Wildlife Photography_ From Snapshots to Great Shots - Laurie Excell [34]
A Day at the Zoo
Not only will you learn a lot about your equipment and your technique when visiting a zoo, but it’s a great way to spend an afternoon before heading out on a wildlife adventure. On your next day off visit your local zoo (local park if your city doesn’t have a zoo). Work the various animals with the equipment you own. Determine what focal length will give you a full-body image and how tight you can get with your telephoto. Knowing your minimum focus distance, how close you need to be to different-sized subjects to fill the frame, and so on, you’ll be prepared when it’s time to click.
Plan Your Next Adventure
Even if it seems like a pipe dream to you right now, sit down and plan your dream adventure. Where would you go? What time of year is best? How would you get there? What would the accommodations be like? How much would your dream adventure cost? You never know; with careful planning and a little bit of savings, one day your dream may come true.
Share your results with the book’s Flickr group!
Join the group here: flickr.com/groups/wildlifephotographyfromsnapshotstogreatshots.
6. Close Encounters
Tips and Techniques for Safely Getting Closer to Your Subject
Moving in closer for those in-your-face, frame-filling images of wildlife is the goal of many a wildlife photographer. Who doesn’t want to capture every detail in the feathers or fur of a subject or that direct, soul-to-soul connection when wildlife looks into the lens? Each chapter in this book builds upon previous chapters with tips and information to help improve your wildlife photography. Getting closer to your subject will help you make more dynamic and interesting images, whether you achieve this through the use of longer lenses and attaching teleconverters or by actually moving physically closer to your subject. In this chapter, I’ll explore the many techniques I use to get closer to my subjects.
Poring Over the Picture
The ultimate compliment wildlife can give me is to continue about its daily life unconcerned by my presence. A quiet and slow approach allowed me to get within frame-filling range of a sow and her cub.
Poring Over the Picture
Getting closer to your subject might involve using more than one technique. To capture this in-your-face, eyeball-to-eyeball shot of a bison, I photographed from the safety of my car using a telephoto lens to increase the magnification.
Getting Closer Through Increased Magnification
One way to bring your subject closer is through the equipment you own (Chapter 1, “Equipment Essentials”). DX bodies with their small sensor increase the magnification by 1.5X/1.6X (crop factor). Adding a longer focal length lens to your system is another way to increase the subject size in your images. If you already have the long glass, try using a teleconverter to increase the focal length of your lens. You have several options to consider when trying to increase subject size in your frame.
DX Bodies
If you have a DX camera, you are already getting an increased magnification of 1.5X your lens’s actual focal length due to the cropped sensor (Figure 6.1). DX bodies are popular among those who want greater magnification but can’t afford the big glass. Because of the smaller sensor size, lenses are multiplied by 1.5X (Nikon) or 1.6X (Canon) to come up with the equivalent focal length on a DX body.
Figure 6.1 Using a DX body increased the magnification of my 200–400mm lens by 1.5X due to the size of the sensor.
Telephoto Lenses
Depending on your current lens selection, it may be time to step up to the next longer telephoto lens to bring your subject closer. Once you get into the super telephoto range (400mm and up), your lens choices are narrowed down to fixed focal length—400mm, 500mm, 600mm, and so on—which have fairly wide apertures (2.8, f4). This increased magnification and wide aperture allow you to capture frame-filling, peak-of-action images (Figure