Winter Wildlife Photography Tips

You know, one of the great things about working in places like Yellowstone National Park, in the winter time, is that you get to experience how the animals survive in this brutal environment and the lifestyle that that they have to live in order to survive this. But the more important thing is, in order for you to get here and enjoy, you gotta be able to survive too. So we're going to go over a few little things that'll make you more comfortable and possibly save your life. And I guess we should actually start with layering. That's the most important thing in climates like this. It's to layer your clothing. Not only does that allow you to shed layers, If you're active, if you're doing hiking in, you know in deep snow and that kind of thing, you're going to build up a sweat. Sweat is what'll get you every time. Sweat is the killer 'cause that sweat will pull body heat away from your body. So being able to shed layers as you need is crucial. But I have, actually, three layers on. I started with a smart, wool, thermal underwear. On top of that, I have polar fleece-lined pants and then on the outside, my jacket and my pants, is a waterproof shell. You're gonna be working in snow and you're gonna be loosening the tripod legs and your tripods are constantly gonna be in the snow. So your hands are gonna get wet if you don't have this waterproof gloves. Earlier in the week, I've got severe frostbite and huge cuts, open wounds on my knuckles from just my hands being exposed just for a matter of minutes. When you get behind the camera and a situation unfolds in front of you, you have to quickly make that decision. You know, lens, length, where I need to be, where I need to position myself. And you know, this stuff, this scene right here kind of unfolding real quick. At least, in my mind, you know, these are iconic animals that you think about when you think about the rockets. Oh, absolutely. Putting your time in and finding a subject, working it and tracking him down and, and staying with it. It's paid off absolutely It really has. This is classic winter in Yellowstone situation right now. We have bison in extraordinarily deep snow. We waited into this, you know, it was over my waist. I'm six foot two. So, you know, we're dealing with, you know, three maybe even four feet of snow that I'm seeing these bisons trudge through. And as beautiful as the situation is, this can actually be extremely difficult to work. And primarily that's because of how these animals are feeding. And if you watch, you can actually see these bison as they swing their heads back and forth to brush the snow or push the snow out of the way so they can access the grass below them. All the other species of ungulates or Hove mammals that are out here, they'll paw down through the snow, but the bison do things very differently. They use that massive head of theirs. So, they remove the snow to feed in these areas. Because of the depth of the snow, It's oftentimes very difficult to get a clean shot of their face. So, you need to be really precise with what you're doing here and you need to be very cautious of when you trip that shutter button, because when their heads are down in a two dimensional plane that we're seeing this in from our cameras, you know, it just, it loses the excitement and it loses the drama that we're actually seeing with our eyes. So, we wanna wait and make sure that we get that head to pop up and maybe even that "look straight at the camera", just just like that right there. And that's when we want to trip the shutter button In wildlife photography, we're at the mercy of the animals that we're photographing. We're not in a studio. We can't control the scenario. And so inevitably there's going to be distracting elements that you have to deal with in a situation like this. And in this scenario, in particular, we have this beautiful background with these conifers covered in snow and then you have the occasional dead tree. That's not a problem, as long as you account for that tree in your composition. And so you don't want something like this growing out of the Bison's head. You want to make sure that you move yourself around or you can pose in such a way as to make that dead tree back there part of the composition. The key thing to remember here is that if it doesn't add to the composition, then it actually hurts the composition. And so, if you can't figure out a way to work that dead tree into the background, then you just simply need to move or not take a shot at all and wait for the scene to change. Jared, this is a nice opportunity here. I mean, it was like all the hard work paid off. We've seen this guy, what, three times now this week? And he's kind of been in generally the same area and you know, taking that extra time this morning to kinda tracking followers trash. We had fresh snowfall last night. So, it was pretty easy to track it. Yeah, sometimes you just have to put in the time to really work, to find these animals. And, you know, we worked our way up and down the Madison river several times here. And luckily, because of that fresh snow, we could tell very quickly which were old tracks and which were fresh tracks. Once we honed in on where those fresh tracks were leading, you know, it was just a matter of getting out of the snow coach, climbing down to the river and just, kind of, creeping along with a set of binoculars to find this guy and lo and behold, there he was, stuffed up inside of a log hanging over the river there. I'm actually very surprised where we even saw him because he blended in so well there. Oh, he's perfectly camouflaged. Ease down the bank here. I don't know if he's hunting or if he's just going to find another place to rest and work. Please, honey. You know, one of the unique things about this particular cat, some of the other film crews that were in here they were specifically in here photographing and filming this particular cat because he has a very strange way of, of unique way I should say, of hunting. He would actually dive in the water and that's very uncommon for any of the cat species except for the tiger. Yeah And so this is really unique. It'd be great if we could catch a muster out or something like that or some kind of duck. Yeah. This individual Bobcat's famous for that. Yeah. Now, just like with the rest of the animals we photographed this week so far exposing for this, we're doing exactly the same thing. We got full sun on white snow, lot of white snow. And so metering the snow and my meter wants to tell me that it's 1/5000 of a second at 5.6 at 100 ISO. But I know that that's snow and it needs to go back to white instead of gray. So, I'm gonna open up one full stop, which takes my shutter speed down to 1/2500 of a second net the exposures coming at dead on for this emotionally neutral-tone cat here. You didn't seem to be bothered by our presence. No, no, not at all. I mean, he's obviously aware that we're here but, you know, coming in like this, kind of digging out something of a hole nice and slowly and kind of, you know, getting ourselves down low, we're partially concealed by the snow. And like I said, even though he's very much aware that we're sitting here, by doing this, it helps to