Safari Wildlife Photography Tips

These wildlife photography tips will help you take better animal pictures on your safari.

I have over 20 years of African wildlife photography experience and these are a few of the things I have picked up over the years that have helped me improve.

1. Use a Beanbag or Window Mounted Tripod

Handholding your camera in safari wildlife photography is often a luxury because of the large lenses necessary to get closer to the shy African wildlife subjects.

And seeing as though most of your photography on safari will be done from inside a vehicle a tripod to stabilise your camera is impractical. A beanbag does the job equally well and it's very quick to set up. Simply place it on a window sill, rest your camera lens on it and click away.

Something else I've used is a window mounted tripod. It's a little more inconvenient than a bean bag because you need to affix the camera to the top each time you want to take a photo (the tripod stays fixed to the window while you drive) but it does the job.

2. Digital camera and lens characteristics

There are three characteristics that your digital camera should have if you want to effectively photograph wildlife.

It should have little or no shutter lag when you depress the shutter release button so that you don't miss any essential action. Some compact digital cameras have a lag of half a second or more which is too long.
It should power up immediately because the split second that it takes might be all the time you have before the animal melts away into the undergrowth.
The focal length of your lens should be at least 70mm or higher. Anything less and you will start to get photographs where you can't identify the animal. An image stabiliser in the lens is a huge bonus because it means you can handhold the camera in lower light conditions and not have blurring occur in the final picture.

3. Be Patient

It may sound a little strange but patience is one of those wildlife photography tips that really will improve your wildlife pictures. Why?

Because the most interesting animal pictures are the ones where they exhibit some kind of behaviour other than sleeping or walking around and to capture that takes time and patience.

You could be lucky on your safari and capture something unique straight off the bat but you just never know. And that's another one of the things that make safari wildlife photography so exciting. It's never predictable.

4. Get The Focus Right

Getting the focus right is not as easy as it sounds especially with today's auto focus cameras.

Because there are often branches, grass and vegetation obscuring the subject in safari wildlife pictures the camera can easily focus on that instead of the animal. So be careful that your camera isn't focussing on that clump of grass in front of the lion cub.

As a general rule I always try to keep the subjects eyes in focus if that's possible because that gives the photograph an interesting focal point even if the rest of the scene is a little out of focus.

5. Use The Light

One of the lesser known wildlife photography tips is that the best time for spotting wildlife on safari is during the early morning and late evening.

Coincidentally that is also when the light is best for photography so take full advantage of this.

Midday is problematic because of the harsh direct light and dark bodies against light backgrounds makes for difficult exposure.

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