When you take a picture with two subjects, I feel they must both be in focus. Out of focus subjects are visually annoying. When shooting with a telephoto, shallow depth of field is a problem especially when you are physically close to the subjects. These are 4-day old ostrich chicks that were born in a facility I've visited many times in Namibia with my photo tour groups. The owner was holding the baby ostriches for the picture; otherwise, I never could have gotten both birds in focus. I waited until the squirming chicks were equidistant to the camera to take the shot. I used a lens aperture of f/7.1, and that wasn't enough depth of field given that my focal length was 200mm. So, the only way to get both birds sharp was to wait until they were the same distance from the lens. I shot this with a Canon 5D Mark II in 2013 before I starting using Neat Image software to mitigate noise, and before I bought the 1Dx Mark II. With the current ability to handle noise, instead of using 640 ISO as I did for this shot, I would have raised the ISO to 2500 so I could have closed the lens down to f/16 to guarantee depth of field throughout. My shutter was 1/1250.
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