How to Photograph Wildlife: Field Craft From a Working Biologist
Most wildlife photographs fail for the same reason: the photographer arrived, took the picture, and left. Lynn Starnes spent thirty-eight years as a fish and wildlife biologist before she was known for her photographs — U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Tennessee Valley Authority, a master's degree in aquatic ecology. That background is not decoration. It is the reason the animals in her images look relaxed instead of alarmed, and it changes what she does in the field. Here is the method, in her own words and mine. ## The advantage is knowing the animal, not the camera > "The advantage of being a biologist first and a photographer second is my knowledge of animal behavior and habitats. I see animals I am studying eating, sleeping, in their mating rituals, and even playing. Most tourists who visit America's wild lands rarely have the time to let animals acclimate to their presence, so they rarely see animals being wild, natural, relaxed animals." This is the whole thing in one paragraph. Gear gets discussed endlessly because gear is easy to discuss. But knowing that mule deer are moving at dawn and dusk and bedded in ravines through the middle of the day tells you when to be out and where to look. No lens compensates for arriving at the wrong hour. **Practical version:** before you photograph a species, learn its daily and seasonal rhythm. When does it feed? When does it move between cover and water? What time of year does its behaviour change? Elk during the rut behave nothing like elk in July. ## Be an ambush photographer Lynn calls herself an "ambush photographer." A studio portraitist can pose a subject. She cannot ask a bull elk to lift its head. > "So, I make my animal photographs through great patience. Photography for me is fundamentally a waiting game." The tactic that follows from this is counter-intuitive and it is the one most people get wrong: **deliberately pass up the early shots.** > "Sometimes, being motionless and passing up early photographs of t