Nature enthusiasts may find themselves interested in beginning wildlife photography but they don’t know where to start. You might take photos of birds with your phone only to find out that they don’t live up to your expectations, often turning out grainy or blurred due to the distance.

As a fellow newcomer to the world of wildlife photography, I can offer a few tips for those just starting out.

Selecting a camera and lens can be a daunting task. There are an abundance of cameras and lenses that are available to those interested in wildlife photography. Your budget can help to narrow down the options, and great photos can be taken on any budget.

Lenses and camera bodies are often sold or rented separately, but can be sold in kits. Many photographers switch out multiple lenses with their camera bodies depending on the subject they are trying to capture.

A telephoto lens is often most helpful when photographing wild birds as they allow you to photograph subjects from greater distances.

Some camera bodies even come with wildlife eye tracking technology, this allows a user to quickly focus on the subject’s eye.

Other useful equipment for the beginner can include lens protection such as a lens cover or lens hood. Tripods and monopods are useful for stabilization, especially with heavier set ups, although handheld shooting has perks as well with its free range of motion. Long distance trips and camping can benefit from back up batteries.

Memory cards are for storing photos, and they have varying capacity and read and write speeds.

Another tip is to do your research before going out into the wilderness. Learn about the three basic settings in photography: shutter speed, ISO and aperture. If you want an easier experience you can shoot in auto, this means the camera automatically adjusts these settings for you.

Go to your local camera store or birding hot spot and ask for tips; people are often happy to share.

It also helps to get comfortable with your camera and take advantage of free resources. YouTube and photography blogs are great places to start.

Additionally, you can pay for a photography workshop, where an experienced photographer may lead you to wildlife hotspots and teach you helpful techniques with real time feedback.

Once you know how to use your camera, you can practice with a stuffed animal outside. Try to focus on the eye of the animal, as the eyes are the “windows to the soul.” When you get comfortable with this, try progressing to birds that are used to humans so they are less likely to flee. Parks, beaches and sanctuaries are great starters for beginners.

You can encourage birds to stop by your own backyard by planting native species and offering clean water.

Pay attention to the foreground and background of your bird as well. You can slowly and quietly adjust your position to avoid a branch covering your bird’s face and to add interesting elements to the foreground and background. Try to capture behavior, as this brings interest to the photo.

When photographing birds in flight with a hand held camera, try to keep your camera as steady as possible, rotating with your body rather than with your hands.

With enough research and practice, you will be getting shots you will want to share with friends and family. Most importantly, do not forget to be respectful to the wildlife and their habitats and have fun.

Anatoli Igolkin / Getty Images/iStockphoto

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Photographer Eli Jones has found a successful niche for himself — real estate photography. He went from having a small client base and not making a profit to earning over six figures a year, using social media to promote his business.

On TikTok and YouTube, Jones creates videos helping people break into his field. Here are some of the ways that Jones was able to create a highly successful business — these tips will be useful for anyone looking to get into real estate photography.

Invest in Equipment

“Get whatever gear you can to get started,” said Jones in a YouTube video.

Jones recommends finding whatever sort of photography equipment you can realistically afford. Without prior photography knowledge, spending thousands on a quality camera is not a recommended investment. Instead, work with the budget that you have and try to find equipment that will get the job done.

As you continue to build your business, you can put a portion of your earnings towards new camera gear.

Brand Reputation Is Everything

Jones was able to build a brand that makes him over $100,000 a month simply by being a positive communicator. “Put a positive interjection at the start of any written communication,” Jones said in his YouTube video.

He recognized that his reputation could bring him more clients. If one client had a fulfilling experience, they would go on to recommend him to other potential customers.

Creating a positive relationship with his client base allowed him to expand his client list and bring in a steady stream of clients.

Focus on Selling an Experience

Of course, a photography background and artistic talent are components of a successful photography business. But that is only one facet of building a successful business in real estate photography. According to Jones, only 20% of a good business is the product itself.

“[The other] 80% of the things that you [should] focus on in your business are not related to the product,” Jones said in his video.

By focusing on selling your experience — your communication, product and timeliness as a full package — you will separate yourself from the competition.

Though real estate photography is a niche market, there will still be competition in your area. Establishing yourself as a great business to work with will set you apart from the rest of the pack.

Go Above and Beyond

Jones uses an analogy to describe how he fostered a relationship with a long-time, loyal client.

He arrived at a shoot and found the homeowner wanted to paint her outdoor shed a new color. Instead of sitting there and letting the client do the work herself, Jones painted the shed with her.

It only took 20 minutes out of his day to assist the client — and now the client solely relies on Jones to take photographs of her properties. This client spread the word about Jones, gaining him many new customers in the process.

“It will make you lots of money in the future if you take the time out of your day to do something completely unexpected,” Jones said on YouTube.

