Winter wildlife photography in the UK

Winter wildlife photography usually starts with a grim forecast: grey sky, low light and cold hands. There's a lot more to the season than that though, and plenty of it is easier to find than in summer.

8 August 20269 minute read

Frosty Bison, Fountain Flats, Yellowstone

The sun stays low all day, the trees have dropped their leaves, and a lot of what was hidden in June is suddenly visible from a footpath. Several of the best wildlife spectacles in the UK happen between late autumn and the end of winter too. So the season with the worst light also has the most to point a camera at, and most of this guide is about getting round the light.

Winter wildlife photography in the UK: quick starting point

Low winter light means making a trade-off every time you lift the camera. There are only three things you can pay with:

open the lens up
raise the ISO
only use a very fast shutter speed when the subject needs it

Snow goes the other way, as the meter tries to make the whole scene darker than it is. +1 to +2 stops of exposure compensation is the starting range. Then check the histogram rather than trusting the preview (a small screen in a bright white landscape is very good at making everything look fine).

What's around

This is a rough seasonal guide rather than a schedule, so treat it as what's likely to be around, not what definitely will be.

November

Starling murmurations start building and keep building all winter, so November is the month for finding the roost rather than expecting the best of it. The deer rut is finishing, and redwings and fieldfares arrive. It's the quietest month of the four, and most of it is scouting for January.

December

Waders are busy around estuaries, and an estuary is one of the easier places to plan for, as the tide gives you a timetable to work to. Check it for your own sake too, as a rising tide on mudflats and saltmarsh can cut you off quickly. Short-eared owls can hunt in daylight, which is why they're on this list at all. Garden birds get bolder around a reliable feeder. December days are short, so it's best to pick one thing and do it properly rather than trying to fit three sites into six hours of usable light.

A short-eared owl filling the shot, its yellow eyes looking straight at the camera. — A short-eared owl at 1/800s, f/6.3 and ISO 1600 on a 600mm, added to the Wild Eyes Mission at the bottom of this page. They're one of the few owls you've got a decent chance of seeing in daylight, so make sure the ISO is already up before one turns up.

January

A strong month for murmurations and wildfowl, and probably the best of the four if you only get out once. Whooper and Bewick's swans turn up in some parts of the UK. Hen harriers and merlins can be active around the coast, but neither is a bird to plan a whole day around. Go for the wildfowl and count the raptors as a bonus.

February

Hares get easier to spot in open fields (a footpath along the edge is usually all you need), and they're the one on this list most worth building a morning around. Frogs start spawning, and some birds move into early nesting behaviour, which is the time to give them a wide berth (disturbing some species at the nest is a criminal offence). February also gives you back a good chunk of daylight, so a day out feels a lot less rushed.

All of that moves with the weather. A run of mild days shifts half of it and a cold snap shifts the other half. After three or four winters in the same few places you'll have your own calendar, and it'll be more useful than this one.

Winter light is low all day

The big bonus of a British winter is that the sun never gets very high, so you get directional light for most of the day rather than just at either end. That makes eleven in the morning a lot more interesting. Backlit wildlife photography becomes something you can try on a whim instead of setting an alarm for. The downside is there's much less light to work with, and you pay for that with ISO.

Settings for low light

Raise the ISO

Noise reduction has come a long way, and files that would once have been binned clean up well now. So protect the shutter speed you need and let the ISO go wherever it has to. A sharp shot at an uncomfortable ISO beats a clean shot with motion blur in it every time. You can work on noise afterwards, but there's no fixing blur.

A close-up of a robin's head and orange breast, beak open, against a soft brown background. — ISO 16000, which is what it took to hold 1/2500 at 570mm. That's higher than most people are comfortable going, so don't let a number like that put you off if it's what keeps the shutter speed where you need it.

Shoot wide open when you need the light

Open the lens up and don't worry about it. The small loss of corner sharpness wide open is nothing next to the cost of dropping the shutter speed too far. Lens tests are done on charts in good light, which isn't much like a moving animal on a December afternoon.

Match shutter speed to the subject

Not everything needs 1/2000s, and using it by default means spending ISO you didn't need to. A perched bird or a standing deer will take a much slower shutter speed than a bird in flight, often two or three stops slower. Save the fast shutter speed for when something is moving quickly. Photographing birds in flight covers where that line sits.

