Focusing and zooming

Manual focusing can create miracles! If your subject is a small one (like flower, pebble, grass, parts of body, etc) then it is recommended that you use manual focusing to focus at or near the object while letting the background blur due to defocussing. This contrast of focus and defocus in the same picture can create amazing effects!

Zooming on the other hand, according to me, does not render much good effect. In fact if you have studied some theories on vision or perspective projection you might be knowing how zooming makes the picture more unrealistic than normal vision. So I will suggest to avoid zooming wherever possible.

Lighting

Good lighting is absolutely necessary for good photography. By good lighting I don't mean the intensity of it, but it's the quality of lighting. And the fact is that the worst quality lights are the flash lights that come with standard cameras. So my first advice about choice of lighting for not only nature photography, but any photography is not to use flash lights. I always prefer to make use of the natural lights irrespective of the lighting conditions. However there are some obvious problems with photography in low light conditions. If the natural lighting is low one may need to use large aperture or exposure time in order to capture enough light for the photograph. Another problem with low intensity of lighting is noise. The photograph tends to get noisy in low light conditions. There may be couple of solutions to this problem: i. Decrease the ISO speed, but this may require increase in exposure time or aperture size. ii. Use Adobe Photoshop to remove the noise (this is not an elegant solution, but works very well). When it comes to long exposure time, the use of a tripod or stand is indispensable. However I generally try to find a good spot to place the camera rather than carrying along a stand with me! If the exposure time is more than 1/20 of a second, holding the camera in hand while photographing is not recommended.

Choosing a subject:

According to me, the choice of subject is probably the single most important aspect of natural photography. I have found that often some really beautiful scenery, when photographed fail to capture the beauty that was otherwise present in the actual place. What I could make out of it is that unlike photography of well-defined subjects, the subject in natural photography is generally dispersed in the whole scenery that the photographer might have tried to capture. This reduces the liveliness of the photograph. Probably that's why you'll see among natural photographs, sunsets and sunrises are the most popular among the appreciators. That's because you have a subject there, which is the sun! So what I would try to follow is to choose a good subject for photographing in nature, and put the rest of the scenery in background. If the subject is big then it's alright, else for smaller subjects manual focusing at or close to the subject renders good effect. The subject need not be an important part of the thing/scenery you want to capture. It can in fact be a very trivial part of the scenery. Like a pebble or a small wild flower or a dew drop. While you put the greater picture and scenery in the background.