Wildlife Photography How To

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Ok, maybe not tigers this month but the other two made the cut in some of the winning photos for this assignment. Wildlife and nature are favorite subjects for Shutterbug readers and, as expected, we reviewed a ton of amazing images from readers in these categories. The tough part was narrowing it down to just six favorites but we think we’ve picked some fabulous images to spotlight here.

For this month’s column, we look at how to turn your love for wildlife photography into a serious business. I interviewed the husband-and-wife team of David and Jennifer Hemmings who have been particularly successful in the wildlife photography field.

Poet Munia Khan one said, “If I were a flower, the hummingbird would be my favorite bee,” and these words could equally apply to photographer Tracy Johnson whose passion for these tiny birds turned into an obsession with some very beautiful results.

National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen says “I always wanted to go down to Antarctica and get into the water with as many leopard seals as I could.” In the viral video below, he almost got more than he bargained for when a massive leopard seal took both his camera and his head into its mouth.

Jim Graham captured this adorable image of a sleeping sled dog in front of a majestic backdrop during a trip this past summer to Greenland. The image was shot in Ilulissat, which is in western Greenland, approximately 220 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

If there’s a more challenging photographic discipline than wildlife photography, I don’t know what it is. It requires heavy and expensive long focal length lenses, a sturdy tripod, and the physical prowess to schlep all this gear through physically demanding environments. If you’re thinking “that’s not you, Joe,” you are correctamundo so I asked a few friends for advice on telephoto lenses and this is what they told me.

Without a doubt, this month's Wildlife and Nature assignment brought out the best in Shutterbug readers. There were so many excellent entries, we could've easily picked twice as many favorites and still felt we left some great shots out. In the end, we narrowed it down to 10 wildlife and nature images that truly stood out.