Jones believes it is always important to “paint the shed,” or to go above and beyond for a client. Kindness for the sake of your business will improve your reputation and expand your client base.

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The shortlist of finalists is now going to be judged by the Awards’ animal-loving judge panel. Among them are TV presenter, writer, conservationist, and animal lover Kate Humble; comedian and TV presenter, writer, and all-round superstar Mel Geidroyc; TV vet and animal welfare campaigner Emma Milne; and professional pet photographer Elke Vogelsang.

Bored Panda got in touch with Michelle Wood, a core member of the Comedy Pet Photo Awards team, and she was kind enough to tell us about this year’s competition, and what awaits the judges.

“2023 has been a really fun year for the Comedy Pets,” Wood told us via email.

“Now in its 5th year, the competition is becoming more well known and popular, reaching new markets but also we love seeing animal lovers returning to the competition to enter new funny images of their pets each year,” she shared with Bored Panda.

INSOLARE: Eva Nielsen & Marianne Derrien AT Les Rencontres d’Arles

In INSOLARE, Franco-Danish artist Eva Nielsen and curator Marianne Derrien reflect on the evolving landscape of the Camargue, a coastal region south of the city of Arles where the Rhône River meets the Mediterranean Sea. Undertaken as part of the BMW ART MAKERS initiative, the project is currently on view at Les Rencontres d’Arles, the photography festival taking place every summer in the French city. Between the vaults of the Cloître Saint-Trophime, a Roman cloister designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1981, the exhibition presents a series of works that take on a transformative quality by blending photography, silk-screening, painting, and printing. Through an approach that is both poetic and scientific, Nielsen and Derrien highlight the environmental changes that are leading to the disappearance of certain urban, industrial and natural landscapes, where the human footprint is always in question.

‘With INSOLARE, Eva Nielsen takes optical and hydro-geological phenomena and combines them with a technical gesture, that of exposure, used in particular in screen-printing,’ curator Marianne Derrien explains. ‘A spectrum of both rural and industrial reality, this project crosses the artist’s trajectories with those of the territories at the gateway to Arles, where the Camargue begins.’ 

INSOLARE at Les Rencontres d’Arles | all images courtesy of BMW Group

DOCUMENTING the camargue’s changing landscape

Taking up the subject of geographical and geological change, Eva Nielsen made several trips to the Camargue, where she took hundreds of photographs. Through her photography, she captures the essence of the coastal area, integrating observations of climatic and geological phenomena with screen printing techniques. Nielsen approaches her craft like a topographer, aiming to create a ‘state of awareness’ that reflects the reality of a territory, its architecture, and environment. The different techniques and materials used by the artist are superimposed and hybridised, resulting in a form of transfiguration where the works echo the ever-changing landscape of the Camargue.

‘Faced with̀ the intensitý of natural phenomena and forces, between drought and rising waters, living areas circulate and migrate in Eva Nielsen’s works through superimpositions of screen-printed images and paintings offering a fragmented vision of these territories,’ Marianne Derrien adds. ‘Blurring the boundaries between media, practices and motifs, INSOLARE brings to life the sedimentation of the Camargue’s solar and liquid landscapes.’

the exhibition takes place inside the Cloître Saint-Trophime

PART OF THE Geographies of the Gaze section AT Rencontres d’ArleS

INSOLARE is part of the Geographies of the Gaze section of the 54th Rencontres d’Arles, which runs until September 24, 2023. ‘Alongside other artists whose work reveals a state of awareness of the reality of climate and ecological upheaval, Eva Nielsen takes us on a journey through the Camargue region, where geography meets the traces of a contemporary history rich in its past, in a sensitive and original approach at the crossroads of different practices,’ Christoph Wiesner, director of the Rencontres d’Arles, notes.

The project is presented through a scenography that is designed specifically to respond to ecological and heritage preservation issues. With the environment in mind, the exhibition design ensures that materials are produced and used as sparingly as possible. Suspended metal structures have replaced the traditional picture rails, and they will be reused at Paris Photo, where INSOLARE will also be on view in November 2023.

A NEW EXPERIMENT AS PART OF BMW ART MAKERS

In early 2023, Eva Nielsen and Marianne Derrien were announced as the winners of the second edition of the BMW ART MAKERS, a program created by BMW Group, supports a duo each year in the creation of a joint project focusing on innovation and the visual arts.

‘Eva Nielsen and Marianne Derrien’s project on the impact of human activity on the land is a natural fit for the BMW ART MAKERS program,’ explains Maryse Bataillard, Head of Corporate Communications and CSR, BMW Group France.‘We’re proud to be presenting a ground-breaking exhibition in Arles, a key venue for lovers of the visual arts. The intermingling of mediums and their use as a lever for innovation totally echo the values of the BMW Group, which is fully committed to contributing to the trajectory towards carbon neutrality and has presented a concept for a 100% recyclable and recycled car by 2040.’ 

