WINTER WILDLIFE WORKSHOP

January 16 - 20, 2024

What’s wrong with this picture?

The problem with this picture is depth of field. The beak of this Egyptian goose was a few inches closer to the camera than the eyes, and that made this photographic situation very challenging given the 700mm focal length I was using. I’d combined the Canon 100-500mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter, and not only did this give me extremely shallow depth of field, but the maximum aperture of f/10 wasn’t enough to recover the loss of focus on the beak.

And, my ISO was already 12,800. If I closed down one f/stop to f/14, the ISO would have been 25,600. The conclusion I came to was that this was an impossible situation to get an ideal picture given the low light level, the focal length, and my distance to the goose. I applied Topaz Sharpen AI, but the beak was just too soft for the software to make it look good.

This is the same goose but shot from a different angle. In this composition, the beak and the eye are on similar (but not identical) planes. That made all the difference.

So, the solution in this particular situation was for me to move my shooting position to make the most important elements approximately equidistant to the camera, which is to say they were on similar planes.

Don’t underestimate how shallow the depth of field is with long lenses. It’s great to have significant magnification when photographing wildlife, but focus falloff happens so quickly, especially when you are relatively close to the subject. Sometimes it’s necessary to remove the 1.4x or 2x teleconverter just to gain dof. Then, in post-processing, you can crop the image and then run it through Topaz Gigapixel AI to regain the lost pixels and to frame the subject as you originally wanted to. §

1. I find that it’s quite effective with wildlife photography to lighten the eyes of animals just a little. It makes them pop just enough to add impact to the pictures. I use the dodge tool in Photoshop for this, and I usually lower the opacity to 60 or 70%. This helps you regulate the application of the tool better.

2. Don’t hesitate to shoot through glass. If there is any degradation of image quality, which there usually isn’t, you can use Topaz Sharpen AI to improve the picture. This is a street scene in a village in Japan. I liked the mood and the perspective that was only available from this second story view point.

3. When photographing pets, stuffed animals make great props. They add to the ‘cuteness factor’ reminiscent of the movie ET when the extra-terrestrial hid in the closet camouflaged by stuffed animals. Make sure the dog or cat and the stuffed animals are on the same plane so depth of field is not a problem.

4. Even though this is a winter scene, you can expect the camera’s meter to give you a perfect exposure because the mountain lion is middle toned and its body occupies the large, central area of the viewfinder. Since meters take most of their information from the center of the frame, you’d get a correct exposure here. §