Composition in the Wild E3/4: Why most wildlife photos feel random (and how to add purpose)

Why do so many wildlife photographs feel random?

A bird appears, you lift the camera, take the shot… and the moment is gone. Later, the photo feels more like a snapshot than something intentional.

In this episode, we explore why that happens — and how a small shift in approach can dramatically improve your wildlife photography.

You’ll discover how observation, patience, and a simple intention can transform the way you photograph wildlife. Instead of reacting to every moment, you’ll learn how to recognise patterns, anticipate behaviour, and create photographs that feel more deliberate and meaningful.

If you’ve ever felt that your wildlife photos are technically fine but somehow lack impact, this episode will help you understand why — and how to change it.

In the final episode of this series, we’ll bring everything together and explore the three skills that truly transform wildlife photography.

It's time for another podcast...

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So you've taken your wildlife photographs, and you're now home, or you're at the hotel, or wherever you are, and you're looking through them, and they feel kind of random, they feel a bit boring. There's a bird on a branch, there's um a grazer grazing. But the fact is that these pictures are more like snapshots, they're not quite the wildlife shot you were going for. So, what we're going to talk about in this episode is how you move from snapshots into something that's far more engaging and how you do that. Now, if you've been listening to the series, so this is uh episode three in this um series. First of all, thank you. Uh, and I may repeat some of the things I've said before, and and one of the reasons for doing that is that some people hit random episodes. So um, if that is you, please bear with me. And also, I have something I want to share with you, particularly if you're listening to this live as in as it comes out, because I do have something that I hope you'll you'll be interested in uh to tell you about at the end of the episode. Right, so what you've been doing, you've you've been out, you've taken um these photographs, animals have shown up, you've been doing what you've been practicing before you went away, and they're really not working. The these pictures feel random. Basically, they feel like the picture of a bird on a branch, it's a bird. So what is the what are the things you really have to remember when you're away taking photographs? So the first one, and I'm gonna talk about why these photographs feel random. The first one is that wildlife is unpredictable, so uh animals can move suddenly, they can appear and disappear quickly, and what that means to us as photographers is that we tend to react immediately, we shoot quickly before the moment disappears, and there's nothing wrong with that instinct, but and this is important, if that becomes our only approach, then it starts to really restrict our photography and it becomes reactive rather than intentional. So, what do I mean by that? Reactive means you're kind of just waiting for the animal to do something, you'll shoot anything, you're not approaching your subject with a particular idea in mind. So, one way of thinking about this is the visual storyteller idea, uh, which I've spoken about a lot, but it's where you look at a subject, you look at their environment, and you make conscious decisions about how you want to photograph that subject in that environment. And that, and in doing that, you create a story for whoever's viewing the photograph, which might be you later, it might be friends, family who weren't able to go on this amazing trip. But you're communicating something about that that situation to the viewer. So that's the first thing to think about. Yes, wildlife is definitely unpredictable, but the habit to avoid is just to blast away and shoot at absolutely everything. Um, the second part of this is what I'm going to refer to as the record shot habit. So this is what I meant when I said you've got a photograph of a bird on a branch, and it you've got the photograph, but all it's really saying is yes, here's a bird on a branch. It's basically saying, Yes, I've seen this animal. It doesn't communicate anything, it doesn't tell the viewer anything about their behavior, it doesn't convey any kind of atmosphere about the environment and what it was like to be there. There's no emotion to it, there's no story. So basically, it's document, it's a documentation, it's the kind of image you would use if you're trying to identify a bird, and something I do is jump on Wikipedia or somewhere else or Google and just try and find a bird that matches the bird I've got a photograph photograph of. So it's basically a doc it's a documentary shot, which is fine, it all has its place. But if you wanted something special, this isn't it, this isn't going to cut it, and this really tends to happen a lot when you're photographing unfamiliar wildlife. Now, the third thing to remember is that urgency can create rushed decisions. So, again, if you feel under a huge amount of pressure to take a photograph, so you tend to snap at it when an animal appears. That is is is going to undermine what you're doing because you're no longer thinking about what you're shooting, you're just shooting anything. So, what a lot of photographers will do in a particularly if it's their first wildlife excursion, they'll shoot immediately, they keep