This is a wild toque macaque, an Old World monkey I captured in Sri Lanka. I used a 100-400mm Canon zoom along with a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 560mm of focal length. I took this shot in 2019; had I photographed this today, I would have used my new 100-500mm zoom plus the teleconverter. I like having a 700mm focal length in a hand-holdable and relatively compact package. The f/8 lens aperture provided just enough depth of field so all of the important features in the face are sharp, but you can see from the ears to the rear of the animal the focus falls off sharply. Backgrounds can be soft and it's perfectly acceptable; however, out of focus foregrounds, in most circumstances, are distracting. This image is straight out of the camera. I only lightened the eyes slightly with the dodge tool in Photoshop to make them come alive even more than they were originally.
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