Too many secrets…

If you’re a wildlife photographer, but you’ve never won a wildlife photography competition, here are a few trade secrets to help you break your duck!

Admittedly, there are some images that will do well commercially and some that will win prizes, but I’ve illustrated each category with an image of mine that’s actually won some sort of award.

Some of those have also sold well, such as Eddie the Penguin and Bear Gills, but others have been less successful.

My friend James is very confident about which are the kind of images that will do well in competitions and which are the kind that will do well commercially, but you never really know in advance what the public wants.

Judges are a little bit easier to predict, but sometimes all you can do is follow the rules of composition and hope for the best...!

Equipment

First of all, I have to say that you’re unlikely to win anything with an iPhone!

Unless it’s a specialist competition restricted to mobiles, you need pretty decent kit to be able to take great wildlife shots.

Wildlife photography generally relies on fast shutter speeds, high frame rates, long lenses and the sensor’s ability to cope with low light and high ISOs, and you just can’t beat a full-frame DSLR or mirrorless camera for all that.

That’s not to say that a great wildlife photographer is no more than the value of his camera equipment, but it makes life so much easier.

I once saw a slideshow given by Mark Carwardine about the history of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, and it was amazing to see the difference between the early and later winners.

Back in the 1970s, you could win the whole thing with a pretty picture of a flamingo at sunset, but a few years ago the winning shot showed a flight of snow geese coming in to a land on a lake - and that meant the photographer had to use an underwater camera housing and a motion sensor to trigger the shutter release!

I haven’t gone that far (yet!), but this shot of a lion’s head, for example, was taken with an 800mm lens and a 1.25x teleconverter - making the focal length 1000mm!

Action

Which would you prefer to see: a bird in flight or a bird on a stick?

People generally prefer action shots to portraits, but they’re obviously more difficult to take, so there aren’t as many good ones to be found.

If you want to stand out from the crowd, then you could do worse than focus on action shots.

Jeffrey Wu is a wildlife photographer famous for his spectacular images of cheetah hunts, but he freely admits he doesn’t even bother taking portraits of the animals!

This picture of a cheetah hunting a Thomson’s gazelle has won a few awards, and the main reason is surely because of the thrill of the chase.

That’s one of the exciting elements of an action shot: we don’t know the result!

Will the cheetah kill its prey, or will the prey escape?

Timing

A key part of action shots is timing.

The challenge is to capture what Henri Cartier-Bresson called ‘the decisive moment’.

If the image would be ruined if it had been taken a fraction of a second earlier or later, then you’ve probably nailed it.

In order to do that, you have two options:

• wait for the right moment and take one shot

• take a continuous burst of shots before, during and after the action.

Different photographers have different views on this, but, personally, I prefer the security of taking a burst.

It’s a numbers game, and the more pictures you take, the more chance you have of getting that one prize-winning image that makes it all worthwhile.

Obviously, I’m not advocating a ‘spray and pray’ approach: you still have to choose your moments carefully.

However, animals and birds can move so rapidly and unpredictably that you just can’t afford to rely on taking one shot at just the right moment.

In the case of this elephant image, I took a burst of around 10 shots, and this was the only one that captured ‘the decisive moment’ with the trunk in the right position and the cloud of dust exploding against the animal’s flank.

Light

As Mark Carwardine says, the three basic building blocks of a photograph are the subject, the background and the light.

Of these, the light can often be the most important in setting the mood or atmosphere.

Some photographers, for instance, only take pictures during the golden hour after sunrise and before sunset, and they don’t even bother going out in the middle of the day!

I wouldn’t go that far (and I once saw four male lions take down a buffalo at around 10 in the morning…), but a good picture can easily be elevated to a great one if the light is right.

I took this shot of a tiger at around midday on a perfect sunny day in India, but I knew that I had to do something to make it stand out, so I underexposed by a stop and played around with it in Lightroom so that it looked like the animal was in a cave, illuminated by a single shaft of sunlight.

Originality

This is always the challenge for every photographer: how can you make your images stand out somehow by being original.

It’s a difficult trick, particularly now that cheaper travel and the existence of the worldwide web have made great wildlife photography so much easier to find.

Every shot seems to have been taken already, so how can you possibly make your images unique?

The answer is to take one or two ‘record shots’ and then work the scene, playing around with the variables that are in your control: underexposure, overexposure, changing the focal length, the shutter speed and/or the aperture.

In this case, I was taking pictures of a giraffe, but I wasn’t happy with them, so I decided to underexpose by a couple of stops.

