The Most Common Mistakes Photographers Make

The Most Common Mistakes Wildlife Photographers Make

Wildlife photography – maybe more than any other photography genre - is prone to mistakes. Even for experienced wildlife professionals, mistakes are to be expected. The “keeper rate” for wildlife – the percentage of images not deleted and dumped in the trash bin – is woefully low. Focus is inaccurate, shutter speed is too slow, flawed composition and poor planning are just some examples of what can go wrong. That’s what’s most frustrating about wildlife photography. So many things can go wrong and there are no do-overs! Once the moment is gone, it’s gone.

As the painter, Bob Ross used to say, “There are no mistakes, only happy accidents.” Making happy accidents, and learning from them, is one of the best ways to improve as a wildlife photographer. 

If you’re new to wildlife photography, it’s important to set realistic expectations for yourself. It’s easy to become disappointed and discouraged by poor results. But think of it as a numbers game. You might take hundreds of photos before you capture that one special frame that’s truly worthy of keeping. And when that success occurs, by all means, celebrate! You’ve earned it. For the remaining frames, study them to understand why they didn’t make the grade and whether the reason was within your control or perhaps something else. Either way, use these rejects as a learning tool for what and how to do things differently next time.

Lucky for us, happy accidents in the age of digital cameras cost next to nothing, except for the opportunity cost of missing an epic, once-in-a-lifetime wildlife image because you forgot to remove the lens cap. I’m being ridiculous, of course, none of us would ever do something as boneheaded as that. Of course, we wouldn’t.

Here are ten (10) of the most common mistakes wildlife photographers regularly do make, including myself, that we will be addressing throughout this series of posts.

Incorrect Shutter Speed

Unless you are intentionally looking to capture motion blur, the most common mistake in wildlife photography is using a shutter speed that is too slow to freeze the action. Minimum shutter speed varies based on the speed and action of a particular animal. For example, you might get a sharp picture of a stationary animal at 1/125 sec, but the buzzing wings of a Hummingbird need 1/3200 sec or faster to be sharp. It is almost always preferable to use higher ISO sensitivity with some digital noise than using a lower ISO setting that requires a shutter speed that doesn’t freeze the motion. You can reduce digital noise in post-processing but there is no solution for fixing motion blur caused by slow shutter speeds.

Use this chart as a quick guide to set your shutter speeds to the minimum shutter speeds required for every situation. The more time you spend in the field photographing animals, the more this guide will be ingrained in your mind.

Missed Focus

No matter how sophisticated your camera’s focusing system is or how skilled you are at tracking animal motion, you will sometimes miss focus. As you gain experience, your percentage of out-of-focus shots will decrease, but out-of-focus wildlife shots are inevitable with fast-moving, unpredictable animal action.

One common reason for missed focus is when the camera’s focusing system chooses a nearby object like a branch or blade of grass to focus on, instead of the animal. This can happen for a variety of reasons. First, make sure that you are using a focus mode that supports your focus point's precise placement. You also need to be adept at placing that focus point on the animal which can take practice.

Second, make sure that your camera is in continuous autofocus mode as it needs to be able to make focus adjustments based on animal movement.

In particularly dense scenes, like an animal hiding behind lots of grass or behind falling snow, the camera’s autofocus system can sometimes get confused and focus on the wrong thing. For a stationary animal, temporarily switching to manual focus can solve this.

Maximizing your in-focus shots means understanding all of the focus modes that your camera supports and knowing when to use each one based on the animal action you photograph. A single-point focus allows precise focus placement for slow or stationary animals, but will often fail when an animal is in motion. Other focus modes that use multiple focus points to track action across the frame are more appropriate for motion. Very fast motion means using more of the available focus points to track your subject. Some very new cameras even have animal-specific focus modes where the camera identifies the subject’s eyes and keeps them in focus which can be very handy.

Another method that helps track wildlife is back button focus. Many photographers swear by it, while others don’t like having to use multiple buttons to achieve focus. Both of us are proponents of back button focus for all of our photography.

The technique will take some practice, and we strongly urge you not to use it on a trip unless you have created the muscle memory because the technique separates the focus and shutter activation between two separate buttons, allowing you to control each independently.

There are two main benefits to back button focus.

