Using the Landscape in Wildlife Photography

While in last week’s blog post I focused on the differences between landscape and wildlife photography, this week I came across another Outdoor Photographer in which photographer Marc Muench discusses how he works to bring these two aspects of nature photography together to communicate his own personal perspective of the natural world.   Though including some foreground and background elements in a wildlife shot is important to provide some context, these elements are not typically the main focus in such shots.  In fact, these elements are usually blurred to focus all attention on the main attraction: the animal.  However, as Muench argues, an animal’s surroundings can reveal a lot about the animal and are important to that animal’s story.  Often, limiting a subject to its immediate surroundings (foreground and background) limits the story that can be told by the photograph.

Muench’s view of how animals should be portrayed in their environment stems from his love of the wide open spaces.  It is in these wide open spaces that these animals are able to live relatively wild and free.  For Muench, placing animals in the context of these wide open spaces and the natural landscape helps to communicate their wildness and their natural experience.  In photographing both the broader landscape and the animal in a single shot, the animal is placed at the proper scale.  Doing this is the only way to truly communicate the wild nature of the animal and the enormity of nature itself. 

Photographing wild animals at this proper scale is much different than how we normally think of photographing wildlife.  Typically, the animal subject fills a major portion of the composition.  However, as Muench explains, “the scale of the wild world is usually 20 parts landscape to one part animal.”  This is how he personally feels his wild subjects should be photographed.  This is especially true for Muench in Africa where he has focused much of his photography work.  Though there are various game reserves in Africa, there is also a lot of wilderness that remains relatively untouched by human influence.  This is where Muench finds his photographic philosophy particularly relevant.

 

Muench’s approach toward nature photography is pretty compelling to me.  As someone who loves animals but is partial to landscape photography, I am drawn to this kind of photography and would be interested in incorporating some of Muench’s ideas into my own photography.  I think that there is a certain challenge to photographing animals in this way.  It requires one to consider both the rules of landscape photography and wildlife photography at the same time.  As I blogged about last week, the story is important when photographing wildlife and judging from Muench’s photographs, I like the story that the landscape, when combined with the animal subject, can tell.

Link to Marc Muench's article: https://www.outdoorphotographer.com/on-location/featured-stories/wildlife-runs-free/