Wildlife Photography How To

Photographing wildlife in their natural habitat has always been both challenging and rewarding. Whether you develop a business selling the use of the images or leading workshop tours, this field requires a special combination of passion and patience. In this article, we look at how and where wildlife photos can be sold as well as prospects to pursue and pitfalls to avoid. Special thanks to our four contributors: Sean Crane; Barbara Fleming (Fleming Safari Company, LLC); Eric Horan (Lowcountry Photo Safaris); and Josh Patterson.

Wildlife and nature photography is certainly a niche market but it turns out to be bigger than many think. According to our contributing photographers in this month’s column, photos of nature and wildlife can be sold for a broad range of uses, including stock, editorial, book publishing, interior design, fine art, and even assignment. Other important questions we ask our wildlife and nature photographers this month include what does it take to make your passion for these subjects a business? How do you market and promote your images?

Wildlife photographers with any interest in photographing big Alaskan brown bears should certainly consider the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, professed to have the highest concentration of large adult brown bears in the world with over 70 bears having been seen at any one time. The sanctuary is located on the Alaskan Peninsula about 100 air miles west of Homer and is only reachable by floatplane.

The BBC has just released an extended trailer for the sequel to their wildly popular Planet Earth Series. Directed by Sir David Attenborough, Planet Earth II picks up where the original 2006 series left off, and is scheduled for release in the U.S. on January 28, 2017 and will be broadcast every Saturday on BBC America.

Renowned British filmmaker/photographer Philip Bloom is known for cinematic images that tell a story. He recently spent three days in northern Norway making this beautiful 4K video of Orca whales and the Aurora Borealis.

One of my favorite books as a child was Eric in the Land of the Insects, written by the Dutch author Godfried Bomans. In this humorous fantasy, 9-year-old Eric enters the landscape painting that hangs on his wall and discovers a world of man-sized wasps, bees, butterflies, and other insects that are stunningly similar to the world of humans. Once photography became a part of my life my world was populated with grasshoppers, spiders, snails, flies, dragonflies, and butterflies—Eric’s world.

The state of Wisconsin is teaming up with NASA and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in a unique project to identify the state’s wildlife populations with the installation of 5,000 strategically placed trail cameras. The “Snapshot Wisconsin” initiative employs remote sensing satellites and a global crowd-sourced database to create what aims to be the “richest and most comprehensive caches of wildlife data for any spot on our planet.”