These are Japanese macaques, i.e. snow monkeys, that I photographed at the natural hot springs in the mountains of Japan. The monkeys can survive the snow and the cold of winter by maintaining their body temperature in and around the geothermal steam and hot water. It's amazing how the monkeys have become accustomed to tourists. This is a very popular place in Japan. On one occasion, I was resting my telephoto lens on the rock border of the pool and a baby monkey was being chased by a friend. Both of them ran past me, stepping on the barrel of my lens as if it was another rock. I took this shot with a 70-200mm lens plus a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 280mm of focal length, but sometimes I was so close to monkeys in the foreground that I could fill the frame with a 14mm wide angle. My settings for this image were 1/100, f/13, and 320 ISO. I should have used a faster shutter because the image wasn't tack sharp. After I ran it through Topaz Sharpen AI, though, it turned out quite good. I shot this in 2015, and I was very hesitant to use high ISO settings back then.
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