These are African penguins (formerly called 'jackass penguins') on Boulders Beach south of Cape Town. I was dealing with a harsh morning sun that created a lot of contrast, so in post-processing I worked the shadows and highlights sliders as well as the clarity and vibrance sliders in an effort to mitigate the contrast and bring back the rich color I saw with my eyes. I used a 500mm focal length plus a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 700mm of magnification. That meant the background surf couldn't be sharp due to the shallow depth of field of the long lens. So, I took a separate shot of the waves where I focused on the water and used a fast shutter to freeze the movement. I then composited that behind the birds. My settings for the penguin image were 1/640, f/10, and 250 ISO.
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