WildLight: A Personal Approach to Photographing Wild Things

This isn’t another how-to guide to wildlife photography. It won’t get you much closer to knowing which focus mode to use for a leopard. It’s bigger than that. WildLight offers a way of thinking about what it really takes to make compelling photographs of wildlife.

For decades, photographer and bestselling author David duChemin has asked a different question than most: not how great photographers use their cameras, but how they think. In WildLight, he turns that question to the wild, as he shares the ideas, methods, and hard-won lessons that have shaped his own approach to photographing wild things in wild places.

WildLight is not a book about formulas: which shutter speed to use for bears, the correct aperture for eagles, or the right way to compose for a rhino. That’s what YouTube and a bit of practice are for. This book goes much deeper, discussing the choices that separate a forgettable snapshot from a photograph that will stir the emotions.

In these pages, you’ll explore:

• The difference between a photograph of something and a photograph about something—and why it changes every decision you make

• Waiting for a sighting to become a scene: patience, presence, and reading animal behavior

• Isolating your subject through angle of view, depth of field, moment, and light

• Working with guides, taking creative risks, and finding your own voice in the wild

• Why your why should drive every gear and creative choice—not the other way around

• The place of post-production and the freedom of interpretation and creativity

• The need to take risks, have an opinion, care deeply about your subjects, and so much more

Lavishly illustrated with more than 100 of David’s own recent photographs from around the world, WildLight is a book that investigates the ideas and hard-learned lessons that have been the most important to him as he’s learned to find his own way as a wildlife photographer, and then sits down to share them with you.

David’s approach in WildLight will be familiar to those who’ve read his other best-selling books. He avoids dispensing cliched and time-worn advice that is so often the fodder for guides and handbooks, and instead invites you to consider how you might think more creatively about your approach to a craft that is so often preoccupied with gear and given to shortcuts.

Along the way, he hands you not rules to follow but questions to ask, the kind that make your photographs unmistakably your own. If you've read other books on the subject and are hopeful for something more thoughtful about the craft that is so personal to you, WildLight is an offering you don’t want to pass up.