In his latest column for AP, nature photographer Marsel van Oosten tells you how to shoot close to animals… without risk of dying
Marsel van Oosten
Marsel van Oosten was born in The Netherlands and worked as an art director for 15 years. He switched careers to become a photographer and has since won Wildlife Photographer of the Year and Travel Photographer of the Year. He’s a regular contributor to National Geographic and runs nature photography tours around the world. Visit www.squiver.com
The vast majority of wildlife images are shot with telephoto lenses. There are several reasons for this. One, most wildlife prefers to stay at a safe distance from us because it has learned that humans cannot be trusted. Two, some wildlife is medium-sized or smaller, so you need a lot of magnification for your subject to show up at a recognisable size in your frame. Three, getting physically close to certain animals is simply not a good idea because of the risk of dying while trying.
In my own photography, I prefer photographing wildlife with (relatively) short lenses because I enjoy showing animals in their habitat and creating so-called ‘animalscapes’. Long telephoto lenses, such as 400mm plus, have a very narrow field of view, so you often end up with just the animal filling your frame and little to no space for any context. This is made worse by the fact that long telephoto lenses have a very shallow depth of field, which means that backgrounds quickly turn into out-of-focus blurs. While this is great for separating the foreground from the background, and lets your subject pop out, I prefer my backgrounds to add to the image. This can be anything from trees or mountains to clouds.
Each year, I spend about nine months leading photo tours around the world, the vast majority of which are in Africa. With a long telephoto lens, getting good images of the elephants, lions or rhinos living there isn’t difficult. However, shooting them with a wideangle lens is a whole different story.
Wild dogs are fascinating predators that hunt in packs and are infamous for ripping their prey to shreds while it’s still alive. Habitat-loss and poisoning (by farmers) are the main reasons they’re an endangered species, so they are also increasingly difficult to find. My objective to photograph them with a wideangle lens was therefore challenging. So far, I only succeeded once by placing a camera with a wideangle in a depression close to a waterhole where the dogs were hanging out. I was
