We live on a planet that is the envy of the Cosmos. Any extraterrestrial would kill to spend an afternoon here and portray, with his camera, the wonders that the Earth holds. The nature that surrounds us is full of fascinating places and amazingly beautiful moments that cry out to be immortalized, turned into photographs that will one day bear witness to what this planet once was.
I say this because the footprint of Man makes the future of the plane uncertain.
Tomorrow I don’t know. Today you can still grab your camera, go on an excursion, and return home loaded with rewarding nature photos like the ones I’m going to show you below.
Today’s is an inspirational article par excellence. When you read it, I want you to feel an irrepressible desire to photograph nature. I confess that behind these lines I have the firm intention of touching your heartstrings, moving you, getting you “the monkey” of photographing nature, reaching your cerebral amygdala and activating your most basic emotions regarding the Earth, regarding this treasure dated of expiration in which we have been lucky enough to live.
In today’s article I am going to show you examples of nature photos that will leave you spellbound, thrilled and breathless. What you are going to see next will make you feel like a complete alien who has just landed on a new planet and who is seeing for the first time things that he could never have conceived.
Also, I don’t want this article to remain an ephemeral “contemplative” moment. I want you, after reading it, to feel the torrent of passion run through your veins and start planning your next photographic outing to take photos of this nature that I am going to show you.
To do this, next to each photograph I am going to include a brief guide to how the photo was taken and how you could also capture a similar one. Obviously I am not going to take the photo for you, I will let you enjoy the experience of spending a morning or an afternoon taking the photos by yourself. But I am going to give you a hand: under each photo I will leave you some guidelines about how the photo was taken or what aspects you have to take into account when taking a similar photo. Simply to serve as a starting point.
18 nature photographs explained in detail
Enough small talk. Here are 18 photos of nature, fauna and flora, belonging to the planet that climate change deniers and large industrial oligarchies will end up destroying.
For now, this is how it looks.
Let’s start with something strong: the photo you see above was taken with an iPhone to which a macro-type lens-accessory was attached, one of those that you can get on Amazon for less than 10 EUR. Amazing, right?
How many times have you pointed your camera at a rose and felt uninspired or uncreative? Look at the photo above, it is the typical rose that you can find in any park next to your house, but look at the game that the photographer has created:
First, the photo is taken with a large aperture lens, an f/1.4 or f/1.8, hence the dramatic background blur. On the other hand, observe the drops of water on top of the rose. It could be because of the rain, but a well-known trick in professional circles is to spray water (with a household sprayer) on the rose before photographing it.
Finally, notice the bi-color contrast, red/green, that the photographer has achieved in this rose photo, elevating the photo to the category of “painting” from my point of view. A delight for the sense of sight.
For those moments when you have a beautiful almond or cherry blossom tree in front of you but you don’t know how to photograph it. One of the least hackneyed angles in tree photography is the Contrazenith angle, also called Nadir.
You stand under the tree, stick the camera to the trunk, and explore the view you get through the viewfinder or screen.
If you also shoot in RAW, later you can develop the photo digitally and, perhaps, give a little more joy to the color or contrast.
This photo is a classic of nature photography, and yet it never loses its magic. Locate a field area near where you live, you will surely find a tree with which you can portray a concept similar to the one in the photo above.
Do you want a trick? Sometimes it is not easy to find a completely “lonely” tree, but if you get out of the car and explore the place on foot, you realize that you can isolate a tree from the rest of the trees simply by getting into the right position, or by shooting a specific focal length (with more zoom for example).
No self-respecting nature photo gallery can be without its squirrel. If you would like to photograph one, you need to go out with a good telephoto lens (from 100mm onwards). If the lens has an optical stabilizer (VR, IS), activate it.
To photograph squirrels you obviously have to go to a park with trees, but the key is to spend a lot of time looking for nothing but squirrels. That thing of going for a walk in the park and at times I photograph a flower, at times a tree, at times a selfie and I go looking to see if I happen to catch an animal, it does not usually work much, since you immediately get tired or overwhelmed. But if you plant yourself in the park or forest with the firm goal of photographing squirrels and do it with patience, your visual acuity sharpens and you are more likely to find the squirrel you are looking for.
