This is a female chinstrap penguin and chick I photographed on my Antarctica trip. Chinstraps are the most abundant species of penguin at 7.5 million breeding pairs. Their success in proliferating is directly related to how successful they are at catching fish. They can dive to an astonishing 230 feet in search of prey. The original background in this picture wasn’t terrible -- it was a mass of out of focus penguins -- but I wanted to show a sense of place. Therefore, I combined the penguins with a southern oceans landscape using Topaz Remask 5. The software did an excellent job at retaining the detail along the edges of the birds. The mother and chick were on a rocky rise, and that’s how I could take this low angled shot. This kind of perspective makes a huge difference. I photographed this from a dinghy, and I used a 70-200mm telephoto plus a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 320mm of focal length.
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