Selecting the Right Lenses for Wildlife Filmmaking
Lenses are crucial to getting the right look for every shoot you have planned for your wildlife film.
Wildlife filmmaking is exciting, that’s for sure. It also demands perseverance, patience, and an open mind – and to achieve real quality, it demands that you use the best possible lenses that you can. You’ll need to make some real consideration about the types of lenses that are necessary for your particular subject matter and story. So, here’s our guide to some of the important lenses that you may come across when planning or producing your wildlife film.
The best wildlife filmmaking lenses
Before we look at some of the best wildlife filmmaking lenses, it’s worth reviewing some of the best wildlife photography lenses that you can buy. Just because you are shooting wildlife with your camera does not mean that you have to buy a prime lens… Yes, prime lenses (kind of an archaic term, to be fair) have some great benefits, but some of the best wildlife photography lenses have a short minimum focus distance, for example.
In wildlife filming and photography, these two features make an enormous difference. For wildlife filmmakers, the ability to shoot at a minimum focal distance of at least a five or six metres with more depth of field is very important for, say, shooting groups of small animals like congregating birds that don’t happen to be in flight for that moment, or even large animals in medium range to where you’re setting up for the shoot, for example.
The lens used for long focal lengths
Long focal lengths are often used for wildlife filmmaking. The main reason for this is most animals are naturally wary of humans and so don’t like you to be too close – though they’re also used to capture images of dangerous animals that you don’t want to be too close to as well!
However, this does not necessarily have to mean you can only go out and use the ‘longest’ lens that you’re able to find. There are lots of long telephoto lenses available that would still work great for wildlife filmmaking… It all depends on what you want to achieve, your budget and what other lenses you already have.
Most lenses with ultra long focal lengths (also known as super telephotos) are photography lenses and these are often used for wildlife filmmaking. If you’re using these lenses, be sure to practice first so you can avoid any pitfalls. Most of these lenses are “fly-by-wire” (controlled by electronic motors), so it might take you a while to get used to manually focussing them correctly. Autofocus for filming is only just becoming useable in the latest cameras, so it’s still best practice to learn how to focus lenses manually.
The popularity of wide angle lenses
Wide angle lenses can be used to achieve a large degree of a crisp image, while also being very practical for wildlife work. Wide angles are extremely useful for landscapes, capturing wildlife at ‘close’ proximity where you may have the time during a shoot to focus on grazing behaviours say, or for shots that “look out over” the landscape. They’ve become increasingly popular to use on wildlife productions as technology has become better and more widely available – you’ll often find crews taking gimbals or zip wire rigs with them on shoots now and wide angles are perfect for using in these types of setup.
Wide angle lenses have one other main use: creating timelapses when the camera is paired with intervalometers. This is because wide angle lenses typically perform better at slower f-stops and it’s much less noticeable if the lens has a slight focus issue caused by changing temperatures. Not to mention that most timelapses used in wildlife films are of the animals’ habitat and not the creatures themselves.
Hire the Laowa macro probe lens to capture unique perspectives and compelling footage for your wildlife photography, research and films.
Hire the Canon 200mm f/1.8 lens for when you need the longest focal length in ultra low light conditions.
The lens used for macro and close-up shots
Macro lenses are particularly effective for filming the movements of a species in a specific, small space or micro-environment, as they provide imagery and footage of fine detail that are sharp and detailed. For example, if your project is about insect foraging and foraging habits in the rainforest for example, you will most likely use a macro lens for much of that.
Most macro lenses can also be used for other purposes due to their focal lengths – for example, a 100mm macro lens also makes a good telephoto lens – however their true speciality is the tiny distances they can focus at and so they’re best used specifically for this purpose. You might, however, want your shot to go from a wider view of the world into the incredibly precise macro view and so wide angle macro lenses are great for this.
Macro lenses with wider focal lengths are particularly well suited for capturing the perspective of tiny animals close to the ground – also known as the “bug’s eye view”. As we learn more about the tiny creatures we share the world with, as well as the larger ones, these perspectives are becoming more important to show. What does the world look like to the smallest chameleon? These lenses can help show your audience the chameleon’s perspective – or you can use them to capture scenes inside structures built by animals, like a termite mound, to see how their society really works.
Lenses for wildlife filming - Conclusion
Hopefully this has provided a little extra insight into which lenses you may find useful when working on a wildlife film, or working with wildlife filmmakers.
There are some major considerations when choosing the type of wildlife camera equipment that you’ll be using with your lenses of course, but many of these elements can also be simplified by understanding what lenses you will need.
So, when you’re in the planning stages, it is essential to have a comprehensive list of equipment and ensure it all works together as planned – it’s no use having a lens with a particular mount if your camera has a built in lens that you can’t remove!
Just remember that wildlife documentaries generally need that bit more specialist kit than a few boom poles and reflectors!
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