Pierre Steenberg

Tips for Leopards

June 08, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Knowing animal behavior can help us get images that others would miss. Yet, some animal behavior is so obvious and predictable that we should know it instinctively. Leopards exhibit behavior that are particularly useful for photographers to know. This is especially true in a habitat such as the Serengeti where there are not many trees. Leopards nee...

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Birds are everywhere

June 01, 2025 • Leave a Comment

For many subjects we have to travel far and wide. After all, Lions are not everywhere. When I moved to Nebraska, I instantly felt like I was in a photography desert, but then again, even deserts have wonderful pictures in them. I could not find "my kind of" landscape scenes. But birds are everywhere. No special place is required. Of course, bird ph...

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It is not always easy

May 25, 2025 • Leave a Comment

All the ingredients for a wonderful photograph was present. That included a stunning bird, colorful flowers, nice green leaves, and reasonably okay light. What more can one ask for? Yet, even though all the ingredients were present, sometimes they just do not all work together. Photography is not always easy. Here is a sequence of images of that sc...

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Surveillance works

May 18, 2025 • Leave a Comment

I was at Lake Victoria in Tanzania, Africa. A Kingfisher would fairly regularly perch itself high on a tree to keep an eye on the pond below. I climbed up the stairs to position my self at the same level as the Kingfisher, but the background did not work and I could not change my position, as I was confined to a balcony. What was I to do? How was I...

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Getting different images

May 11, 2025 • Leave a Comment

I am an advocate for getting different images rather than shooting the exact same scene over and over (unless something changes or if you are planning a specific image). While on safari, a very kind Kingfisher patiently posed for us. It just stayed there for a long time and it allowed us to get reasonably close to it. How do we get different images...

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Practice

May 04, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Long lenses are essential to get good images of wild wildlife (I mention "wild" twice because I am not talking about wild animals in a zoo, that are being fed, etc. I am talking about shooting genuinely wild animals in their natural habitat). Truly wild animals don't often let you close to them (depending on the species). So we have to photograph f...

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The little ones also want some attention

April 27, 2025 • Leave a Comment

While on safari everyone wants to see and photograph the big five, Lion, Elephant, Leopard, Buffalo, and Rhino. Some of us are also interested in photographing birds and some of the other animals. But how often do we give any love to the little ones? Do we even notice them? Are we so excited about getting that award winning big five animal picture,...

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Stay ready

April 13, 2025 • Leave a Comment

They say that Lions can sleep between 18 and 20 hours per day. Spotting Lions therefore does not guarantee good Lion images, unless you are satisfied that half asleep Lions laying around doing pretty much nothing. It can be very tempting to follow their example and dose off too. After all, on safari, you are awake well before sunrise and you get to...

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Selecting an image

April 06, 2025 • Leave a Comment

With wildlife and bird photography we often shoot at high frame rates. Modern cameras can shoot at 20 frames per second all the way to as much as 120 frames per second. This means that we are getting a lot of images. Just four or five seconds of shooting can provide a hundred or more images. So why do we need that many images of the same subject? I...

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Do we need a clear shot?

March 30, 2025 • Leave a Comment

Most photographers want a clear shot of their subjects. They don't want anything between them and the bird or animal they are photographing. The fear is that anything between their lens and the subject would ruin the image by being distracting and out of focus. This fear prevents many people from getting down really low, yes, down into the weeds an...

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