This is a guest post by wildlife shooter Mike Cavaroc. You can see more of Mike’s photos at www.cavaroc.com
Many photographers take their shot, perhaps crop in a bit, and after tweaking the Curves/Levels/Saturation/etc, are done with it. But what if the composition begs to be something different? How do you know which to choose? The simple answer is that if you want to tell a story, you shoot horizontal. If shooting wildlife, this gives your subject a space to sort of walk in to, and is especially useful if there is motion, as shown in the example with the pronghorn. If you have a lot of elevation change in your image, you’ll want to shoot vertically to ensure that all the splendor of the original scene is still there just as you saw you it.
With wildlife, many people tend to shoot horizontally, and can quite often come away with successful shots. Before jumping straight into a horizontal format though, ensure that it’s what the scene requires. Are there impressively lit mountain peaks in the background? Are fall colors above? Ask yourself questions like these when out in the field and if you can answer yes, definitely shoot vertical. Clearly, in the example of the bull moose with Grand Teton lit up from the first light of day, this shot would not have been nearly as successful in a horizontal format. With this shot you really get an idea of the landscape that this particular bull moose calls home. Thus it is very important when composing your scene to look around and see where the important details truly are and how you can capture as much of their environment as possible.
On the other hand, maybe there is just not that much detail in a shot. Sometimes it’s hard for a photographer to do, but in this instance, getting rid of half, or two-thirds of the shot is necessary to get rid of any empty space that may have been captured. This can be seen in the example of the panorama of the two bull moose with the Grand Teton Mountains in the background. In this shot, all of the focus was running right through the middle of the photo. There was extra sagebrush distracting from the moose at the bottom of the photo and there were clouds above with very little detail that were leaving the shot feeling unbalanced. In this case, I simply eliminated them and created a panoramic format. Since I’m shooting with 12.8 megapixels, this still leaves plenty of photo to be blown up larger, if desired.
These are just a few examples and there are plenty more options depending on the scene, the animal(s), the weather, etc. Of course, these are only rules and doing something completely opposite of what I said could result in something spectacular! The only way to find out is to just get out there and keep shooting.
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