Is a messy, distracting background an automatic bad thing? Do you need to strive to have only clean meld of color backgrounds in your wildlife photography? I guess it all depends on who you want to listen too. But if you cruise a number of magazines, you’ll find that quite often messy is exactly the background you’ll see. So how are you to know what is right when you see one thing, hear another and want to do a third? Personally when I ask myself this question I fall back on one simple answer, what’s the story? Photographing critters, using the angle of view of your lens is critical in this pursuit which is why I shoot so often with the 800mm. But how do you connect the dots?
The Grey Butcherbird is a resident of the eucalyptus rainforest of Australia. It forages most often on the ecotone of the forest for larger prey that it impels on sharp twigs/branches/thorns and then with relish tares to shreds and consumes. Once you know its story, it doesn’t look so innocent and its name makes more sense. In telling though its story in a photograph, the visuals need to convey at the very least where it lives giving it a sense of place. Eucalyptus leaves have a distinctive shape so by including them but having them really out of focus gives the Butcherbird a place. When compared to the photo below, there is a dramatic difference. For some, they will prefer the bottom photo and that’s a good thing. But if I have you at least thinking about trying to include a little mess, well that’s a good thing too!