The floor of the jungle in the Peruvian Amazon is quite dark even at mid-day due to the density of the canopy. Photographing things that don't move like flowers, mushrooms, and leaves can be done with a tripod, thus the dim illumination doesn't matter. Anything moving, though, requires either an incredibly high ISO or a flash. I captured this baby ocelot with a flash as you can see from the light fall-off. I shot this with film using the all-manual Mamiya RZ 67 medium format camera, and the large, powerful flash I used at the time was a Metz CT60. Keeping the active kitten sharp with manual focus was obviously extremely difficult. And remember, until the digital age, we couldn't see our pictures until we returned home and developed the film. There was no possibility to tweak the exposure at the time of shooting based on the immediate feedback of an LCD screen, so you had to get it right. My approach today would be to use 25,600 ISO with no flash and then apply Neat Image software to mitigate the noise. By doing that, the background wouldn't have been so dark.
0 Comments