I photographed this baby chimpanzee clinging to its mother in Kenya at the Jane Goodall Center. The chimps live on thousands of acres, but they seem to enjoy human visitors and often come right up to the electrified fence to get close. To take this picture, I was lying on the ground shooting between strands of wire with a 70-200mm telephoto zoom. The mother and baby were about 3 feet away, so I had to use an extension tube between the lens and the camera body which enabled me to focus this closely. The depth of field was extremely shallow, and in retrospect I should have used a smaller aperture. However, I took this image in 2008 when I was still using my first serious digital camera, the Canon 1Ds Mark II, and noise was a serious issue. 3200 was unusable, and 1600 was still way too noisy. And back then, we didn't have good software to mitigate the noise. So, I kept the ISO low and that forced me to sacrifice depth of field. My settings were 1/100, f/2.8, and 250 ISO. The most important thing was to render the eyes sharp, but it would have been nice for the baby’s extended arm to be sharp, too.
0 Comments