The challenge in photographing two subjects with a telephoto lens is that (1) they must both be in focus, and (2) telephoto lenses have extremely shallow depth of field. In the case of these lion cubs that I captured at sunset on my last African photo tour, there were only two possibilities to hold focus on both cats: Either they had to be equidistant to the lens or the lens aperture had to be small enough to provide sufficient depth of field. I got lucky in this instance and both cats were the same distance from the lens. However, had one of the cubs been just 4 or 5 inches behind the other one, I couldn't have used an f/8 aperture. The ISO in this picture was 800, and if I wanted, say, two more f/stops of depth of field -- closing the aperture down to f16 -- that would have pushed the ISO to 3200. Keep in mind that when you have two subjects, virtually without exception, both need to be in focus.
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