A woman with spiky, dyed blonde hair sits submerged in a bath strewn with red rose petals. She is naked, aside from a pair of swimming goggles just visible above the water line.

This is one of Japanese photographer Yurie Nagashima’s arresting self-portraits — and a parody of the “hair nude” photographs that swept Japan’s art scene in the 1990s.

Pubic hair was typically blurred in print media at the time, but the images began skirting censorship by presenting full-frontal nudes of Japanese actresses and celebrities as works of art. Nagashima, however, thought the phenomenon sexualized women by placing them in “unnatural poses” and making them look like “soft porn models.”

Her own ‘90s takes were a sarcastic and irreverent response, intended to hit back at a genre dominated by male photographers. In one shot, a topless Nagashima peers defiantly at the camera while straddling an exercise bike; in another, she seems to mockingly stare at the viewer, wearing transparent pink tights and a matching wig as she lies across a leopard print throw.

In an attempt to separate her images from the overtly objectified content of the genre, she even shot nude portraits together with her mother, brother and father.

But back then, Nagashima said, many missed the point.

“Even though I was parodying ‘hair nude’ photographs, because the critics were all men, they didn’t understand feminism and couldn’t see the difference,” the photographer said in a Zoom interview.

Last weekend, a selection of Nagashima’s self-portraits went on show at Tokyo Gendai, a major new art fair that welcomed more than 20,000 visitors to the Pacifico Yokohama convention center.

She was one of five artists featured in “Life Actually: The Work of Contemporary Japanese Women Artists,” an exhibition examining women’s distinct perspectives — including gender and other topics. Elsewhere, photographer Tomoko Yoneda’s meditative works explored the theme of collective memory, while Ayako Yamamoto’s images captured the memories and experiences of young women she had met overseas.

Female photographers in Japan have long struggled to gain economic and reputational parity with their male counterparts. But a shift took place in the 1970s, according to the show’s co-curator Michiko Kasahara, who is also the deputy director of Tokyo’s Artizon Museum.

“Artists began questioning the conventional way of depicting women through the eyes of men,” Kasahara said, pointing to the use of self-portraits that became popular during that decade as a way to wrestle back power.

Finding a voice

Nagashima emerged onto the art scene in the 1990s, some 20 years later. Recognizing that women creators weren’t immune to power imbalances with subjects themselves — “even if you question the images of women that men are portraying,” she said, “you might do the same thing if you use them as your own models” — she too saw self-portraits as a way of authentically expressing themes such as body image, sexuality and the female experience.

Nagashima documented the evolution of her identity — charting her experiences as a young student traveling Europe, becoming a mother and as a working photographer.

She also turned the lens on her friends, capturing seemingly banal moments close-up, like when they retouched their lipstick or took a drag from a cigarette.

Nagashima said she became more vocal about labeling her work as “feminist” after having a child. She was struck, she said, by the patriarchal structure of Japanese society and found herself in a double bind, caught between the expectations of being the perfect mother while also becoming an even better photographer.

The predicament prompted her to pursue a master’s degree in sociology at Tokyo’s Musashi University in 2015. Her thesis later became the basis of her first critical book, which explored the discourse surrounding women’s photography. It was, Nagashima said, her way of deconstructing the “onnanoko shashin” (or “girly photography”) movement that male critics categorized her works as being part of.

The reductive term was used by certain male critics in the 1990s to describe a group of women photographers who used lightweight (and therefore more accessible) cameras to capture themselves, their friends and their daily lives.

Nagashima’s book was a way of fighting back against the misinterpretation of her photography by — once again — men.

“I wanted to deconstruct ‘girly photography’ and reveal how it had been a different movement all along,” said Nagashima.

“I wanted to show that the nudes we took had been influenced by the third wave of feminism. I wanted to highlight that the male critics had misunderstood what we were trying to do at the time. I wanted to show what I had actually been doing.”

Creating more opportunities

While Kasahara argues that the country’s women artists are now more conscious of their self-worth than ever, and their number has increased, Japan’s art market is still stacked against them, with fewer opportunities to showcase their work or further their careers than their male counterparts.

Such challenges mirror gender inequality in the country at large. Japan ranks bottom among all G7 nations — and 116th out of 146 countries — in the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Gender Gap Index.

“Art museums and galleries must both consciously increase the number of women artists shown,” Kasahara said, adding that creating spaces for female expression could help shake “the image that Japan unfortunately projects as a country that discriminates against women.”

For Kasahara’s co-curator Yuri Yamada, it is equally important to revisit contemporary art history and excavate the overlooked contributions to the photographic canon.

“The history of photography in Japan has been around since the Edo period (1603 to 1868), but the history of women photographers is still very short,” said Yamada, who is also a curator at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.

“We also need to go back and rediscover women photographers who had been around in the past and have been forgotten ever since.”