Don’t Crop Wildlife & Nature Photos Before Watching This Video

Do your wildlife and nature photos lack balance, emotion, or impact? If so, a likely culprit is poor composition, and this problem starts with inappropriate cropping. Today’s insightful tutorial from pro Ejaz Khan provides four simple solutions that will help you create compelling images that feel alive, elegant, and unforgettable.

Khan is a notable wildlife photographer whose popular YouTube channel boasts almost 13K avid subscribers and hundreds of instructional videos designed for beginners and experienced shooters alike. Today’s eight-minute episode is devoted to four “essential” composition techniques that are guaranteed to help you take control of your view’s attention and emotional response.

Here’s how Khan introduces this very helpful lesson: “Whether you love wildlife photography or fine art photography, mastering composition is the key to transforming your images into art.” It’s all about techniques involving that he refers to as simplicity, foreground awareness, blocking, and symmetry.

Khan uses inspirational examples to illustrate his tips, the first which explains the importance of simplifying the frame to enhance your emotive storytelling skills. His image-cropping recommendations also focus on thoughtfully representing the foreground in your shot to add depth, connection, harmony, and dimension to wildlife imagery.

He then describes the concept of blocking which focuses a viewer’s attention by identifying and removing image-killing distractions that clutter up a scene. You’ll also learn how compositional symmetry creates a “calm, luxurious aesthetic,” and how Khan employs these methods to create order out of chaos—whether he’s photographing pumas in Patagonia or wolves in the arctic.

Bottom line: By mastering these techniques, and it doesn’t take long, your creative style will be significantly refined, and the photos you make will no longer appear accidental. Be sure to check out Khan’s instructional YouTube channel and discover a wide range of wildlife photography tips and techniques.

And don’t miss the related tutorial we featured earlier with a highly acclaimed avian photographer who demonstrates how to avoid ruining your bird photographs by following her advice for fixing five common image-killing mistakes.