Usually when I photograph wildlife, I want this kind of background -- completely out of focus so all of the attention is riveted on the subject. This is achieved by one or more of the following: (1) large lens aperture, (2) use of a telephoto lens, (3) close proximity to the subject, and (4) the subject positioned relatively far from the background. In this shot of a male snub-nosed monkey displaying aggressively, I used all of these things. When I shoot animals or birds in action, I usually use manual exposure mode so I can specifically choose the shutter speed and aperture. Since the monkeys move so fast, I used 1/2500th of a second. I didn't want to take a chance of any unwanted blurred movement. I also selected f/7.1 for a little depth of field but not so much that the background became sharp. The ISO was set to 'auto', and what this really indicated was that I was willing to accept a high ISO if necessary in exchange for the settings I chose. The light level was low when I made this portrait, and that pushed the ISO to 16,000 on my Canon 1Dx Mark II. I used Neat Image software to eliminate the noise, and you can see what a great job it did here.
2 Comments
Sep 8, 2017, 4:53:42 PM
Jim - Hi Joe, I've had that same issue once in a while. Neat Image works on an area of the picture that is fairly uniform like the sky or a large, gray rock. You can drag the square in the Neat dialog box to a uniform area of color and sometimes that works. But let me look into this a little more and see if I can find a solution if there isn't a uniform area of color. I'm in China now leading a photo tour, so it may take a day or so for me to get back to you.
Sep 8, 2017, 9:38:50 AM
Joe Howard - Jim: I shot a number of high ISO landscape shots in Alaska. When I use Neat it often says the auto selected area is too small. Generally, it is not doing the job that is needed and I have been finding that Lightroom noise reduction set at about 45 does a better job than Neat. I have been using the auto setting. What am I doing wrong?