These are pacas, Central and South American rodents that are largely nocturnal. I captured this group in Costa Rica because they were hanging around the lodge I was using. I knew I'd have to use flash, but on-camera flash is the least attractive type of artificial light we have. It's too flat and too harsh. So, I set up the flash about 15 feet from the camera at an angle to where I expected the animals to be. I used a Pocket Wizard to trigger the flash. I also used a small lens aperture -- f/16 -- to make sure I had enough depth of field that encompassed the entire group. Had either the foreground paca or the one farthest from the camera been soft, I would have trashed the image. When you have two or three subjects in a composition, they all must be sharp. My shutter speed here was 1/160 and the ISO was 320. I used a 70-200mm for the picture.
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