Focus is no longer prioritized over the shutter release – When you are not using back button focus and fully press the shutter of your camera, you prioritize achieving accurate focus before firing the shot. This can cause a bit of a delay that is not ideal for wildlife photographers. Separating the two functions means that neither function has priority over the other. You are able to hold AF-On down, continually focusing the shot. When you press the shutter button you will have zero delays, taking the photo at the exact moment you intended.

Achieving focus on a stationary animal and recomposing – If you acquired focus and your focal point is in your diopter's center. You might want to put that animal off to the side quicker than changing your focal point. You can simply focus using the AF-On button, then releasing it. Reposition the shot to place the animal to one side or the other and simply press the shutter button to take your images. IF the animal then begins to move, you simply press the back button again to reacquire focus.

Our advice is to understand all of your camera’s focus modes and practice tracking moving objects using the various modes. The time to do this is at home at a local park or zoo prior to your expensive safari to a far-flung location. Recognize that using the correct focus mode will decrease, but not eliminate, out-of-focus photos.

Incorrect Depth of Field/Aperture

One common, but incorrect, piece of wildlife photography advice is to always shoot with your lens wide open or at the widest aperture that your lens supports. This can be used to isolate animals in the photo and blur busy or ugly backgrounds. However, there are a couple of situations where you need more depth-of-field and a smaller aperture. First is for a group of animals that is at staggered depths. If you want the entire group in focus and are using a telephoto lens, you might need a much smaller aperture, anywhere from f/8-f/18 to get the group in focus. Slightly out-of-focus animals in the rear of a group will be quite subtle or barely noticeable on a camera’s small screen but will look very obvious once you review the image on a larger screen.

The second scene where depth-of-field matters a lot is for large animals. When using a long telephoto lens to zoom in close on a big animal, your depth-of-field might be only inches deep at an aperture of f/4 when the animal is relatively close to you. While the eyes might be in focus, the snout, ears or antlers might not be. At close distances with long telephoto lenses, you need smaller apertures like f/8-f/18 to increase your depth-of-field. This is even more important when the animal is at its longest when approaching directly towards you. Decide on how much of their body you want in focus and make your aperture smaller and smaller in order to achieve that depth-of-field.

Beyond practicing at home before you go on your expedition, smartphone apps can help you understand depth of field at different apertures. One such tool is an app called PhotoPills. This app offers a wide array of tools for photographers and can be a relatively quick way to calculate complicated things like depth of field and hyperfocal distance. Let’s use PhotoPills to calculate some depth of field examples. Here is a table with depth of field calculations at various focal lengths, apertures, and subject distances. These examples are from a full-frame camera.

The combinations of subject distance, focal length, and aperture are limitless, and these tables are just a few samples to illustrate the key points. We encourage photographers to use an app like PhotoPills to explore the various depth of field for their own lenses at varying object distances.

Incorrect Exposure

It has happened to all of us. We have all over or under-exposed an image. Sometimes this happens because of setting choices made by the photographer. Other times the camera’s built-in metering system can get confused about what the proper exposure should be in certain scenes.

The first and most important step is to learn how to read and interpret your histogram. You want a histogram that contains no clipped highlights or shadows. By constraining your photo's dynamic range within the histogram, you can make exposure adjustments in post-processing without losing any details or data.

Even if you have no clipped shadows or highlights, the histogram will also show you when a photo is underexposed where there is an area of little or no data in the highlights section of the histogram. Raising your exposure settings to push the curve to the right and add more highlights without blowing them out will ensure that you are capturing the maximum range of tones available in the photo. Exposure adjustments can be easily lowered in post-processing to achieve the most pleasing result.

Your choice of metering mode can greatly affect the camera’s ability to get the right exposure. Using a matrix, evaluative, or multi-metering mode is often most appropriate for scenes in nature. The camera evaluates the entire scene when making exposure setting decisions.

In scenes with tricky or high-contrast lighting, sometimes using spot metering mode directly on the subject can get the best exposure. Beware, if you are using spot metering on a subject that is in deep shadows, bright areas of the photo can easily get blown out. Check your histogram to confirm this.

