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| © Marina Cano |
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One look at Spanish photographer Marina Cano's animal portraits might convince you that she's brought a menagerie into her studio. Her images are so exquisitely wrought -- from the composition to the lighting to the gestures and expressions of her subjects -- that they seem almost like celebrity portraits or fashion photography.
Indeed, Cano uses a handful of the same portrait techniques studio photographers use to flatter the human beast.
Cano, a 44-year-old flautist and semiprofessional photographer from Cantabria, a coastal province in the north of Spain, is working on her first book of photos. It's a series of wildlife portraits made in Europe's largest wild animal preserve, the 1,850-acre Cabarceno Nature Park. With nearly 120 species roaming in relative freedom, it's less than 8 miles from her home in the provincial capital of Santander. Most of the images published here are from that project.
Want to bring her technique to your own wildlife photography? Here's her advice.
Don't stop the crop
"The challenge for wildlife photographers is to focus attention on animals," says Cano, "and one way to do it is by erasing everything that's not the animal."
Empty skies, pointless background detail, and black shadows in the foreground contribute nothing essential and should be eliminated -- just as many portraitists do in pictures of people.
"The experienced eye instantly sees what adds to our understanding of the animal," she says. "What doesn't should be mercilessly cropped away."
Search for shadows
Another way to draw attention to your subject: Just as many portrait photographers do, place the subject against a dark background. In a studio, you do it with black seamless. In nature, Cano does it by carefully selecting a camera position that provides shadows immediately behind the animal.
The main lighting should be soft but bright and, to avoid distractions, the background should contain no element in a contrasting color or brighter than the subject. Often, this kind of lighting occurs early in the morning or late in the afternoon, when sunlight is softer and shadows longer. Sound familiar? Again, a technique lifted from location portrait photographers.
The problem with this technique? Darker animals will often fade into the background, losing their shape or contouring. But just as a portraitist would rim light a dark subject posing against a dark backdrop, Cano "rescues" dark-hued subjects by looking for h2 backlight that will highlight their outer edges, as she did for the zebras on the opening spread and the pelican on the last page.
Be patient and persistent
Because animals pose a unique set of problems, not all of Cano's techniques originate in human portraiture. For one thing, she can't direct her subjects. "I spend many pleasant hours watching and waiting for animals to assume the right body language against the right background in the right light," she says. "A photographer may get lucky and produce a fantastic picture by chance, but to get a collection of successful animal portraits, it's necessary to return again and again to your subjects."
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