Nature Photography How To

Shutterbug reader Bill Tiepelman captured this profile of a beautiful red-bellied woodpecker in his backyard in Wentzville, Missouri. An avid bird watcher, Tiepelman has on old swing set in his backyard that he repurposed into a bird sanctuary in an effort to “attract as many species as possible.”

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.

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.

In terms of extreme locations, you can’t pick a place much more remote than the Falkland Islands. Located 300 miles off the tip of Argentina in the South Atlantic Ocean, the Falkland Islands consists of two main isles—East and West Falkland Islands, plus 776 smaller islets, covering 4,700 square miles.

Nature photography may encompass grand landscapes or large wild animals, but it can also incorporate the smallest of objects. There is an entire delicate world of light, beauty, color and form in macro photography. Wonders that can be documented while on vacation on a tropical island, in a national park or even in your backyard. I have spent mornings lying in a bed of wildflowers, moving no more than a few feet, recording everything from the dew on a spider web to the shape of a purple iris. I am often surprised and rarely disappointed.

Here’s a fun and revealing behind-the-scenes video shot by nature and landscape photographer Thomas Heaton. In the four-minute clip, Heaton walks you through one of his recent shoots in Yosemite Valley, showing you the steps he took to make a gorgeous image.

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.