I tend to think of wildlife portraits as finding the essence of an animal. Just like human portraits, taking animal portraits follows a lot of the same rules with a few major differences. Whilst you’ll have the advantage of not having to worry about hair styling, wardrobe and makeup, you’ll spend a lot of time waiting for just the right moment to actually take a shot. Never work with animals or children they say. And they’d be right: children can be extremely unpredictable and uncooperative. Not all the time of course. But animals – in particular wildlife – well that’s even worse: you have very little chance to direct the shot. And they might not even turn up. If that lion doesn’t look at you, you can’t take a full face portrait with him looking right at you. Luckily, some animals are curious to see what has just stopped in front of them, like giraffes for example. But be quick. If you’re in a safari vehicle, you should have your camera ready for the shot before you stop. The animals are most interested in you at the point you arrive. After that (if they haven’t scarpered) they’ll often lose interest and never look at you again. Often though, animals keep a constant look-out and will turn to look in different directions repeatedly on the lookout. Even predators do this, so their kills don’t get stolen. Try to catch the animal looking directly at you if possible.

Luck plays a big part. But as with anything else, it’s possible to ‘refine’ luck by shortening the odds. Do your homework and find out when the animals are likely to be around. Go with a guide, or someone who knows the animals to increase your chances. There are times when certain animals don’t do much: lions are a great example! If you turn up at midday, they’ll be asleep. Find them at dawn or dusk and you’ll see them utterly transformed.

When is the best light? Usually golden hour is best, not just because it’s a lovely colour, but also because the light comes in at more of an angle and creates a more 3D effect. Or it might create back-light for extra drama. All is not lost if the light isn’t great though: often, converting to black and white and carefully processing the image can make a great image.

Ok, so let’s talk technical stuff. In order to create a powerful connection with the animal, and so that you can show something of its character, you’ll have to decide how close to get. Most portraits work best when the animal is dominant in the frame. This is also a time when the rule of thirds doesn’t so much need to be used for the placement of the whole animal, as certain strong features of that animal. Think eyes on a thirds, or a hand on crossing thirds for example. Consider this portrait of a cheetah. Two of the signature features of cheetahs are the black ‘tear’ lines down each side of the nose, and those wonderful eyes. If you photograph the cheetah so that it’s small in the scene, those features won’t have much impact. So, zoom in with a long lens and make sure the eyes in particular are sharp. You’ll notice with the gorilla above that just one sharp eye works really well too. Zero sharp eyes doesn’t work, however! Speaking of sharpness, use as fast a shutter speed as you can get away with. If there’s not much light, crank up the ISO and use a beanbag or tripod. I know visual noise is undesirable, but sometimes a little noise is acceptable and is easily removable afterwards.

Separating the animal from the background is a good way to make it stand out. Try to use a shallow depth of field: as wide as you can go with the aperture. Be aware that any long noses may be out of focus if you’re at a really wide aperture, even if the eyes are in focus. In the world of lenses, I’m afraid long, fast lenses really do make a difference – and cost a whole pile of cash. Not only will you get closer in, but the quality of the shot will be better: sharpness, background blur (bokeh), contrast and lack of aberrations. It’s often the lens that’s more important than the camera. My sweetest lens was a Nikon 300mm f/2.8 and it cost an arm and a leg. I still haven’t replaced it since moving to Sony, but the intention is there.

As for post-processing, I like to do quite a bit to make sure the image really pops from the screen. As well as the usual exposure, white balance and so on, I usually add a bit more contrast, draw down the blacks and push up the whites and sharpen a bit more than I’d normally do. Also a touch of clarity and maybe a vignette or radial exposure filter with some dodging and burning. I realise that if you don’t know what these terms mean, this all may be a bit much to hear. It’s just to explain that my style is to perform quite a few tweaks to the image afterwards. Not always, but usually. And not always lots: usually subtlety is the best.

It’s worth pulling back a little sometimes and not cropping in too much. Whereas the cheetah’s face warranted a long lens and some cropping in post, the baboon above looked like it needed to a bit more space. It’s a portrait in its environment. The photo is still simple enough and the animal is the main subject, but there’s a little of its environment included, which I think enhanced the portrait.

I don’t know how other photographers describe texture, but I always think of it as visually representing what you would feel if you reached into the photograph and touched the surface of the subject. By the way, don’t do this to an elephant!

Speaking of elephants, they’re one of the best subjects for showing texture in photographs due to their endlessly fascinating skin, particularly of the trunk. If you click the images to make them full size, you can see the rough texture. Making sure the texture detail stand out is a way to make the photograph more engaging and intimate.

It’s not just elephants that have interesting texture though. Following are a grey seal (feel the texture of the whiskers, the sand and the fur), a close-up of a leaf (the veins are so intricate and beg to be touched) a lioness hunting (if she wasn’t searching for breakfast, it would be lovely to run your hands through the grasses), and a crossbill in an evergreen (again, I just want to run my fingers through the soft needles)

To really home in on texture, it’s often worth cropping into the region that has most physical interest and increasing the contrast, sharpness and perhaps clarity in post-production. This brings out the edges in more detail. Often, it’s worth converting to black and white to concentrate the eye on the texture in the image.

Let’s go back to elephants for the last couple of images. They really are the kings of texture!

There’s something incredibly evocative about the colours at sunset and sunrise. (In fact, I wrote a whole article a while ago about it for Landscape Photography Magazine)

In this blog post, I’ve collected a few thoughts about what I look for when creating a good sunset image.

