A coastal brown bear walks along the shore at the mouth of Hallo Creek in Katmai National Park. Despite the distance, I like this images much better than some of the tight portraits I made of bears during the same trip. To me, it just looks wilder, less like a staged shot, just a bear in its environment, doing its thing.

As I’ve been sorting through my images from the past couple of photo workshops I’ve led, I’ve noticed a reoccurring theme in some of my favorite wildlife images – they aren’t all close ups.

In fact, the images I’ve liked the most, are frequently the opposite. They are photos of animals in their environment; some hybrid between a wildlife and a landscape shot. Some of these were composed out of necessity, the animal was simply far away. But for others, I purposely stepped or zoomed back to show a larger scene. Either way, they work, and serve as reminder that you don’t need to be on top of the animal (physically or optically) to make a solid wildlife photograph.

Over the years I’ve been leading photography workshops, I’ve noticed that visiting wildlife photographers are often looking for the tight portrait shots. They want a brown bear looking straight the camera, a close up of  a bear catching a salmon in the air, or the tight headshot of a Dall Sheep ram. Frequently they want these images so badly that they will crop in (and ruin) an already excellent image.

This summer, I watched one client working on some images he’d made earlier in the trip. It was an image of a pair of Dall’s Porpoises bow riding our boat as we motored through Resurrection Bay near Seward. The un-cropped image was near-perfect, in my opinion. It showed the two porpoises in the lower right of the frame, the mountains across the bay as backdrop, and in the foreground on the left, the bow of the boat, and splashing water. It was the perfect shot to show the experience, the place, the animals, and their behavior. In short, the complete story of our encounter.

As I watched, he selected the crop tool and cut out everything but the backs of the porpoises! I waved my hands, stopped him, and told him to pull that right back out. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a good sense of composition, it was simply that he was preoccupied with what he thought a good wildlife shot entailed.

Which leads me to my own photography. Like my workshop participant, I’ve fallen into that trap myself. I’ve failed to tell the bigger story going on, as I try to get the shot I thought I needed. Sometimes the situation warrants a tight shot, sometimes, it doesn’t. But most often, a given scene provides both close and wide compositional options. Don’t limit yourself based on your preconceived notions and keep your mind open to all the opportunities presented.

Here are a few examples from my own work, when a wider scene worked better than a tight shot.

What do you think?

A fox in the lupines, Umnak Island, Alaska. I could have cropped this in to a fairly tight portrait, but I felt what made this image succeed was the setting. The red fox in the blue flowers, and green foliage. It’s still obviously and image of a fox, but the surroundings make the image much more effective.

 

Tiny moose. Big lake. Brooks Range, Alaska. Whether the moose were in this shot or not, I think this image would work, but with it, there is a new element, and I think, a better story.

 

Male Rusty Blackbird in cattails, Fairbanks Alaska. The stark surroundings in this photo show off the bird effectively. Like the fox earlier, this image is vey clearly a photo of a bird, but the brown cattails tell us something of the season (early spring), and the habitat choice of the bird (boreal wetlands).

 

Bald Eagle, soaring. Homer, Alaska. Look, from a purely practical standpoint, this is a more sellable image than a tight portrait. As a professional photographer, that matters. Very often publications and advertisers are looking for photos that include space for text or graphics. They want headroom. This type of image sells much better on stock sites than tight portraits.

 

Bald Eagle perched on driftwood, Katmai Coast, Alaska. I’ve got some tighter images of this same bird, that also work, but here, the wider perspective offers more than a portrait. As I noted above, this image has room for text and graphics, which is appealing for future sales of the photo. But too, it’s got some habitat, it tells the viewer something about where it was, without the need for a caption.
Subadult brown bear walking a lake shore in Katmai National Park. This photo appealed to me for the background. That blue, lightly rippled water was so beautiful, it bearly (see what I did there?) mattered that there was a bear in it. Unquestionably however, the image is improved by the wildlife.

 

Mule deer, sunrise, Montana. This image is all about color. What I love about wider shots of wildlife is that when they are done well, it’s unclear whether it’s a wildlife or a landscape photograph. It can, and should be both.
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