Nature Photography Tips

I am lucky enough to live in a rural English village, with fields and trees all around, but there are animals and plants to be found even in big cities. In fact it is often easier to see creatures like foxes in town as they are more used to humans.

The photo below of a village church, nestled amongst the trees with its steeple peeping over the top..

Take your camera for a walk, and keep your eyes open. Along the way, take photographs of the nature around you.

You can make use of the nature photography tips on other pages of this site to practice your flower photography, macro shots and even some landscapes. You can experiment with exposure and composition, wide angle or telephoto lenses and extreme closeups. Try to take photographs of at least 10 different subjects. But don't limit yourself to one shot of each! That is one of the benefits of digital photography, you can take loads of pictures and delete those that don't quite work out.

Try to tell a story of what you saw on your walk, in pictures. Take some establishing shots so that we can see where you were. Don't forget to look down at the ground, up in the air, from side to side, over, under and through things.

You could even repeat the exercise at a different time of year. Don't limit your photography to warm, sunny summer days...an autumn stroll or a country walk in the spring (like mine below) can all turn up unexpected pleasures. You might even want to try photographing a winter wonderland.

So onto those nature photography tips. I will use the photos I took, creating the the ideas behing this web page, as examples.

Set the scene

All the pictures on this page were taken within a 1 mile radius of my house.

My walk started right across the road from our house, with a little pathway through the trees that leads to a meadow. It was a lovely spring day, with gentle sunshine and hardly any breeze.

Walking under the canopy of trees I loved the way the sun left dappled patterns on the ground. I also wanted to capture the "light at the end of the tunnel" effect.

Scenes like this can present a problem of contrast.

Our eyes are capable of picking out details in both the shadowed and sunlight areas of a scene but this is not always possible in photography. To get detail in the trees I lost the detail in the sunlit area at the end of the path. In this photograph I felt it didn't matter. That light area represented the effect I was after and the lack of detail was not detrimental.

If, however, it is important to your picture to show detail in both areas, it is a good idea to take two shots, exposing for each in turn. Back at the computer you can combine both in one finished photograph with special photo editing techniques, known as high dynamic range.

Catch the light

As I walked through the trees, I almost trod on these tiny yellow flowers growing in the path. The sun, shining through the branches, happened to catch them in its beam and they positively glowed against the unlit areas of the path.

The high contrast worked to my advantage for this shot. I didn't want to capture detail in the shadowed areas, wanting instead to concentrate on the blooms. Setting the camera to use the spot metering mode I took the reading from the flowers, deliberately under-exposing the background.

As these flowers were tiny I set the camera to macro mode and knelt down on the path to take the shot, being careful to keep myself out of the sunlight so I didn't cast a shadow on my subject.

Not all photographs can be taken from a standing position, be prepared to get yourself into some less comfortable positions! This is one of my favourite nature photography tips, in fact.

Did you notice that the top flower obeys the rule of thirds?

Use natural frames

I walked around the tree for a better viewpoint, using my thumb and forefinger of each hand to create a sort of sort of frame to help me compose the shot. I used my zoom lens at its wider end, to focus on the flowers, while allowing enough background to give a suggestion of the path through the field beyond, framed by the trees.

I set a wide aperture of f5.6 on the camera to throw the background out of focus, so that the viewers attention was first caught by the flowers. If everything had been in focus the shot would have been too busy.

Look up

After walking across the field I reached the outskirts of the next village. Here a pretty thatched cottage caught my eye. Why am I including a building on a page about nature photography tips? Read on....

Including the darker tree on the right, framed the cottage nicely and helped to even out the overall exposure.
With the white walls and bright sky it would have been easy to underexpose this shot.

It would have been nice if the gates had been open, welcoming you into the cosy cottage, but as the residents were at home I didn't think opening them would be a good idea.

On closer inspection I noticed the unusual wildlife along the top of the thatched roof. You just never know where you are going to see something worth capturing.

Apart from using that spot metering mode again, to exposure for the thatch, so that the large expanse of sky does not result in a dark photo.

Zoom in to create a mini landscape

How I wished I could nip into that garden to remove the dead daffodils and the lone stinging nettle! But one of the most important nature photography tips is to leave things undisturbed, and I didn't feel like trespassing. So I stayed on the path and used a zoom lens instead.

Garden flowers are just as worthy of being photographed as their wild cousins.

Zoom out

I zoomed in on a small area for the picture above, this time I zoomed out to use a 9mm focal length to capture the church and churchyard.

The yellow field shown in the first picture on this page, taken from behind the church, also used a wide angle lens, 11mm this time. Using a wide angle lens has an additional benefit, in that depth of field is exaggerated. The yellow flowers closest to the camera were in focus, as well as the church steeple in the background.

Complimentary colours and diagonals

The final picture from my country walk illustrates two more nature photography tips.

When taking colour photographs the opportunity to include complimentary colours, in this case yellow and purple, must not be missed. Success here lay in letting one colour dominate, equal amounts would not have worked so well.

My first shot was a straight on view of this wall in front of the church. But it needed something more. Moving so that the wall created a diagonal line helped to carry the viewers eye through the picture. A useful tip, not just reserved for nature photography.

Tips like these should help you to investigate all angles when undertaking your own steeplechase challenge. So get out there with your camera and have a go yourself. And don't forget to share your results on the site.

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