In most cases, simply shooting an orange sky by itself is boring. Nice colours, and all, but boring. The thing that really makes it interesting is having some shapes in the frame. Whether that’s trees, buildings, clouds, animals – it’s up to you. Usually, at sunset, it’s getting pretty dark, so any shapes that are in the scene are dark and end up more or less silhouetted. Actually, this is perfect: what you’re looking for here is simple graphical shapes that look interesting against a sunset sky. So, a gnarled tree, or a line of giraffes is perfect.

Speaking of gnarled trees and giraffes, here’s one from Kenya:

Practically speaking, what you’ll probably have to do is push the white balance on your camera to the warmer end – usually warmer than the camera is likely to set by itself. The best settings are if you shoot in raw and expose for the highlights, i.e. the brightest part of the sky. Be careful not to expose for the sun if it’s in the frame though. Partly you could damage your camera’s sensor if pointing directly at the sun and partly because the sun will always be a burnt out highlight. So, get a nice bright exposure with your histogram biased to the right hand side, but so that the brightest part of the sky (except for the sun) is near the right hand end of the graph.

What this does is records the greatest amount of data available so you can adjust things in post-processing. Speaking of post-processing, don’t be scared to warm the white balance up and push the vibrance / saturation until the shot fizzes.

Using this technique of exposing for the highlights, this image of a storm cloud late one evening in France is very dynamic:

Mixing things up a bit, here are two urban images. The first is of the Angel of the North in Gateshead. The orange sky is actually a long exposure of streetlights reflected against the cloudy sky. The powerful shape of the Angel cutting through the frame makes the shot interesting. Secondly, there’s a shot of the Millennium Bridge on the Tyne. The colours here are gentler, but again, the shapes of the bridges and The Sage make the photograph worth taking.

Back to Kenya for a couple of evocative wildlife images – elephants then antelope and trees. With both of these, I’ve used the animals in silhouette against the sky to give a relaxing but graphically interesting photo.

It’s worth experimenting with sunsets and looking for animals or birds if they’re around. You don’t have to include the land in the shot if there’s enough interest in the sky. The next photo is of a flock of curlews flying past one evening. You know they’re curlews because they have curved bills. The simplicity of a silhouette nicely captures that against the sky.

Lastly, I’ll sign off with some UK images: again silhouettes but using the interesting shapes of the wildlife in their environment to create pleasing photos. The first is a roebuck at Studley Royal deer park in Yorkshire and the second is a jackdaw on a church roof next to where we used to live in Ryton.

“What’s that?” I hear you say. Chiaroscuro is an Italian word which literally means “bright-dark”. It’s an artistic term used to describe the use of strong contrasts between light and dark areas to enhance the 3D modelling of the subject and create drama.

And I love it!

If you’re after a dramatic finish to a photograph, look no further. The technique used here is to selectively darken and lighten parts of the photograph to make a high contrast result that really pops.

And here’s the original image. To some, this might seem like cheating. The final photograph is obviously very processed. To me, it’s just art. As long as I’m not trying to pass this off as an untouched image, it’s just my artistic take on what I see when I look at this photograph. I see the texture of the animal’s horns, skin and hair and the contrasty treatment brings those out, along with some sharpening. I also see buffalo as dangerous, edgy, cantankerous creatures and post-processing the image this way emphasises those characteristics.

It would be a rare thing indeed to find wildlife in just the perfect lighting conditions, so photographers often use some post-processing license to make what they’ve taken into a piece of art. In fact, I regard post-production as about half the effort of taking and making a photograph.

I started in Lightroom by cropping into the section of the image I thought had most impact. For me, that was the curve of the horn with part of the face showing: I felt it created a pleasing composition, while showing some of the textural detail in the image. Then I played with the exposure, contrast, blacks, whites, shadows and highlights sliders to get close to the feel of what I was looking for. A little clarity and some sharpening can work well, but I don’t like to go overboard with those. Sometimes I add an exposure curve and vignette, or radial filter to help things along, too. Once I got as far as possible with those sliders, I selectively darkened and lightened parts with the brush. This is such a fantastic tool in Lightroom and it’s rare I need to take photos into Photoshop for finishing. The result of the brushing is to make only the parts I wanted to draw attention to pop out of the photograph.

Here’s a classical painting example: “The Matchmaker“ by Dutch painter, Gerard van Honthorst. Note how the use of selective light and dark areas dramatically draws the eye immediately to the woman on the right and creates a really dramatic image. As you can see from the buffalo, it works for wildlife, too.

And finally, here are a couple of my favourite African big cat images where I’ve used a similar treatment.

A good photograph must grab the viewer’s attention. That usually means that the subject of the photo mustn’t have to fight with a lot of other distracting stuff in the frame. If there’s one thing that kills a photo immediately, it’s having a cluttered background. The eye likes things simple. Try to simplify the photograph into its most basic elements. Cut out anything distracting by repositioning yourself, or cropping in. Or just wait and pick a different shot.

Another way to simplify a photograph is to use a shallow depth of field so that the background gets blurred. This is exaggerated when you use a long lens.

Take these two different giraffe shots. The first has huge amounts of clutter and distraction: all the different bits of foliage dilute the impact of the shot. Attention gets lost trying to take it all in. On the right hand side however, the brain doesn’t have to separate the subject out from a mess of background gubbins. This is simply a picture of a giraffe and is much more impactful.

Similarly for these cheetah shots: the first image has quite a bit going on, where as the second image is much more simple. It’s about competition for your attention. The second picture doesn’t require nearly so much work to process.

Lastly, here are two images of small birds. The first is incredibly distracting. There’s stuff everywhere! The second is a kingfisher and, even though there’s texture in the background provided by a zebra in the distance, there’s enough simplicity to make this primarily a photo of a kingfisher. The zebra adds interest to the feel of the photograph without overpowering the kingfisher. Note that I used a shallow depth of field (wide aperture value) to create the blurred background and separate out the foreground from the background.