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!

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.