kind of keep him at ease and we're able to somewhat mask a lot of our movements here to where basically it's just our cameras and our heads and hands sticking up above the snowbank, looking at it now. You know, a lot of time with wildlife when animals, especially they're not habituated to humans, you know, you do need to wear camouflage. You do need to use blinds. You do need to, you know try to move as quietly and stealthily as possible. And a lot of times something as simple as shade or a tree, you know, the shade of a forest is sometimes your best comfort. That's what I mean. So this is one of the few situations when I'm photographing and snow that out actually switch over to aperture priority. Normally, you know, I'm right with Doug. I photograph everything in manual in this sort of scenario. However, right now overhead, we have clouds that are just racing by. There's some really high level winds going on. And so, the lighting situation is changing very rapidly. So, with the sun coming over our back right now, I'm able to switch my camera over to 3D matrix metering or for Canon shooters, that would be evaluative. I set a plus one exposure compensation and I'll allow the computer inside of the camera to make the decision as to what my shutter speed should be. I've got everything set up right now to make sure that that shutter never goes below 1200. And that seems to be just about right for me. Jared, it looks like he is easing on down, hunting down the edge of the river on Cawood. Let's dig outta here and just kinda follow her down there to the opposite side of the river here down the bank and just try to keep up with her. Yeah. That's all we can do right now. Anytime you're photographing a bird like this in this sort of tight cover up in a tree, you know, this sort of overcast lighting that we have right now, is absolutely perfect. If we had any sort of sun out right now we would have harsh highlights and very deep shadows. And that's a dynamic range of that. Your camera just wouldn't be able to handle. So overcast lighting when working in forest in situations or working with birds and trees is the absolute perfect type of lighting. And what I like to do in this sort of scenario, I'll drop my aperture down to F4. My F-stop down to F4. That's gonna give me an extremely narrow depth of field. And when shooting with these longer lenses like this and especially at close distances, you have to be surgically precise with your focusing. If I were to focus just below the eye, on the neck, or part of the shoulder at F4 like this, it's such a narrow depth of field, that I would actually be out of focus. And of course, as everybody knows, the eye is the most important part of the subject. Technically, just a few years ago, this species of grouse didn't even exist. This is what we used to call the blue grouse here but it's since been divided into two species the dusky and the city grouse. In which case, we're watching the dusky grouse right now. Now, it's really interesting. If you watch this guy sitting in this tree here, he's actually reaching out and plucking needles from this conifer here. And that's something that's very unique about this species here. And that's how they survive the winter. And there's very few species of any sort of animal that can survive off of this sort of stuff. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop, stop, stop, stop. Right here, right here. All right. There's something under those trees right there. Doug, this might actually be a wolf. Let's check this out. Doug, look at this. We were driving up the road. You said you thought you saw a coyote. Looked little big to me. You know, we pull up, beautiful example of a gray wolf here tucked under these trees right now. This is absolute gorgeous. It is gorgeous. You know, it's not a photograph, By no means, by no means. But I mean, he's behind the trees, He's got a lot of stuff in the way, but just the opportunity to see this magnificent animal, I mean, They're elusive. They don't want to be near people. And just to be this close to one is, is really special. Oh yeah. This is what winter in Yellowstone is all about right here. And that guy is on a kill. Yeah. Or at least it looks like a rack of ribs right there that she's got barbecued, maybe? All right. So let's go ahead and let her be and keep on moving. That's pretty cool. So Doug, after the creation of the national park, Congress realized that the political boundaries that's Yellowstone doesn't actually encompass the entire ecosystem. So what they ended up doing was surrounding the entire national park with national forests, which are all fantastic places to photograph like we're in right now. Well, I mean, even though we're not in the park, technically. This is beautiful through here. These animals, they don't know the boundaries. And that's the cool thing about this. Oh my gosh, dude. This is really nice. I was going to be dropping out of the way here shortly though. But for the time being, this is a great situation. Yeah. This is gorgeous. I'd like to take this opportunity to explain to you how to determine exposure for neutral tone subjects and snow. Now, it doesn't matter what the lighting situation is. It doesn't matter if it's overcast or if it's full sun, the process is going to be the same. The only thing that's gonna change is how much you compensate your exposure. So, basically, what you want to do is you want to point your camera's meter, which is the center part of your viewfinder, at the white snow that is in the same light as your subject. Depress your shutter, halfway down which activates the meter, and start adjusting your F-stop and your shutter speed and ISO until the meter on the inside of the camera reads zero. That's a neutral tone exposure. The camera's meter is built to determine a neutral tone exposure. It basically says that everything you pointed at is neutral gray, and that's not the case. The snow is white. It's not gray. We don't want gray snow. So, we want to compensate our exposure in order to bring the snow back to white, we have to add light to it. So, my meter right now is telling me that 1/1600 of a second at 5.6 and 400 ISO is a proper exposure for that snow. That is not correct. That's going to give me gray snow. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna add light by simply adjusting my shutter speed down to 1/800 of a second. By doing that, now I've opened my exposures up, the snow is pretty and white and the elk will be properly exposed. We got a bit of a drive to get out of here though, Doug. So, we should probably go ahead and I don't want to leave this though but I don't want to be left here. Yeah. You don't want to be wolf food, either. I'm with you Let's do it. Well, I think it goes without saying. The wildlife photography opportunities here are truly amazing. And the brutal winter weather these animals have to endure gives us a greater appreciation for these animals. I hope you've enjoyed this week's show and learned a little more about winter photography and Yellowstone National Park. And remember, it's not just about the photograph, it's the outdoor experience. I'm your host, Doug Gardner. Thank you for joining me on another edition of Wild Photo Adventures.