Photographing a macaw or parrot and making it the protagonist is almost a guarantee of success. Can anyone resist the spell of that fur and the vividness of those colors?
If you want to photograph a parrot, your safest option would be to go to a zoological garden or a fauna park where you will have close access to a multitude of animals. Arm yourself with a good telephoto lens and try to work with rather long focal lengths.
If you are going as a family great, but two things:
- Organize yourself in some way so that you can focus on the photo for a while without interruptions. It’s wonderful to be able to enjoy a family day at the zoo but to get a decent photo you need to mentally focus on the subject of the photo, dedicate time to it, patiently lurk for several minutes until you can capture that photo. If you go with children, the ideal is that there are more adults in the group to allow you some time of artistic “disconnection”.
- It’s best to go on days when there are fewer people, so you’ll get fewer elbows while you’re looking for that perfect photo.
If you are overwhelmed by the zoological gardens and the crowds stress you out, why not plan a getaway to a rural place with family or friends? If you get up early you can enjoy a relaxing ride and the opportunity to come across a photogenic horse willing to pose for you.
The morning walks through the countryside will also allow you, depending on the time of year and the weather conditions in the area, to be able to enjoy the morning fog with which you can add a point of mystery to your nature photography, just like in the photograph above.
I’m not going to lie to you, you don’t take this photo by chance one day while you go shopping at the supermarket. But if you like hiking or doing mountain routes, you can combine it with your other hobby as a photographer and be able to get photographs as emblematic as the one you see above.
The goat photo above requires the following ingredients:
- Telephoto.
- Position yourself in favor of the sunlight or, at least, not against the light.
- Obviously you are not taking this photo “in passing”. It has to be part of a photography “excursion” or at least an excursion (hiking/mountaineering) where you stop and spend some time working on this photo.
Normally when we see a group of flowers together, the first thing that comes to mind is to photograph them all together from above, at a zenithal angle. Afterwards, we check the screen of our camera with disappointed eyes, and then we bend down to take a macro-type photo, an extreme close-up of one of the flowers.
The photo above is a creative way to portray an element of nature that would normally be bland or boring. There are many things happening in this photo that I want you to notice:
- Relatively open plan. It’s not your typical close-up of a single flower. On the contrary, we photograph the whole, thus transmitting the idea of a group, of an environment, of society, of a community.
- Very small depth of field. We achieve this by opening the lens diaphragm to the maximum (f/ value as small as possible). Thanks to this, the photographer is able to focus on a single flower, leaving all the others out of focus. As a result, whoever looks at the photo, the first time our gaze inevitably goes to the flower in the center, not because it is in the center, but because of its focus.
- This game of focus and blur, together with the height from which the photo was taken, gives the viewer a feeling of “immersion” that is difficult to achieve otherwise. You see the photo and you feel that you are there, lying on your stomach, resting your elbows on the ground and enjoying the moment in first person.
Magnificent photo that illustrates a human-nature connection. Placing a person in a natural environment by mixing natural elements with parts of the person’s body in the composition usually gives very gratifying results at a story level and an emotional level.
What you see above is a river with a small waterfall with “silk effect”. An impressive photo, without a doubt, but not so much that you can’t consider it yourself, however humble your photographic equipment may be.
Let’s break down the “making of” this photo so you understand what’s behind it. You will see that with some patience it is quite easy to achieve a decent result:
- We locate a creek or a small river where we can walk with boots without our physical integrity being in danger. The photo can be taken even if there is no waterfall, but it is clear that a small waterfall will improve the final result.
- We planted a tripod, there, in the middle of the water. Can you put a tripod in the water? It depends on the tripod, but it is usually possible. Just make sure to wash and dry it well as soon as you get home, so it doesn’t deteriorate over time.
- We look in our backpack for the lens with the shortest possible focal length. A wide angle type 18mm or even 14mm will give us a spectacular view.
- We will attach a Neutral Density filter (ND Filter) to the objective. They are on Amazon at very cheap prices. Make sure, however, that you buy an ND Filter with the correct diameter for your lens.
- We set our camera to shoot in RAW + JPG and in manual “M” mode.
- We set the mode dial to manual mode, set ISO to minimum, aperture around f/11 – f/16, and a relatively…