This was a very difficult picture to take because it was 11 o'clock in the morning and the bright sunlight was very harsh and contrasty. Had I included even the smallest portion of the background, that area would be totally blown out -- i.e. overexposed completely. That would have ruined the shot. Fortunately, the huge bulk of the mother shaded the baby from the sun. The elephants weren't that far from our vehicle -- maybe 40 feet -- and I used my 500mm f/4 Canon telephoto plus a 2x teleconverter, giving me 1000mm of focal length, to create a tight composition in which the sunlit areas of the scene could be cropped out in-camera. I thought it was very cute how the baby had to curl its trunk to get it out of the way as it nursed. My settings for this shot were 1/100, f/8, 200 ISO. Today I would never use such a slow shutter with such a long telephoto, but this was taken in 2007 with my first serious digital camera -- the Canon 1Ds Mark II -- and I wanted to keep the ISO low to prevent noise. I used a bean bag resting on a windowsill of the Land Rover to steady the lens and to make the relatively slow shutter speed feasible.
0 Comments