changing their settings, so they haven't done that prep that I've spoken about before about knowing your settings, they constantly move and they're chasing movement. So basically, they're reacting the whole time, they're not on top of the shoot. If you could imagine doing a portrait shoot with somebody, and every time that person moved, you're grabbing a shot or you're changing a setting. It the person being photographed is hardly going to feel that you're in control of that shoot. That's not going to convey a sense of confidence to them that you actually know what you're doing. And while you won't get like a one-star review from wildlife, this is exactly the same situation. So the important thing is to really think about what you're doing because if you're just reactive all the time, you want to get visual chaos. So, strong photographs are about clarity, not urgency. And again, an important thing to do here is to think about particularly wildlife photographs you've seen that you're really impressed by. They're the kind of thing you aspire to shoot that to that level. What is it about that photograph that makes you feel that way about it and really take the thing apart? So, this is something I do in my photography courses, the online courses, the full ones. It's it's an exercise you do very early on, actually. You start taking apart using specific criteria, images that you absolutely love and that that inspired you to get into photography, maybe. And you'd love to shoot them, but when you don't break that image down into certain criteria, your chances of shooting like that are pretty remote, frankly. So you really need to understand what the photographer was doing. And the same, it definitely applies to wildlife, it applies to pretty much any photography. But in the instance of wildlife, it's really important that you are not chasing the subjects that you are actually stopping back. So I think the things to remember here are that the strongest wildlife photographers are not always the fastest, they're often the most patient observers, and that is really important, the observation part. And they allow the movement to develop before they press the shutter. Now, you could argue in the days of digital, does it really matter? Well, you know, honestly, probably not. You can shoot away and you might have hundreds of images where um a really good photographer might have a dozen. Is that necessarily a problem? Well, that's down to you, really. Um, it it's certainly I come when I come home from shoots, particularly if I've been away for a few weeks, I can easily have a few thousand images to go through. So um, and that can be quite exhausting, frankly. But also, I I want to be shooting things that are pretty good. I want my average images to be actually pretty good, so I'm not going to blast away and shoot anything. And this is really important when you start getting into wildlife photography. So remember, you don't have to be the fastest, it's much more important that you're a patient and you observe what's going on and you let the moment develop before you actually hit the shutter. So, how do we change this? How do we just change? I guess it's the mindset behind how you approach this sort of photography. So instead of asking what just happened, you really should be asking what is about to happen. Now, I have spoken about this before. I spoke about it when I was talking about being um when you're a photographer in your own backyard, and the important thing is to start observing so that you watch animals' behavior, you get to know, for example, when a bird is about to fly off a branch, because those few frames of a bird just taking off from a branch can be quite dramatic, actually, because they're unusual. People don't tend to get those shots that often. You'll get a bird sat on a branch, you'll get a bird in flight, but that transition phase it's trickier to shoot, so you won't see so many. So this is um it's important from the the perspective of shooting photographs that are more unique, more interesting, but it also challenges your skills, your observational skills as well as your photographic skills. So if we were to take some birds at a pond, so it might be ducks or uh just wading birds, if you just turn up and immediately photograph them, well that that's that's just documenting them. So the most important thing to do is to just observe them for a minute, a few minutes. So just pause and start watching them. Watch what they're doing, look for patterns, look for their feeding movements, look for uh it might be grooming behavior, it could be wing stretches, sometimes so cornrants that we have here in um Australia often like to sit in some with their wings out after they've been diving just to dry them out. Um, there might be interactions with other birds, quite small ones, but these patterns tend to repeat, and once you observe that, once you recognize that pattern, you can recognize when it's about to happen, you anticipate the moment, and then you start getting stronger photographs because you're showing interactions, you're showing behavior, you are telling the story of what these birds do every day, but you're not just coming up with a static shot of a bird on a branch not doing very much. So I'm going to talk about things you can practice at home, and garden birds are um a good one to so birds are really good to photograph actually because they are quite tricky, and the better you get at photographing birds, the more you hone those skills of autofocus, of managing