Copyright Nathan Montgomery, 2008
With the fall semester some 24 hours in my rearview mirror, today I had the chance to spend some quality time with the new camera. Steph and I took a day trip to the NC Zoo. It was a beautiful 70 degree day in the Carolinas, and the animals were the most active we'd ever seen them. I took about 200 pictures, of which only six made the cut for posting on this blog. If you're keeping score at home, that puts my success rate- even with a nice, new camera- at 3%.
This first subject is the Arctic Fox. Truth be told, I made some mistakes in this image. The depth of field is too narrow, meaning that the fur beginning at about the ears isn't focused. I realized my error early in the sequence of shots and changed the aperture for better focusing. However, the fox never gave me such a nice look at its eyes again. Hence, I'm left to compromise based on the pictures I got. Even if this picture is a bit technically flawed, the subject was too good not to post if.
Credit goes to my mom, visiting from Illinois, for the matting on this image. She chose a variation on my normal black and white scheme, stealing this slate gray tone from some pixels on the log in the image.
1 comment:
A few quick technical comments worth mentioning here. I took this image through a fence. The other pictures I'll post were all shot through glass. Both add some challenge to the photographry. When I'm doing landscapes or waterfalls or flowers, I always use manual focusing. With animals, though, it sometimes makes sense to cheat and use auto focus. Unfortunately, auto focus sometimes struggles to ignore something like glare on glass or a fence between you and the subject. Bottomline, I spent a lot of time today bouncing back and forth between auto and manual focus, depending on whether my bigger challenge was a subject that wouldn't sit still or a fence that I needed to shot through.
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