To start with it is easier if we divide the enormous subject of nature photography down into a number of distinct but overlapping categories and I have created a series of webpages dealing on the main ones. Before you go to them it is worth examining how the photography of the natural world has changed since the early days of photography. Any discussion on a topic as complex as this is going to be simplistic but here are some of the key points. Photography of the natural world has always been split into at least three distinct groups of photographers:

• Amateurs who want to record a scene, animal or plant that they have seen.
• Naturalists who take a scientific approach to cataloging their observations and specimens.
• Artists who seek out the essential beauty of nature and often enhance it in a studio.

From 1840 to about 1860 the long exposures meant that animals other than man and dogs tended not to be photographed. There are exceptions to this but in the main it holds true. Plants are more static and algae, leaves, flowers and grasses were all recorded early on by botanists like Anna Atkins (1799-1871) and Franz de Paula Antoine (1815-1886). Still life studies of flowers and vegetables were ideally suited to the available technologies and the sensibilities of the age and Roger Fenton, Charles Hippolyte Aubry and many others did these.
 
The struggles in the late nineteenth century to get photography accepted as an art form led many photographers to pictorialism which selected subjects and used soft lenses, chemical processes and toning agents to make the natural world look like a painting. Following the First World War some photographers, such as Paul Strand, saw that it was pointless turning the natural world into the semblance of a painting and it would be preferable to show it as it actually is. Here pin sharp gelatin-silver prints became the highest level of achievement and we enter the fine art worlds of Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. At the same time high quality wildlife color photography done on location was still in its infancy and it was people like Ylla (1911-1955) with her book 'Animals of Africa' in the early 1950's that started to change this. Later on Eliot Porter (1901-1990), Hugo Van Lawick and the television programs of David Attenborough had an influence on how we saw nature and it was no longer the noble lion sitting on a limestone kopje but a pack of hyenas pulling an antelope apart. In a book like 'Serengeti' by Mitsuaki Iwago our cuddly view of nature is challenged and when Jane Goodall recorded that chimpanzees could actually be cannibalistic all our illusions of a natural Eden were gone.
 
If we now look at those three groups of people I mentioned earlier they all still exist but they have morphed. The amateurs are still there with far better cameras and lenses, the fine artists need to do more that simply take a beautiful flowers although many still do that. The naturalists in universities and research institutes now have access to better equipment and facilities than almost all artists and produce images on a daily basis that are simply stunning but are rarely seen in galleries. There are so many naturalists with photographic skills that they can make a living dedicated to photographing a particular genera or species. This means the artists have to produce images that are more edgy in what they take and that is what is happening. An alternative strategy is to revert to using nineteenth century techniques and processes in a search for originality. To explore these trends in more detail have a look at the related topics.