TAKE IT YOURSELF

equipment

Besides the camera and a 200mm lens, you’ll want a nice big beanbag to prevent camera shake. Always have your lens hood on to keep dust off the lens and prevent unwanted sun flares. Make sure you buy top quality SD cards (Sony and SanDisc are very good) and don’t get cards that hold more than 64GB. On a wildlife trip take a portable back-up hard drive (Peter takes two) and your laptop. You will also need Lightroom and Photoshop and, for black-and-white processing, a plug-in such as Silver Efex Pro is fantastic.

settings

There’s a basic formula to getting good sharp images. Set your aperture to f/8, your shutter speed to 1/1000 sec and your ISO to auto (most Fuji cameras can handle up to ISO 3200 and still produce great quality images). When shooting animals, be sure to focus on the eye. If you want to separate your animal from its background to make it stand out more, open the aperture up, as Peter did with the elephant image (f/2).

praCtiCaL

Shoot RAW plus black-and-white JPEG. This helps you see in black and white but you still have the full, uncompressed RAW image to work on.

Learn about your image stabiliser.

Use only for hand-held shooting at slow shutter speed. On a tripod or at fast shutter speeds, the stabiliser needs to be switched off or it will make the image fuzzy.

Shoot at eye-to-eye level with the animal coming towards you. Try not to shoot down on your subject.

Don’t be afraid to use a wider lens and show animals in their setting.

Be ethical about wildlife photography. Don’t try to get a reaction out of the animals or do anything that will endanger yourself or others.