Step back and let us run you through our approach to taking powerful pictures that showcase a wonderful wildlife subject in a breath-taking landscape.

Shots of animals in the environment have their very own category in the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest – a category’s that’s often produced some impressive overall winners in recent years – yet they don’t often figure top of the shooting list for many safari-goers.

As wildlife photographers we spend so much effort working out how to cut the distance between ourselves and our subjects that we’re perhaps reluctant to sacrifice the ground we’ve gained and pull back.  That’s a shame because wildlife scenics offer a bonus payback. What’s not to like about an approach that spotlights both a wonderful wildlife subject and a spellbinding location?

Expanding your horizons to frame a subject within the wider landscape can make a powerful, generic statement about nature, summarise a specific eco-system or describe a distinctive wildlife habitat in detail – whilst being extremely easy on the eye at the same time. On a more mundane level it’s an extremely neat way to play with scale in your wildlife photographs.

One of the main reasons we like doing them is that they let us share lots of information about our subjects to viewers. The chance to contextualise subjects, and enrich our pictures, by revealing local detail, weather conditions, time of day, the season, your subject’s relationship to its surroundings and the space around it make a convincing argument for including them in our own safari portfolio when we have the chance. And set against frame-filling portraits and fast action shots they provide a refreshing change of pace; the chance for calm reflection and considered appreciation of our natural planet

Our top tips for photographing animals in the environment

• Make room in your camera bag for a shorter lens and aim to shoot the wider view from time to time to give more depth and variety to your wildlife photographs. (Bear in mind if you shoot with a very wide-angle lens you will have to be quite close to your foreground wildlife subject – not always easy or advisable).
• Don’t discount the potential for making animalscapes with a long telephoto. We occasionally use a 500mm telephoto for these shots – sometimes for extra reach – but mainly because the compression longer lenses offer provide us with a different look to these pictures.
• Get into the habit of looking for possible animalscape opportunities routinely when photographing wildlife. When you find bold and beautiful topographical features in any wildlife habitat, for example rocky escarpments or arresting trees, aim to work them into the picture with your subject. It’s often simply a question of being patient and focusing your time and attention in such ‘beauty-spot’ locations. Hang about long enough and eventually subject, location and lighting will collide!
• Think like a landscape photographer. Put even more of a premium on amazing light and go for strong foreground interest to draw the eye into your scene (in this case that’s most likely to be your wildlife subject/subjects). Stop down so you have lots of depth of field to bring that beautiful background detail into sharp focus. (It’s a bit counterintuitive because normally as wildlife practitioners we’re using minimal depth of field to blur backgrounds and prevent them from coming into play)
• The secret ingredient in many successful animalscapes is a dramatic sky. Some wildlife environments like savannah or desert can be quite featureless so the sky is often the only thing you have to work with. An amazing sky is very often the starting point and inspiration for our animalscapes and we’ll chase our tails, driving around in circles searching out subjects we can frame successfully against a moodily photogenic sky.
• Try to avoid empty blue skies in animalscapes – they’re very ‘one-note’ and don’t pack the visual punch you’ll need. Cloudy days can be an ally for animalscapes and should be a signal to consider looking out for opportunities to do them.

• Magical moments to capture in animalscapes if you can – particularly in flat or featureless terrain –include rainbows, a rising moon, starscapes and the setting sun. If you’re in a location for some time scope out  the best places, and orientation for Milky Way wildlife shots (waterholes can be a great starting point because there’s a strong chance you’ll get a subject). Alternatively, check when and where the moon will rise close to the horizon so you can get it in your shots where you’re lucky enough to have a subject to play with as well.
• Consider carefully where you position the horizon in your animalscapes. For example if the horizon bisects your image bang in the middle it can look a bit too symmetrical (of course that might well be what you’re after). The rule of thirds helps massively here. If you’re unsure about composition aim for a third land to two-thirds sky in your picture or vice-versa when framing.
• Also watch out when framing that horizons don’t cut through your subject in such a way as to diminish or obscure them. Ideally you either want your subject standing proud of the horizon or clearly positioned below it in a way that allows it to stand out cleanly from any surrounding vegetation or features that might clutter or confuse things.
• Success for these shots depends to a large extent on where you position your wildlife subject/s. Avoid placing a solitary animal too centrally. Again the rule of thirds can help if you’re unsure. Any place where the vertical and horizontal lines along the thirds of your picture cross is good as these are visual ‘powerpoints’ and an animal or bird placed there or thereabouts will work better for you.

• Make sure a single wildlife subject on the left or right of centre (if not looking forward) is facing/moving into the frame and not going out of it dragging the viewer’s eye away from the image. (Remember rules are only there to help – you’re totally free break them if you think your image benefits).
• Quite often with big stormy skies and the sun breaking out between billowing clouds you’ll get strong shafts of light fracturing the shadows that contour a landscape. If you manage to frame your subject so it’s lit by one of these beams of light all the better. You might also want to dial in a bit of exposure compensation on the negative scale to enhance the contrast between light and dark in your picture too when you get the chance to exploit this natural effect.
• It’s often trickier to get things right when you have a group of wildlife subjects in the landscape as you’ll rarely get every individual looking directly at the camera or even the same way. When perfection isn’t possible at least ensure there’s either complete separation between your subjects or that the group as a whole doesn’t appear muddled or confusing.
• Aesthetically speaking it generally looks more pleasing in animalscapes where you have odd numbered groups; so three subjects often works better than four, and in our experience it helps if you have at least one member of a herd, pride or pack looking forward as if engaging with your viewer.
• Animals in miniature mirroring each other’s shapes, like a train moving across the vast terrain or your horizon, can make mouth-watering animalscapes so watch out for this sort of thing happening.
• Again with groups (and solo subjects for that matter) wait for grazing animals to lift their heads as they will often disappear into the grass when feeding. You need to be nit-picking with these shots. (And it goes without saying of course that most times rear ends are a lot less engaging!)
• Play with scale in these pictures. We love photographing Africa’s megafauna from a distance, lost in the wide, wilderness landscape, so their huge size is diminished by the vastness of the habitat in which they live. Use a wide-angle lens close to a lofty giraffe or massive elephant (whilst staying safe and not stressing the animal!) to include a wheeling, cloud-clustered sky for a breath-taking sense of freedom and space.
• If you love shooting animalscapes consider scheduling a safari closer to or during the wet season for the fabulous skies and rich colour palette. Marshmallow cumulus clouds building to charcoal storm-skies are the order of the day and the lush greens can be beautiful, but be prepared for your photography to get rained off completely and for dispersed wildlife to be a little harder to find.

Giraffe, Etosha national park, Namibia

Ann says: I remember us spending the last minutes of available light frantically searching for a subject to set against the vast plain and this beautiful twilight sky. Then I remember seeing the giraffe and having to wait and reposition to get the framing right – creeping with the vehicle so as not to spook the by now very curious foreground animal that we were hoping to use as an anchor to our shot.  Although we couldn’t get the giraffe proud of the foreground it was still just light so we didn’t lose its endless legs against the grassland.

Canon EOS-1Ds MkII with 17-24mm lens at 17mm, 1/60 second, f/8, ISO 250