Some scenes are difficult for camera sensors to interpret. The two most obvious ones in nature are scenes that involve large swaths of white snow or blue sky. When a camera sensor sees a scene with mostly snow or blue sky, for example, it makes an incorrect decision to expose for middle gray, assuming that the scene is “too bright,” which is not actually the case. The result will be under-exposed photos. Adding a positive amount of exposure compensation is needed to adjust for this. Just be aware that if you pan your camera from an area of mostly snow or sky to an area that includes brown or green landscape elements, the meter will make a different and correct exposure decision. You need to be able to change your exposure compensation settings quickly to account for changing scenes like this.

Most modern cameras support Auto ISO, and we highly recommend its use for wildlife photography. Allowing the camera to make decisions about what ISO setting frees the photographer to think about creative decisions that are more important to the image. Our primary creative decisions when photographing wildlife are composition and aperture to achieve our desired look. We also want to make sure that we have the correct minimum shutter speed to freeze the action that we are seeing. Photographing animal action requires significant mental concentration and physical dexterity. We want to stay focused on the creative elements of action and composition.

Auto ISO allows you to set an ISO sensitivity starting point and an upper limit for your ISO setting. The camera will evaluate the scene and start increasing ISO until the upper ISO limit is reached in order to get the best exposure. You may also be able to set a minimum shutter speed in your camera’s Auto ISO settings to ensure that you are freezing motion.

Each camera has a different upper limit on ISO where a photo goes from pleasing to unusable with too much noise or poor colors. On older cameras, this limit might be as low as 1600 or 3200 ISO, while some modern cameras can create usable images as high as 10,000 ISO or even higher. As a photographer, you need to test your own camera and find the maximum usable ISO value to make the best choice for your Auto ISO setting.

When all else fails and you are getting over or under-exposed images, consult your histogram. Keeping your exposure placed correctly on the histogram curve is the key to understanding proper exposure.

Noise in Your Photo

In wildlife photography, you don’t control the amount of available light. You can also be forced to use faster shutter speeds or smaller apertures, both of which reduce the amount of light that reaches your camera’s sensor. In order to achieve a proper exposure in situations like these, ISO sensitivity has to be increased and higher ISO settings can lead to more grainy digital noise.

Every camera has a range of ISO settings where noise is nonexistent or barely perceptible. It also has a range of ISO settings where noise is present but correctable in post-processing. The camera will also have a range of very high ISO settings where digital noise and color degradation give unnatural or poor results, even after post-processing. This varies between camera manufacturers, models, and the age of the camera. Do not take generic ISO advice that you find on the internet. You need to test and understand the ISO limitations of your particular camera which can vary substantially compared to other camera models.

High ISO settings won’t be necessary in a brightly lit scene, and noise isn’t much of an issue. But wildlife photography involves plenty of tricky or low-light situations, whether during twilight hours or in a dark forest or jungle, where you must use higher ISO and introduce some noise to get the shot.

It is also important to realize that a properly exposed image at a higher ISO setting will actually have less digital noise than an under-exposed photo at a lower ISO setting that is brightened in post-processing. This is most obvious when trying to brighten the deep shadows of the photo. You should always try for a properly-exposed image, based on the histogram, even if it means using a higher ISO setting, for best results.

You should also maximize your use of high ISO to capture impossibly lit scenes like this photo of a black bear in a ravine. Your camera will do a better job than your eyes on a scene like this. A somewhat grainy but still sharp photo using a higher ISO upwards of 6400 would have been better than this blurry image using a lower ISO setting of 2200.

Lastly, it is important to think about your photo's presentation, whether that be online or as a print. A photographer's natural inclination is to zoom all the way in at a 1:1 pixel ratio to check for sharpness and noise and ignore photos that are deemed “too noisy.” Realize that viewers of your work will never see the photo at this size. At small resolutions on Instagram or other online platforms, digital noise won’t be relevant to your viewers. Even for decent-sized prints, some amount of grain or noise might be perfectly acceptable in an image.

Missing Body Parts

Almost every animal you will photograph has distinct characteristics that you want to capture. But animals do not always stay stationary. Elephants have their long trunks that are often moving in different directions. Lions, cheetahs, and leopards have disproportionately long tails that can easily find themselves quickly out of frame. Or maybe two fighting Zebra rear up causing you to crop off the lower part of their bodies during a fight.

These characteristics are a major part of the animal’s personality and these elements are not ones you want to crop out of your image when trying to tell an effective story. Shoot a bit wider than you think is necessary. The number of pixels in today's cameras will allow you to crop your image to the best composition in post-processing.