exposure, particularly if you've got a um a darker subject against a bright background, um, those kind of things. So, birds are very good for that. So, what happens with garden birds? Instead of just chasing them, grabbing any photograph, choose the best perch. Think about the uh composition that you want. Wait, think about how you're using space, even if they're sat on a branch, how you're using space. What are you suggesting to the viewer uh when they look at that photograph? And then wait, wait for the small tells that show you that the bird is about to do something and you know what they are because you've been observing them, and then start photographing purposefully. So rather than having you know, maybe a hundred pictures of a bird sat on a branch, you might have a much smaller number of images, but it's of a bird behavior. It might be hunting, it might be um, I I got um photographs of a giant kingfisher in Zimbabwe with a fish that was almost as big as it was, and it was basically had it in its beak, and it was smacking it against a branch that it was standing on, and it did this for a while until it had, I guess, tenderized it enough to swallow it whole. So there was a whole sequence of images there, but it was all about behaviour. Um, I shot quite a lot more than I intended because the light changed and the light got better. This was going towards golden hour, and to me, that just changed the the whole feel of the scene as well. So I basically reshot it. But these are the kind of things to look out for. So with wildlife, what are the kind of behaviors that you're going to see? Now, when I was talking about preparation, I was talking about researching the kind of uh behaviors you might see. So hopefully, if you have been working through this and you've got a trip in mind, you already have some specific behaviors that you may see. And if you do, uh you can you can grab them. But the kind of thing you see typically are feeding, which I've just spoken about, grooming, stretching wings, uh, wings, rather, interaction with other animals. I've got some images of um a couple of uh zebras. Um they were in a group of others at a water hole, and they just looked really odd, and I'd not seen it before. And in the original shot, they're actually reasonable distance away, but I was able to crop in later. But they were kind of nuzzling one another, and then one ran away a little bit, the other one went after it. And I wasn't quite sure if this was affection or it was maybe something more aggressive, it was really hard to work out, but um, it's it's those kind of things that give you much more interesting images, even uh one thing that zebras do tend to do, if you certainly if you're if they're grazing, is one will tend to rest its head, its jaw on the back of another, and that's quite a nice shot to get. And I'm sure there's lots of those kind of images around on the internet. So think about interactions with other animals, think about alertness or curiosity, what happens if they're hunting? Uh, you can shoot an animal hunting, you might be able to get the prey animal in the same frame. That's always um a good one to get. But the key point here is to observe, it's to observe the animals initially, do as much research as you can, but look at them and start to recognize when these moments are about to happen. So this is really important, and uh, it's one of the most important things you can do when it comes to uh wildlife photography. Okay, so um I want to talk about how you implement um a photography plan, if you like. So one of the easiest ways to add purpose to wildlife photography is to choose an intention before you start shooting. So this isn't um a complicated plan, it's a really simple goal. So, what am I talking about? So each time you go out, have just a thought, and if it's your first time out, I guess just pick one. But if you if you've been out and you start to notice weaknesses, for example, when you do get home or back to the hotel or wherever you are, and you start looking through those images, and they're not what you were hoping to achieve, which is what I was speaking about at the beginning, focus on an aspect of that photograph that failed, if you like. So it might be that you're focusing on clean backgrounds, it could be that you're focusing on behavior. If you're going to do behavior, that really does get you thinking about what is the animal doing. Um, now you might want to get a I I tend to refer to it as a contingency, contingency shot, it's easy for me to say. So when I first get somewhere, I might just grab a shot on the animal anyway. It's the kind of throwaway shot, but if something does happen and it disappears, well, at least I've got something. It might not be a brilliant shot, but it may or may not be usable. But then pause and start looking. There's actually a couple of good reasons for doing that as well. One is it will really help your photography because you start to see more about the animal and what it's doing, rather than just blasting away, you're actually just looking at it and seeing what it's doing, and then you can begin to select moments. Um, another moment I saw coming actually, I'd stopped and waited, and this was in South Africa with an elephant, and it was just um browsing at a bush. And but it was moving slightly sort of out of the cover of the bush. So basically, most of the head was behind the bush initially, and then as it started to move, more and more of the head began to appear. And I love those kind of