Animal Photos Thinking Artistically Elements of Art and

Animal Photos Thinking Artistically

Elements of Art and Design The visual style of animal photography can range from formal portraits to sports and action. Like all good photography, animal images should incorporate the elements of art and the principles of design.

Color and Value Colors have an emotional impact. Warm colors are energetic, while cool colors are calming. Birds and fish are incredibly colorful, and contrasting warm colors against cool colors is visually interesting and dynamic. Value is an essential consideration with both color and black and white images, and can emphasize the subject as the lightest or darkest object in a composition.

Texture adds depth to an image and provides the touchable quality that makes an animal image come alive. Different values of light in a composition will bring out an animal’s various physical textures. Soft, diffused light enhances a cat’s fur, a horse’s dappled coat, or a porpoise’s slick skin. Hard directional light from the sun or photofloods helps to highlight the coarse, wrinkled hides of animals like pigs, elephants, and alligators.

Background Always watch what is in the background. Sometimes one color background works well. Other times you want to have other items in the background. If you photograph a subject against a neutral background with no other objects to compare it to, you have no sense of the scale of your subject. Once there are other objects in the scene, you know how big the subject is relative to those other objects.

Showing Proportion refers to the size relationship between one part of an image and another part or the whole image. Careful consideration of proportion brings balance, depth, and visual weight to an image. Proportion emphasizes an object’s location and importance. Larger objects are usually closer to the camera and catch the viewer’s eye first. Sometimes an object is physically larger or smaller than anything else in the image. In other situations, the photographer can manipulate proportion artificially with lenses, lighting, and viewpoint.