To take good wildlife photographs you have to have a lens big enough to scare little children! ;)
You see, this weekend I decided to shoot exclusively with my Nikon D300 and a Nikon 80-200 f/2.8. Limiting yourself to one lens is not only a great way to start thinking creatively about your images, rather than only the technical and gear related issues, but it also highlighted the importance of how a lens can affect the look and feel of an image.
The image on the right, of one of the Kgala males in Madikwe, was shot at a focal length of 200mm and an aperture of f/2.8. Pretty standard lion image but let’s just look a little further. Too many people will not even have ‘wasted their time’ in taking their camera out the bag to shoot an image like this because the background will be blown out and this will make for a horrible image.
The reality is this…
Quite often, and especially in summer, you will find big cats like this lazing in the shadows to try and get away from the scorching afternoon sun. This will almost always lead to the background areas, or at least some part of it, to be burnt out as the yellow grasses catch the bright African light. So do you take the picture or not?
Absolutely! If you know your camera all you need to do is to switch over to spot metering, even centre weighted metering might work, and meter off the area between the lions eyes. This will then tell the camera to expose the image correctly based on the tawny color of the lion in the shade. That’s the point isn’t it? To make sure you present a well exposed, sharp image of your subject?
Yes, the background might be burnt out in ares but this might not be a bad thing. Wait… hear me out. In a light image your eyes will always be drawn to the dar areas and vice versa. In this specific image, with quite a bright area in the top of the frame, your eyes are automatically drawn to the slightly darker areas which is the lions nose, bottom of the mane and tip of the tail. Looking at the image don’t you find your gaze jumping between these three points? That’s why you need to think about your image before and meter correctly. It should not just be ‘just-another-camera-setting-I-don’t-understand-completely-so-won’t-bother-about-it-too-much’ situations. It makes a difference so use it!
If the highlight are to burnt out for your liking you can always use the correction brush in Lightroom to recover just a touch of the detail in the areas to give it a little bit more life. Did not need to do to in this image but at least the option is there!
I seemed to have digressed. It happens. Back to the lens. Do you know how your choice of lens affects your images? I am not referring to how far you can zoom in but rather to the compression effect and how a fast lens, such as f2.8, will affect the image. Compression refers to how a zoom lens bring all the parts of an image together. If you shoot an image of a lion with a big tree in the background, a telephoto lens will pull those two subject closer together, rendering an image that show the lion closer to the tree than it really is and thereby keeping you visual story tight. On the other hand, a wide angle lens will push the various aspects further apart creating depth in an image. There is no right or wrong but if you want to take your photography to the next level you need to play with various lenses so that you can ‘see’ the type of image that lens will render even before you click the shutter. Hey, even the playing around part is fun and you will learn a lot. Will be looking at this in a bit more details in future posts. Speaking of lenses, during the weekend I also had a chance to play with a Canon 7D with a 200mm f2 lens. All I can say is WOW!! A kid in a candy store has nothing on me!! 
More on that later!
Aperture is another important aspect to keep in mind both when choosing a lens and when shooting wildlife. Yes, a fast lens, such as the f/2 mentioned above, will be able to ‘eat’ light when other lenses start struggling but it goes way further than that. How will an image shot at f/2 differ from a image shot at f/11? The short answer is – completely! The way the background gets rendered at the various aperture settings is huge and the look and feel of the resulting images is also quite dramatic and something I will be looking at in a bit more details when I take a few days off from the 18 December. Also looking forward to sitting back, having a drink and working through a lot of the images I have not had a time to look through and process. Time for myself… hmmm!
Have a whole lot of different topics I want to write about in the coming weeks and into the New Year so if you have any suggestions or requests let me know. I also have some fantastic guest bloggers coming up during the next few months so stay tuned.
Look forward to hearing from you!
Gerry
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