These are chinstrap penguins I photographed in the South Orkney Islands on the way down to Antarctica. I used a 260mm focal length (a 70-200mm plus a 1.4x teleconverter), and even though I chose f/22 for as much depth of field as possible, the background was still not sharp. Small lens apertures can't overcome the inherent shallow DOF of telephotos. An out of focus background would have been acceptable, but I prefer to capture what I see -- the birds and their environment. So, I took a separate picture of the background and then composited the two images together. To select the penguins, I used Topaz Mask AI, and it did a sensational job at retaining the detail in the feathers. The low perspective -- I was in a dinghy and the birds were elevated on a rock outcropping -- made this portrait especially powerful in my opinion. My other settings were 1/160 and 400 ISO. I took this shot in 2010 with the Canon 5D Mark II, and I was specifically working to keep the ISO low due to noise issues. Today, with the Canon R5, I would have raised the ISO as well as the shutter. I got lucky in this case because, given the movement of the dinghy, my shutter produced a sharp picture.
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