This is a colony of northern gannets at Cape May in Newfoundland, Canada. Tens of thousands of birds nest here. With a telephoto lens, it's easy to take frame-filling shots of all aspects of the avian activity but there is no context simply because the angle of view is so narrow. With a wide angle lens, it's easy to encompass the entire colony but all the birds appear to be farther than they really are. To solve that problem, I composited two shots. I captured the large gannet in the upper right corner with a 500mm focal length, while I took the image of the whole colony with a 24-105mm lens set to 24mm. In this way, everything is in focus -- just as our eyes see it -- and there is a tremendous sense of depth which, again, is exactly as we see it. My settings for the telephoto shot of the gannet in flight were 1/3200, f/11, 1600 ISO.
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