reveal shots. So I just waited, picked my moment, and then got two or three shots of this head appearing to one side of the bush it was feeding on. So things like that I like because there's um it's an unit's more unusual shot. The other thing is you can get more of an emotional connection when you're sitting and watching animals. I always find the camera becomes something between me and what's going on. So while I'll have the camera there and I'll be shooting quite a lot at times, I also hold the camera down a lot of the time and just watch what's going on, just look around, just be part of where I am, because particularly if this is a kind of trip of a lifetime, you you don't want to miss it. You know, sounds like a silly thing to say, but if you're constantly just looking through your camera lens, I mean trying to miss good shots, but at the on the other hand, just stand back and absorb being there, you know, just have that experience of being there. So that's really important. So another thing you can focus on is light. Obviously, there are different types of lighting, and we spoke about that in a previous episode. You want to practice with different lighting, so it may be changing because it's cloudy, but the clouds are coming and going. You might be in a forest, so um, the sun that's reaching the ground where you are can be bright at times and dark at others, or maybe the trees are blowing in the wind, so that's moving the light, these bright and dark bands. Um, it could be that the sun's going down, the sun's coming up, whatever's going on. So that's a really good one because, as I've said, with the story of this um giant kingfisher, a change in the light completely changes a scene and can changes the look and the feel of an image. And it's really important to be attuned to that. So your intention for that trip could be to focus on light, you could focus on patience and timing. So rein yourself in a little bit if you're a bit impulsive and you tend to just blast away at anything, just slow yourself down, think about your composition, think about what the story is that you're photographing, be patient, think about the timing, read what's going on, and practice that skill because it is a skill and it will make a massive difference to your photography. So, the reason for choosing one of these goals is also quite important because when you are choosing a goal, you you your brain filters all the information that's coming in, and you'll begin to see the scene differently because if you're focusing on uh the background, for example, your your brain is going to be allowing you to see more of what's there, you're focusing on what's there, you'll see you'll see more than if you just put the camera up to your your face and you started shooting. So when you choose a goal, your your brain's filtering the scene differently, and you stop chasing everything, and you begin to wait for the right moment, and at least when you're doing this, you are taking photographs with intention. There's a clear and simple intention to the images that you're shooting. So just to dive in a little bit more on these when you're photographing um a bird, you might decide to wait for it to land where there's a clean background, and that can make a big difference because if you've got a bird with a cluttered background, you've got lots lots and lots of things going on. Unless you've isolated the bird somehow, that could be using depth field, you're going to have a very cluttered image, and it might even be difficult for a viewer to even work out what the subject is. So if you've got a clear background, and maybe you're able to change position so that that's much more likely, you've got an image that feels calmer, it feels more deliberate, it's a much cleaner image. Um, again, with whale watching, um, an example I gave is to try and get Down low at the back of the boat because often, if you're in any kind of a swell, uh, if the boat drops into the bottom of the swell and the whale that you're photographing is in the the wave up there is up above you, you get a very different perspective, but it really isolates the subject. So have a think about how you're using the background with behavior. You're looking for the kind of things I spoke about. So it might be wing stretches if it's a bird, um, it could be some movement, it might be an animal um um trying to creep up on another one if you see it. The kind of interaction I spoke about with the zebras, these add life to the image, they're adding a story to the image. So the things to remember here are that by picking an intention, intention simplifies photography, it removes mental clutter, it removes visual clutter as well, and it replaces randomness with purpose. So the images that you're shooting are going to be much crisper, much cleaner, and have a much stronger connection with the person viewing them. So slowing everything down this is one of the most powerful habits you can develop. So when you arrive somewhere, don't start shooting immediately. Pause, take a look around, listen, and just notice where the animals are moving, where the best light is, where the clean backgrounds are. So the kind of thing I've already been speaking about. And just give the scene a few minutes to reveal itself. Another thing you can do with wildlife when you arrive somewhere is to listen. Um if you've got a good guide, um, often they'll just go quiet and encourage other encourage people in the vehicles. Well, if you're in a vehicle to be quiet, because what they're