It was again a lovely, sunny day, but you wouldn’t think it from the final image, would you?

I call it a ‘sunny silhouette’, and I’d never come across it before, but now I’m increasingly seeing photographers taking similar shots.

Rarity

Rarity is richness, so if you can produce a shot of an endangered species or go to a far-flung corner fo the globe to take your pictures, then you’ll probably be rewarded.

I noticed, for example, that there were a lot of photographs taken in China in the latest Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum and almost none taken in Africa!

That was a bit annoying from my point of view as I spend so much time in Kenya and Tanzania, but it’s just something that you have to accept.

The judges see so many works that they mentally dismiss any that they think they’ve seen done before.

It may not always be fair, but it also gives wildlife photographers an opportunity: why not make that trip to Antarctica that you’ve always dreamed of?

That’s what I did in 2016, and I came away with this shot of a jumping penguin.

It’s won countless awards, and I’ve managed to sell nearly 2,500 copies of it through stock agencies!

Everybody loves penguins, but it’s time-consuming and very expensive to get down there, so the rarity factor comes into play.

Humour

Humour is rather overlooked when it comes to winning competitions.

However, there’s always a market for shots that make you laugh or smile, and there’s even a competition now called the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards!

Animals do daft things a lot of the time, and the humour often comes from ‘anthropomorphism’ - in other words, animals behaving like humans.

I saw these two king penguins on South Georgia, and they spent a good 10 minutes examining the rock.

I don’t know if they thought it was an egg - maybe even their own egg! - or whether they were just curious, but it was comedy gold.

This shot ended up reaching the second round of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, and that’s the closest I’ve ever come to making the final exhibition.

Cuteness

Cuteness and humour are related, particularly when it comes to the animal kingdom, and it usually involves young animals such as lion or cheetah cubs.

Wildlife photographer Paul Goldstein hates people saying, ‘Awww!’ when they see cute shots of baby animals, but that’s just something people like - and judges, too!

I was actually on a game drive with him when I took this shot of two cheetah cubs playing in a concrete pipe.

There was so much going on that we ended up spending a good two hours taking pictures, but this is my favourite.

It’s something to do with the uncomfortable angle of the cub’s head lying against the side of the pipe…

Environment

‘Environmental portraits’ seem to be increasingly popular these days.

The idea is that you place the animal in its surroundings so as to show where it belongs, where it calls home.

I love close-ups rather too much, so I don’t do this sort of thing very often, but sunset offers a good chance to experiment.

This shot is just as much about the sky as it is about the blue wildebeest on the horizon, and that means the animal can be relatively tiny in the frame in order to draw attention to the clouds and the setting sun.

Storytelling

I always find the idea that every picture has to ‘tell a story’ a bit irritating, especially when it’s plastered all over the signage at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition!

After all, how much of a ‘story’ can one photo really tell? It’s hardly going to be War and Peace, is it…?!

However, I do sort of get the point.

One of the things a great photo can do is to present a situation and ask a question such as ‘Will the animal survive?’

The ‘story’ told by this shot of a bear catching a salmon would read something like this: “A salmon is trying to swim upstream back to its spawning grounds and has to jump a waterfall to get there, but a brown bear is waiting for it and is ready to catch it and eat it for lunch!”

It’s not Tolstoy, I know, but still…

Naming

I got into a bad habit of naming all my images using the format demanded by stock agencies.

That meant they all had seven-word titles with fewer than 50 characters.

Admittedly, the titles were very descriptive and told potential buyers exactly what they’d be getting for their money, but they didn’t really help me win competitions.

Paul Goldstein first gave me the idea of creating snappier titles with puns in them when I went on a trip to Spitsbergen.

He took a shot of a female polar bear leaning back on the ice with her leg in the air and showed it to us all later as his Shot of the Day.

The title was ‘Yoga Bear’…!

Since then, I’ve given all my four-star and five-star images a headline designed to appeal to buyers and competition judges alike.

This shot of a European bee-eater tossing a fly in the air was almost made for a caption competition, but I chose to call it ‘Fly Bee’.

Recycling

The final ‘secret’ I want to share with you today is that images that win competitions tend to win other competitions, too!

Once you’ve won your first award, you should be thinking about entering the same photo into as many other competitions as you can.

As you can see, Bear Gills has won goodness knows how many prizes now, and it’s the most successful shot I’ve ever taken from that point of view.

There are sometimes rules in place to try and prevent this sort of thing, but I’d ignore them and just give it your best shot.

It’s always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission…!

If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.

If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.