved.

Both cameras do a pretty good job of taking landscape pictures. Lighting is important when it comes to landscapes, and some of my best shots are taken during early morning bird surveys or late in the afternoon with a good angle of light.

Thanks to digital photography it is relatively inexpensive to take a lot of shots, so getting a good image is easier now than ever. Next time you’re out in the woods be patient and see what shows up, you never know when you might have an opportunity to photograph an interesting animal behavior or beautiful wildflower in just the right light.