Learning wildlife photography – How low should you go?

Posted on 04. Jun, 2009 by Paul Burwell in Everything, Instructional, Wildlife photography

Whenever I teach wildlife photography, I go on at some length about the necessity of getting your camera gear on the same level as your subject’s eyes.  This concept doesn’t only apply to wildlife photography, it applies equally well to photography of children, pets or hobbits.  When I teach this concept to a group of students, their eyes tend to glaze over until I put some images in front of them that can really illustrate the point.

Now I should take a moment to mention that it obviously isn’t always practical or safe to get into a lower shooting position.  This is especially true if you’re dealing with larger animals and especially predators, getting low may trigger their prey response where they start to consider you a potential snack or in my case a meal.  It isn’t just your health I’m concerned about as it seems the regular response to some sort of animal attrack is for the authorities to track down the offending critter and end its time on earth.  So, when I’m telling you that your pictures will improve if you can get lower and match your subject’s eye level, you do still need to THINK about what you’re doing and the sort of subject you’re dealing with.  No photograph is worth either your health or the health of your subject.

I thought I’d use the following images, of the extremely dangerous and elusive Richardson’s Ground Squirrel, to illustrate how images improve as the angle of the camera to the subject changes in respect to the level of the subject’s eyes.  This is the perfect critter for this topic because, depending on the squirrel’s posture, its eyes are somewhere between 1 and 6 inches (2.5 to 15 cm) above the ground.  All of the images below were photographed with my Canon 1Ds Mark II along with the Canon 500mm lens with a 2.0x teleconverter on it for an effective focal length of 1000mm.  All of the images were made at an aperture setting of F9, the standard setting I use on this lens/teleconverter combination when I’m wanting as little depth-of-field as possible while stopping down a bit to compensate for the sharpness lost by using the teleconverter.  If you are using a point-and-shoot type camera. 1000mm is roughly equivalent to about a 20x zoom from what our bare eyes would normally see.

This first shot was taken from my vehicle.  The extreme focal length (or magnification factor) of telephoto images does help to minimize the effect of the apparent difference in height (which ended up being about four feet or 1.2 metres) but you can still tell it was shot looking down at the squirrel.   (Remember you can view larger versions of these images by clicking on them)

Richardson's Ground Squirrel sitting on the grass - 4 ft

On this next photo, using my tripod with the lens about 18 inches (45 centimetres) above the ground, you can really see how the angle has changed and how nicely the background resolves into a whole bunch of nothingness, but there is still an element of peering down on the gopher (our common name for these critters).

Richardson's Ground Squirrel eating a piece of grass - 18 inches

So, we’ve seen the effect of getting a lot closer to our subject’s eye level.  The viewer of our images is able to look at the subject without looking down at it and the innate connection between the viewer and the subject is a lot more compelling.  So what happens when we get even lower to the point where our lens is as close to the eye level of this subject as possible?

Richardson's Ground Squirrel giving a warning signal - 6 inches

Richardson's Ground Squirrel giving a warning signal - 6 inches

You can see the image becomes even more compelling with the lens and camera now at the same level of the squirrel.  I was laying in a prone position on the ground for these last two images with the lens resting on a bean bag.  In the first of the two images above shot at 6 inches, you can really see the delineation line of what’s in focus and what isn’t (the DOF).  One could argue that because of the grass in front of the gopher in the last image, that the angle is too low.  But, I’d argue that I love the dreamy effect it creates and I still have the gopher’s head and eyes nice and sharp. 

I hope that these images, along with the accompanying text, help illustrate the point I try to make about getting to your subject’s eye-level whenever feasible.  Have some feedback on these images?  Have questions about different situations?  This is the place to ask them or contribute your own thoughts.

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Tags: eye-level, eye-to-eye, getting, ground, level, low, richardson's ground squirrel