Choosing the Wrong Lens

How often has this happened to you? Often a day of wildlife photography will be done with a long zoom lens, say 400-600mm. Depending on your location, you should always be prepared with a wider-angle lens, preferably on a second camera. Maybe a lion decides to approach the vehicle or a humpback whale starts rubbing up alongside your boat. A big zoom lens isn’t going to help you to capture those moments. When something happens unexpectedly close, either reach for your other lens or grab your smartphone camera as a quick wide-angle alternative.

Battling Heat Distortion

Photographing wildlife that is far away using big zoom lenses sometimes introduces a failure that you cannot fix: heat distortion. When the ground is warmer (or colder) than the air immediately above it, your image can contain waves of heat distortion. This happens on sunny, summer days, but can just as easily happen in bitter cold when the sun is shining brightly. As you move farther and farther away from animals, you increase the amount of air and moisture between you and the animal. More distance leads to more distortion. The only fix for this problem is to either reduce your distance to the animal or photograph during a time of the day when the ground is the same temperature as the air above it.

Not Staying Quiet

If an animal is going to ruin a scene and frighten away skittish wildlife, there is a good chance that the offending animal is one of the primates holding a camera. We’ve all been on wildlife expeditions where people shout, scream or squeal in delight when an animal appears, or maybe they stand up and shuffle around to change a lens, frightening skittish animals away. Stay quiet, stay stealthy, and share those emotions at dinner later on. Unless an animal is trying to eat you. Then make as much noise as you need to!

A good rule of thumb to follow is that if you can hear the person beside you walk or talk, the wildlife can also hear you. You're in an environment with noises the wildlife is used to hearing. Your startling noises that are foreign to the wildlife will either prevent you from seeing the animal or have you capture an animal in distress.

Be Respectful of The Wildlife

As photographers, it is important to respect all wildlife. Most of this is common sense. If you think that you are putting wildlife or yourself in danger stop what you’re doing and look for an alternative method to acquire the photo.This may seem unimportant to some. But forcing an animal to do something unnatural can have long term detrimental effects on the animal, and the location.

Here are three examples that we would consider detrimental to wildlife.

Baiting or Feeding - This is often done with food that is not natural to their diet. Human food can be harmful to an animal looking for a free meal. It also habituates the animal to humans. If they view humans as a free meal they might put themselves in harm’s way on roadways or residential areas. Animals who become aggressive when searching for human food may lose their life in an effort to protect humans.

Crowding Wildlife – This tactic not only stresses the animal but also impacts the animal’s natural way of life like mating, raising young and hunting.

Provoking animals for movement – This is one of the worst ways to capture a picture of an animal. There is no excuse for putting an animal under duress in order to take a photo. Wildlife lives on the edge of life and death. They move only when they have to and feed only when necessary. Provocation puts a strain on the wildlife that just isn't necessary.

Respect the Environment – I am sure you have witnessed humans’ disregard for nature. Leaving garbage, destroying habitat, all for the sake of getting access to untouched areas of nature. It can ruin a habitat for generations to come.

We would ask you to think as though you have been granted access to the remote locations where the animals live. You should do everything in your power to be aware not to damage or disturb any of the natural habitats while shooting. The environment should look the same way when you leave as it did when you arrived. Even small actions like removing branches from around a bird’s nest may be disruptive to an animal’s habitat. Try and practice a “leave no trace” method of being out in nature. When you leave, there should be little trace that you were there. That goes for vehicles. Don’t blaze a trail out into the wilderness and destroy habitat. Park in a safe area and walk-in.

Does it all seem a little overwhelming? 

Don’t worry. We’re going to help you avoid as many of these happy accidents as possible and show you how to learn from the missteps you inevitably will make. Most importantly, don’t get discouraged. “Success is a lousy teacher,” Bill Gates once said because success only breeds overconfidence and apathy. It’s only from our happy accidents where we learn and grow as wildlife photographers and we’re going to be with you every step of the way.

In the next section of blog posts, we’ll turn our attention to planning your next photography outing. We’ll discuss logistics, pre-visualizing the images you want to make, traveling safely with your photo equipment, and thinking like a naturalist in the field.

Learn How To Plan Your Wildlife Trip – Click Here