A stonechat perched on a curl of dead bracken against a soft green background. — A perched stonechat in the winter cold at 1/800s, f/6.3 and ISO 5000 on a 600mm. Even at 1/800s it needed ISO 5000, so going up to 1/2000s would have meant around ISO 12800 for a bird that was sitting still.

A bull elk running through deep snow, kicking up a spray of white, against a plain snowy background. — And here's where a faster shutter speed earns its keep. A bull elk running through deep snow at 1/800s, f/8 and ISO 400 at 330mm, with the snow it kicks up held sharp. Spend the shutter speed on something moving like this rather than something sitting still (and the bright snow helps keep the ISO down).

A starling in flight with its wings raised, against a soft brown and green background. — ISO 1600 to hold 1/2000 at f/5.6. That's the winter trade-off in one line, and noise is easily the cheapest of the three things you can pay with.

Exposing snow

Snow fools the meter in a very predictable way. It sees a bright scene and pulls everything down until the white turns grey. +1 to +2 stops is the starting point, then check the histogram and the highlight warning rather than the image on the screen. You want snow that's bright but still has a bit of texture in it, so it looks like snow rather than paper. If the animal is dark against all that white, you'll have to choose. Protecting every last highlight leaves the animal too dark, and a dark animal is a worse shot than slightly clipped snow.

A red fox peering over a snowdrift, only its ears and eyes showing against a white background. — A fox in a snowdrift at 1/2000s, f/8 and ISO 400, at 1000mm (a 500mm f/4 with a 2x converter). Almost the whole shot is snow, which is exactly the scene that drags a meter down to grey, so check the histogram rather than the screen.

Cold-weather practicalities

Batteries

Cold drains batteries faster than anything else, and they always seem to go right as the owl turns up. Keep spares in an inside pocket where your body keeps them warm. Don't bin the dead one either. A battery that's given up in the cold usually has a fair bit left in it once it's warmed up again.

Condensation

Take a cold camera straight into a warm car or house and the moisture in the warm air condenses onto it, and into it. The fix costs nothing. Put the gear in a sealed bag before it goes anywhere warm and let it come up to temperature slowly inside the bag, so the condensation forms on the plastic rather than on the sensor.

Gloves

Nobody has quite solved gloves. You need them warm enough to still be working in two hours' time, and thin enough to find the exposure compensation dial without looking down (or pulling them off with your teeth). Fingerless gloves with fold-over mittens are the usual answer, mainly because everything else is worse.

Tripod legs

Cold metal gets unpleasant very quickly. Then you stop adjusting the tripod, then you stop moving it at all, and before long you're shooting whatever happens to be in front of it. Leg wraps sound like a luxury, but they're well worth having.

Hides and garden setups count

A hide gives you shelter, a fixed position and animals that are already used to people at that distance. A garden feeder does the same job on a smaller scale, for free. Put a perch near the feeder so the bird lands somewhere you chose, sort out what's behind that perch, then shoot from indoors through an open window with a cup of tea. There's no prize for being colder than you need to be!

Use the weather

Fog, frost, rain, snow and visible breath are what make a shot look like winter. A lot of people spend the season shooting around the weather and come home with shots that could have been taken in any month. Go out and use it instead. A bird in falling snow is almost always a better shot than the same bird against a plain grey sky. Just remember that in a hard freeze, birds are living on their reserves, so keep your distance and never flush a flock or a roost for a shot.

Winter light lasts all day

In June you get about an hour of decent light at each end of the day and the middle is hard work. In December the whole day sits close to golden hour angles, so the only thing you're short of is the amount of light, and ISO sorts that.

If the light looks rubbish through the window

Go and have a look anyway. A forecast covers a very large area, and you're only shooting a very small part of it. Plenty of the best winter shots come from days you nearly stayed in, and you can always come back.

Wild Eyes on Kōlab suits close wildlife portraits in flat winter light, which is what most of a British winter gives you. Birds in Motion is a good excuse to practise the fast shutter speed half of all this. Between them they cover both ends of the trade-off at the top of this page.

Shoot itWildlife

Wild Eyes

Close, sharp, looking straight at you. Flat winter light is perfect for it.

And if it's the short days rather than the cold that start to get to you, what to do in a photography slump is the other half of getting through a British winter.