10 pro tips for puffin portraits: take amazing wildlife shots with your camera

Puffin portraiture
(Image credit: Future)

Wildlife photography is a brilliant genre that helps you get into the great outdoors with your camera and take incredible shots of mother nature. Taking photos of wild animals isn't without its challenges though, focusing and settings can all be problematic when you need to catch the moment quickly. This is certainly the case with the quintessential summer bird, the puffin. 

Puffins, also called the 'clowns of the sea', are wonderfully photogenic seabirds that pose many trials and tribulations for photographers, such as autofocus, exposure, composition, settings, and your equipment setup, though many of these will apply to other agile and unpredictable wild subjects too. This month we teamed up a reader of PhotoPlus: The Canon Magazine, Mark Braybrook, for a masterclass in wildlife photography with Canon pro Drew Buckley on the magical Skomer island in Wales.

PhotoPlus: The Canon Magazine

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Dan Mold
Deputy Editor

Deputy Editor on PhotoPlus: The Canon Magazine, Dan also brings his technical wizardry and editing skills to Digital Camera World. He has been writing about all aspects of photography for over 10 years, having previously served as technical writer and technical editor for Practical Photography magazine, as well as Photoshop editor on Digital Photo


Dan is an Adobe-certified Photoshop guru, making him officially a beast at post-processing – so he’s the perfect person to share tips and tricks both in-camera and in post. Able to shoot all genres, Dan provides news, techniques and tutorials on everything from portraits and landscapes to macro and wildlife, helping photographers get the most out of their cameras, lenses, filters, lighting, tripods, and, of course, editing software.