Over the years I’ve had myriad compliments on my photographs. For every time I do something right — good composition, appropriate depth of field, perfect exposure in a challenging lighting situation — whatever it is, that means I blew it at some point in the past when I was first learning how to take good pictures or even later, when I was shooting too fast and not paying attention to detail. Hopefully, we learn from our mistakes and do better the next time. Take for example this portrait of an orangutan in the Indonesian portion of Borneo. Notice the hair on the animal’s shoulder is as sharp as the face. This was important. Too many times in the past, I didn’t use a small enough lens aperture for the appropriate depth of field, and when I looked at the images after-the-fact I was angry with myself for being so stupid. Well, after 50 years of taking pictures, I’m happy to report I’ve finally learned! In this case, had I focused on the face of the orang using an aperture of, say, f/4, the hair would have been out of focus and the picture would have been a failure. My settings were 1/250, f/16, and 5000 ISO. Note the high ISO. It was fairly dark, but I refused to compromise on the lens aperture by opening it up and reducing the ISO. I can now fix noise in post-processing, but seriously out of focus elements can’t be made sharp.
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