I captured this picture of a cheetah mother and cubs in the Masai Mara Game Reserve in Kenya with a 500mm Canon f/4 telephoto in 2008. Back then, most of the safari vehicles were vans or jeeps, and that made it easy to rest a bean bag on a window sill to take the weight of the lens and to steady your gear. Now, most of the vehicles are open with no windows, and the arm rest is too low to use as a support. On safari, I find that I am handholding my 500mm lens all the time now, and it's heavy. That means I need to rest the lens on my lap frequently, and it also means the shutter speed has to be fast enough to mitigate the inherent (magnified) movement of the camera and lens when they are held to my eye. The general rule for choosing a shutter speed with telephotos is: It should be the reciprocal of the focal length, or faster. For a 500mm lens, the shutter should be at least 1/500th of a second. That's what I used here while using a bean bag. Now, though, I like to err on the side of sharpness. With a 500mm lens, I like to use 1/800 or 1/1000 if I have enough light. My other settings were f/5.6 and 200 ISO.
1 Comments
Aug 2, 2020, 11:19:10 AM
Rohinton Mehta - Dear Jim, as usual a lovely picture of the cheetah mother and cubs. Just an idea: If you can somehow attach a U-shaped attachment under a monopod, the U-shaped thing can go over the arm rest or side bars on the vehicle and thus prevent your hands from getting overly tired.