7 Tips For Shooting Great Outdoor Photos
You don’t necessarily need extraordinary skills to be an outdoor photographer. Even without elaborate gear, you can come away with excellent photographs of animals, plants or landscapes.
What do you need to take great photos?
1. Have patience: Taking nature pictures is a meditative activity. You can’t hurry nature. You can’t make animals or plants to do anything. For capturing the best pictures, you must settle in and observe.
Here are a couple of questions to ask yourself: How is a flower impacted by the encounter of sun and clouds or by passing breezes? How does a landscape change with the light from morning to dusk?
2. Have a fondness of the subject: The first thing is to become familiar with your subject through repeated exposure. Trips to national parks or the jungles of Africa are terrific opportunities, however you can also benefit from less-expensive trips.
3. Where do you start?: You can start out by visiting local zoos, parks or woodland. For flowers and plants, a nearby arboretum is also a good place to begin. Pick out the subjects that most captivate you, and stalk them like a hunter. A bit of caution is to avoid the woods during hunting season.
4. Be mindful of the lighting: The best time to take pictures of nature is during the early or late day hours when the rising or sinking sun enhances the subject. How do you make use of the low-angle light? To create striking photographs from even the simplest camera, position yourself so that the light is descending diagonally over your shoulder onto the subject.
When photographing a landscape or the texture of animal fur, bird feathers, fish scales or flower blooms, get into a position so that the light is striking the subject from the side. Side lighting brings out texture.
When you wish to produce a aura of light around flowers or animals or reveal the translucency of plants and bugs, place yourself so that the low sun is behind the subject. Do not let the sun strike the camera lens directly. Soft light that’s dispersed by thin clouds or light haze anytime of day is ideal. Avoid shooting when the sun is directly overhead. This will cast shadows that will show up almost black on film.
5. Do I need special equipment?: You can take good nature pictures with a point-and-shoot camera or even a disposable camera as long as you know its limitations. For serious nature photographers, a good tripod is a vital accessory. It’s absolutely necessary for use in low light with long exposures or for close-ups made with slow small apertures and shutter speeds for maximum depth of field. It will minimize blur caused by the camera shaking when filming with telephotos and zoom lenses.
6. Recognize and overcome your limitations: It’s worth while to view nature photos taken by the professionals to discover the factors of outstanding photographs. Yet, more important is know-how. Nature picture taking calls for quick reflexes and physical skills. As you experiment and practice, those skills will become second nature letting you to capture those magical photographic moments.
7. The most common error: Looking at a subject through your eyes, and then barely peeking through your viewfinder prior to taking the photograph. The camera’s transformation from three to two dimensions will alter the view. Discipline yourself to view everything through your viewfinder, shutting your other eye if necessary.