listening for isn't necessarily the animal you're looking for. So, for example, a tiger in India, you might hear a tiger roar, but it's unusual or it's unlikely to put it that way. But what you are listening for are alarm calls, because um, the animals that end up as prey animals, they obviously are very aware because their lives depend on it, of where these predators are. They really have to keep a keen lookout for any sign that there might be a predator about. And um, the Ramasinger, I'm sure I've said that wrong, but it's a large deer that you get in India, it has a call that's a bit like a bark. And so what we stopped them in listening for was not the tiger itself, but the evidence that a tiger was there. And one of the clues that we have, in addition to tracks and things like that, um, is animal alarm calls that tells you that an animal is spotted, a predator, it's warning everything else around, and then you know you've got a tiger in that area. So, this is where just being a part of the environment is actually really important. When it comes to the photography, as I've said, just if you can observe what's going on, maybe grab one or two uh photographs when you first get there, so you've got something, if everything clears off for a reason, but then really start thinking about how you're composing. This really will give you, I think, far better images because it's thoughtful, it's deliberate, and you really are thinking about what you're doing as you do it. So, I'm gonna give you um just uh an exercise before we end, and I tell you about what I was gonna tell you about, what I mentioned at the beginning. So, next time you go out, and this can be a practice session, uh, it might be the real one, might be going out with wildlife, or it could be wildlife locally, however, you're doing it. So, choose a subject, just one, and spend five minutes observing it before taking a photograph. And the questions to ask yourself are what is this animal doing? So just really look at the behaviors and ask yourself what might happen next, and then start thinking about where would the best composition be. And if you can't move, it might be you're in a vehicle, but you can't move for risk of startling the animal. How can you what can you do to get a better composition? Because usually, if you even if you're in a vehicle, you've got some options about just exactly where you're taking the photograph from, and then take the photograph and notice how different it feels compared to reacting instantly. More importantly, look at the results that you're getting. Um, so I I think that's really powerful. Hopefully, you're able to try that. Now, in the next episode, which is the last episode in this little series, I'm going to be looking at three skills that separate good wildlife photographers from the great ones and how you can start developing them in your own photography. And what I want to announce to you as well is I've started some mini courses. So, in a way, they're like, in fact, if you listen to the previous series, which was about composition, this next mini course is actually about composition. The problem with the podcast is I can't show you things because they're just audio at the moment. Uh, I have been running mini workshops, but they're only an hour, so I can't really do a deep dive on anything. So I've come up with um uh a different format, which is a mini course, which is six episodes, six weekly episodes. They range in length from 30 to 40 minutes. They have a task for you to do and they focus on one aspect of what that course is about. So each episode or module becomes available on the Monday, so you'll get one a week, six weeks, and you can just go through them in your own time. Uh, they're designed to build one on the other, they'll have an exercise, maybe a cheat sheet, something like that, depending on the episode. So that's the first part. Um, so you can it's self-paste. The second thing is that each mini course includes three live uh video calls. So they last for up to an hour and a half. Uh, you can submit images for feedback, we can have a discussion. Whoever comes along, uh, there are things I'll talk about, but also it's open discussion. So uh it is a way to have a course where you can get feedback. There is also a closed Facebook group that once you sign up to the course, you get access to, and again, you can share images, ask questions, connect with other people on the course, do all that kind of thing. So there's a sort of community aspect to it as well. So the first one starts um in April. If you want to find out more, uh look at the um there's a link underneath this episode, or go to my website www.ge.photography, and um there is a banner on the website at the moment, so record this, or just go to um the drop-down which talks about improving your photography, and you'll find the uh mini courses there. So that was what I wanted to uh let you know about. You might I might might well repeat myself in a moment. Uh but thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you found it useful. Please remember to like and subscribe, that makes a big difference. You can even buy me a coffee, um, just follow the link or subscribe to the podcast. So, all of that really helps me to carry on doing what I'm doing. Um, well over 200 podcasts now, so all of these things take effort. Uh, so all of your help is is really appreciated. Okay, that's it from me. Have a great day, a great evening, whatever you're doing, and I'll speak to you next time. Bye for now.