Advanced Wildlife Photography: From Canopy to Close-Up

Course Overview

This is an advanced, field-craft course for photographers who already know how to make a competent wildlife frame and now want to work the tropical wild the way a seasoned naturalist does — patiently, in place, and at two scales at once. It is built entirely from the Dean's own South East Asian field project: a body of one hundred photographs made across the rainforests of the Malaysian peninsula and the lake district of southern Thailand.

The tropical rainforest gives the photographer two worlds from a single position. There is the far wild — the primates moving through the canopy and the migrating herons and egrets that turn a blue horizon into living op-art — reached with a long telephoto. And there is the near wild — the mysterious insects, dragonflies, butterflies, and flowers within arm's reach — reached with a macro lens. The advanced photographer does not choose between them. You settle into a position, ready the telephoto for the animal's moment, and while you wait, you turn to the miniature world around where you sit. The wait is never wasted; the same stillness that lets a shy primate accept you is the stillness that lets you work inches from a wary dragonfly.

Across eight lessons you will learn to read and hold a position, anticipate behaviour and gesture at distance, catch birds in flight, master the macro plane of focus, compose with colour and light in the close-up world, train your eye for the overlooked, and finally sequence far and near into a coherent portfolio — a frame that tells its story and goes beyond the photograph.

Faculty & Resources