I photographed this colony of king penguins on South Georgia Island on my way down to Antarctica. From ground level, I was frustrated by the shallow depth of field with a telephoto lens. Focusing on one or two birds with a soft background was fine, but I wanted to give a sense of how massive the colony was. I saw a small hill neaby, and climbing that gave me the vantage I wanted. I used a 70-200mm lens (taken at 110mm), and even though this isn't a super long lens, depth of field was an issue. Looking at a scene through the viewfinder can be deceiving when it comes to ascertaining if everything is sharp. Subtle softening of the foreground, for example, may go unnoticed as you're focusing attention on the subjects and the composition. Therefore, I used a fairly small aperture to make sure the picture was sharp throughout. Had the closest penguins or the most distant ones been soft, even a little, the picture would have been, in my opinion, a failure. My settings were 1/100, f/13, and 400 ISO.
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