My 7-year journey in wildlife photography

Hi. I am a 21 years old wildlife photographer and today I want to share my journey as a hobbyist photographer.

I recently posted a blog about my first wildlife camp. It was at this camp 7 years ago that my journey as a photographer started. I remember I bought my camera specifically for the camp. It was a Canon Powershot Sx150 HS. It was an entry level camera with 12x optical zoom which is not at all suitable for wildlife photography. Albeit I did not realize this then, I can surely say that looking back now. Back then, I was just excited to get my own camera and start clicking pictures with it.

I have segregated my journey in phases which I have been able to identify.

Phase I: Click everything and anything you see

An excellent example of just getting the subject in the frame.

As a beginner who had no idea about cameras, their features or how they work, my first camp can be basically summed up as clicking pictures of whatever I saw and making sure that the subject was present in the frame. Notice how I have used the phrase ‘present in the frame’ and not ‘visible in the frame’. I still remember taking a shot of the Brown Fish Owl, which was so far away that the only thing you could see were some trees and lot of noise. I did not care about contrast, sharpness, framing, depth-of-field, lighting, etc at all. Mainly because I did not know most of these terms back then. My only target was to aim at the subject and press the shutter. When I look at the images from back then, I definitely feel the urge to go back in time and tell that kid to at least read the manual that came with the camera.

After coming back from the trip, I started to share my images among friends and on social media. One of my friends, told me about a software called PhotoScape which will help me to enhance my images. When I got the software, I thought I had found gold!

Phase II: Learn basic Post-Processing and go bonkers!

Super-sharpened! I know. Over-doing things makes the image unnatural.

After getting introduced to this magic software, not only did I realize that it was possible to change brightness, contrast, crop the image or as I defined it then ‘make the subject look closer to you’, but also this thing called saturation which made my images look really vibrant and full of colors. This led to all of my photos for the next few trips be over-processed. All because of the excitement of having this super powerful tool. I don’t know if this is true for all beginners but I definitely did go bonkers with all my photos when I first learnt about post processing and its basic features. Of course, in just a couple of months, on advice from my friends, I toned down the post-processing a bit. It wasn’t too long before I came to know about the best of the best of all the post-processing software, Adobe Photoshop. I got that and started learning all about it. And as I was learning more about post-processing, I was also learning about different concepts about the camera, how it works and tips to use out on the field. This led me into the next phase,

Phase III: Toning it down- Learning to use vibrance instead of saturation

Vibrance is a tool which makes unsaturated parts of the image saturated, while saturation tool increases the saturation of the whole image. Vibrance hence helps to only recover lost colors and does not touch the correct ones, (Not always but for argument’s sake, this definition can pass). This basically is an example of avoiding over-doing things. As time passed, I learnt about showing the scene as a human present there would see and not something which looks awesome on the screen but is nothing like the actual place where the photo was made.

It was about two years in, when I upgraded my camera to Canon Powershot SX50 HS. It is a cute beast. Cute because it weighs only 420gms. Beast because it has a 50x optical zoom as well as 35mm wide-angle with RAW support. All these features make it extremely useful for wildlife photography. After buying this camera, I did read the manual cover to cover. I also read up on blogs about basics of photography and watched YouTube videos to learn about different modes on the camera, the Exposure triangle, Depth-of-Field(Getting the much sought after “background blur”), etc. As I mentioned before, I also learnt a few of the intermediate concepts in Photoshop like layer-masking, basic levels manipulation, recovering details from shadows and highlights, importance of RAW images to name a few. All of this helped me to make images which were more presentable and represented what I saw on the field more closely. It helped to avoid over-doing things which made my images look more natural and real to the eye. On the field, I learnt how to get a sharp image, how to approach a subject, importance of shooting as close to eye-level as possible and last yet far from the least, ethics to be followed on the field. This led to me finally letting go of the habit of ‘shooting whatever I see’. (Although it still pops up when the species is rare or a lifer :P)

I did make a few new mistakes too. I always used to place the subject in the center. This does work fine in some cases, but keeping the subject off the center really gives the image a very pleasing perspective. I also used to go for super close-ups and cutting part of the subject’s body just getting the head. Again, this does look fantastic in some cases but now I have grown to like images which capture the whole subject. The worst habit I got into, was to sharpen the subject and blur everything else, as I had learnt layer-masking. This again started making my images look unnatural.

As years passed and I observed the work of professional wildlife photographers and had more discussions and debates with my peers, I learnt to avoid the mistakes I have mentioned above and in turn made a few new ones. Then I started to learn more advanced concepts and read more blogs. I learnt about composition, pre-visualizing an image, studying your subject to learn the behavior and get good shots. This helped me immensely to improve my images and there’s a lot of learning left.

As I continue on this journey, making mistakes, learning from them and improving myself, I like to think of the following phase as a never-ending one.

A few of my images in this intermediate phase,

Image 1 has the subject placed in the center.

Images 2 and 3 are examples of not placing the subject in the center.

Image 4 is the ‘super-closeup’ I talked about.

1: Baya’s Weaver

2: Ashy Prinia

3: Rufous Tailed Lark

Little-ringed Plover

Phase IV: Learning an abstract art.

While navigating through the nuances of getting it just right, not over-doing stuff, portraying what you see as well as possible, it is easy to fall into a routine. But it is important to remember that at its core, photography is an art and you get better only when you try new things. They might not work always, but you have to try nonetheless. The only thing that I have to be careful, especially as a wildlife photographer is to strike the right balance between creative freedom and reality. I recently attended a talk by my favorite wildlife photographer, Dhritiman Mukharjee. In his talk he said that a photo is a way to create empathy between audience and the subject. Hence it is important to show the photo in a memorable way. The best way to do this is showing a perspective which is not commonly seen (Hence importance of aforementioned eye-level shot, usually you see birds high up above eye-level). If you are set to a routine it is difficult to do this. Hence, I make it point to try as many as different ideas as possible.

Here are a few of my images I made recently,

Black-tailed Godwit

Common Hawk Cuckoo

Fan-throated Lizard

Oriental Pratincole

Small Blue Kingfisher

Black-winged Stilt

Asian Paradise Flycatcher

Black-shouldered Kite

Red-breasted Flycatcher

Tickells Blue Flycatcher

Mottled Wood Owl

In conclusion, to a beginner who is reading this, I hope you can take away something from this and avoid some of mistakes I made and maybe make a few new ones of your own and learn from them. This has been my journey till now, and I hope to keep growing as a photographer because there’s one thing I have definitely learnt and that is there is always something more to learn!