[IsaacT]

Hello everyone. Personally I feel a bit like a blank slab of marble. I don't really know where my niche lies for photography. I love landscapes, I love animals, I love playing with portraits, and I love astrostuff. I'll figure it out eventually, but for right now I need a bit of guidance on my composition for wildlife(urbanlife) photos. I just got my Tamron 70-200mm lens on Monday, and I have been playing around with the squirrels and birds near my house while I have been busy. Took it out in the rain one day too, but I digress.

My flickr album with the Tammy pictures is here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/126022728@N02/sets/72157650235147717/

Here are a couple of them if you don't want to follow the link(there are seven pictures in the link).






Thank you all for any advice. With landscapes, there are some rules for composition. With portraits, same thing. I am just not sure how it is best to portray wildlife and would like some guidance on developing my pictures.

Thanks,
Isaac

[Des]

I suspect that, with experience, most of us compose photos instinctively. Before we even point the camera at the subject we see lines, colours, juxtaposition, contrast, backgrounds, etc,and we frame with our mind's eye. That is not to say these things can't be learned or improved, at any level of experience. Everybody can learn, no matter how experienced or skilled. Many of us get stuck in grooves. The greater the willingness to try new things, and the more you let imagination run, the more you improve. Your approach to trying new things is a great start.

In a perfect world every photo would be come out perfectly composed, but it doesn't. (Not for me anyway.) My experience with wildlife is that you often get very little time consciously to compose a photo. I just concentrate on getting the focus right, making the most of the available light, and getting a clear view of the subject (difficult with branches and foliage in the way). If there is time, I would then try to finesse the composition. But since wildlife photos often need to be cropped anyway, there is usually a little scope to fix composition with cropping.

These are both excellent photos Isaac. Very sharp, focus spot on, good exposure.
Photo 1: The colours of the squirrel stand out against the background, and the background is not distracting. The fur is finely defined. And it tells a story. The subject is off-centre, and the branch provides a good line from the bottom corner. I would suggest trying two things. (a) Flip it around so the main branch is in the bottom left corner and the squirrel is moving left to right. Viewers who read left to right tend to read a photo the same way. (b) Crop the area behind and below the squirrel a little. The squirrel's head will then be further from the centre of the image and the negative space will work better.
Photo 2: Good simple photo with uniform background. Feather detail and colours are good. The green leaves that the sparrow is perched on and the highlights on the leaves add a splash of complementary colour. The only thing I wonder about is why the photo is square. It would work a lot better in 3:2, with space in front of the sparrow, where it is looking. That is the place where our eye is drawn - where the bird/animal is looking.

One general comment is that in composing/cropping wildilfe photos, I now often leave more of the environment in the scene than I used to. I used to compose/crop to get the bird/animal filling the frame as much as possible, and little else. With a dramatic subject that works well, but sometimes more space around helps.

[crewl1]

WIth animals I feel standard composition rules apply unless you are doing a study of the creature, in which case the full frame closeup like you have in pic 2 will work.
Generally I try to position creatures in standard rule of thirds intersections, so the squirrel I would place a bit higher in frame.
For the sparrow I would leave more space in front to its beak.
There are some threads in this forum for Wildlife and the 300+ thread has a lot of birds. browse through those and see what pics appeal to you and you will see they follow standard composition rules.
https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/26-mini-challenges-games-photo-stories/13...-wildlife.html
https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/122-lens-clubs/55946-300mm-plus-lens-club...ng-lenses.html

[DeadJohn]

All IMO:

#1 is overly busy with branches. Maybe crop tighter? We take what we can get with wildlife, but if the squirrel had less clutter behind it the photo would look better. (The one titled Om Nom Nom on your flickr album is a good example.)

#2 is cropped too tightly. There's not enough space around the bird. The tail touches the edge of the photo.

[wtlwdwgn]

IMHO #1 is a fine composition as is but you could play with cropping some of the negative space. #2 just doesn't work for me as I don't like square crops. It needs some negative space to the right for the bird to look into or fly into. It's like a portrait of a model with their nose pushed into a wall. Just my $0.02.

[wildman]

1. is basically OK. You could do more with tonal range but comp is good enough.
2. Wildlife lives within the context of it's environment so show as much as you can without introducing distracting clutter thus...

[Miguel]

IssacT,

First I recommend you check out the Nature Photographers Network for visual guidance on framing and composing shots. The quality of most of the images there is very high, and it's a good way to see how some higher end lenses render small birds and mammals.

Of your two shots posted here, the bird is superior because the background is non-distracting and pleasant. As well noted above, the crop is too tight, but that's fixable I hope. The sharpness is pretty good, though I get the feeling that NR could be notched down a bit as the feathers look a tad plasticky.

The branches around the squirrel seem to overwhelm it. Also important is perspective. The perspective is looking up at the squirrel. This is what we do usually, so there is nothing extraordinary or engaging about the photo. Some of the better shots at the Nature Photographers Network have the camera more level with the bird or critter being photographed. This conveys a more intimate feeling that makes the shot more special.

Hope this helps,

M

[IsaacT]

I have edited the two and tried to incorporate your suggestions as much as possible. For a quick reference as to why I originally cropped the bird tighter, see the original picture below. Following that are the final recrop with a bit of a heavy hand in PP since I deemed the OOF branch to be too distracting. I lucked out with the very nicely uniform background....makes it easy to erase. Lastly is the altered squirrel pic. I tightened up the crop on it and also flipped the canvas horizontally. Let me know how the edits/changes worked out.

[Sagitta]

The bird photo actually works with the background leaves in it for me. It gives the image a bit of depth.