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5 Creative Ways to Capture Striking Photos of Wildlife
Wildlife photography can be a deeply rewarding pursuit, but capturing images that go beyond mere documentation requires creativity and intentionality.
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Words and Images by Chris Linder, except where noted. | September 2024
Mud and invisible gas. I’m not sure there are two less photogenic things to capture in nature, but they were central characters in my recent long-term photography project documenting permafrost thaw in the Siberian and Alaskan Arctic. Permafrost is defined as soil that has been frozen for more than a year, and it can be found in a vast belt circling the Arctic.
It is also a major reservoir of ancient carbon dating back to the Pleistocene, an era when wooly mammoths roamed a fertile grassland ecosystem.
As the modern Arctic rapidly warms—at three times the global rate—permafrost is thawing and releasing its carbon stores back to the atmosphere in the form of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane, thus accelerating the atmospheric warming in a feedback loop. On land, the release of this colorless gas can only be detected through scientific measurements. In lakes and streams, however, it can actually be seen as bubbles trickling up from the sediment, like a scuba diver’s exhalations.
The Planning
Those methane bubbles presented an opportunity to communicate this important aspect of the story, and I immediately set out to work this concept. My first attempts—photographs of the bubbles from the side of the pond—didn’t adequately explain the scientific process or the sense of place.
These “first drafts,” however, are essential to my process, the equivalent of starting an essay with the first text that comes to mind, kick-starting the creative process. Ideas began to percolate. What if I was on a boat, looking back towards the taiga forest and shooting with a wide-angle lens? That would show the environment and context. However, would it be sufficiently inspirational?
In addition to telling the story, I also wanted to make an image that conveyed mystery and beauty, with enough abstraction to draw in the viewer and make them want to learn more. It quickly became clear that I was going to need to start thinking outside the box, or perhaps more accurately, inside the pond.
The Solution
The first practical considerations were safety, of both my body and camera from the freezing cold water. Given the chaotic nature of the bubble clouds, I knew I would be spending hours in the water perfecting this shot, so a thick wetsuit was needed. As an added bonus, neoprene is thick enough to repel even the most determined of Siberian mosquitoes (though I would still need to wear a head net to keep the endless swarms of bugs off my face).
Next, I invested in an underwater housing and an 8-inch dome port. Using a large dome port with a wide-angle lens allowed me to reveal both the bubbles rising to the surface and the environment on the shore, a technique commonly known as an “over-under.” Since I would be working right at the surface, a housing made by Aquatech for surf photography was perfect for this task.
My next challenge was determining proper focus and exposure. I opted for a set focus just a few inches in front of the dome, a fast shutter speed of 1/500th of a second to freeze the action and an f/16 aperture to render as many of the bubbles in focus as possible. I set the ISO to auto, and for most of the photographs it ranged from 1600 to 3200 due to the darkness of the pond water.
The last step was to wade in, find a good background of taiga forest, and fire away as the bubbles emerged. In I went. I struggled to keep my footing in the boggy pond; the bottoms of ponds are porous and semi-fluid, like quicksand. I framed the images more by feel, since I couldn’t see through the viewfinder in the murky water.
I managed to endure three hours at a time in the icy water, and after every session I would download my images to assess what went right and wrong. The first summer I tried this technique, I came home with over 2,000 photos of methane bubbles. When I returned several years later to try again, another thousand. The wetsuit was a wise investment.
The Result
While bobbing around in a freezing pond getting dive-bombed by hordes of mosquitoes may sound like the worst possible torment, I reveled in the chase. The instant feedback of digital goaded me on. I could see that shot by shot, I was getting closer to achieving the vision in my mind’s eye and was able to make micro corrections to focus, exposure, and framing on the spot.
In the end it did take over 3,000 clicks of the shutter, but part of the challenge was the unpredictable nature of the bubbles—sometimes huge clouds of them would erupt under my feet, other times minutes would drag by without seeing any. Once I had honed my technique, I was prepared for the luck when it came.
The most successful photograph shows a large cloud of bubbles just breaking the surface of the pond, with just enough taiga forest in the background to give the viewer a sense of place. I had specifically selected that backdrop because of the tree on the left, which had collapsed into the pond likely because its roots were no longer anchored into solid permafrost, a consequence of warming known as “drunken forest” in the Arctic.
At the conclusion of the project, several photographs of methane bubbles were published in my hardcover book The Big Thaw: Ancient Carbon, Modern Science, and a Race to Save the World (Moutaineers Press/Braided River 2019), and it was even more gratifying to have this very image chosen for the book’s cover.
See more of Chris Linder’s work at chrislinder.com.
Top photo: A massive cloud of methane erupts to the surface. This image was chosen as the cover of my hardcover book, The Big Thaw.
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