Continuation of my 5-cheetahs-on-a-springbok-kill series...
They ate with ferocious speed even though nothing came around to challenge them over their meal - habit due to continued harassment by larger predators.
I had to save at 70% quality as this is full frame and it's a lot of details.
Techs:
Canon 7D with 100-400mm L IS USM @ 340mm
f8.0 @ 1/200 SS @ ISO-320
popup flash used
Hi Morkel Like how you stayed with the image and worked it !!!
Tight crop is effective and the little bit of tooth showing adds a lot ! As we discussed with the others a higher ISO would have been great, giving you more dof. For something like this the more the better !! Crop wise I would include the entire ear on left and take some from the right !!! Big Congrats !!!
I still don't see how more ISO would have given me more DOF as I was on manual and had f8.0 as my default aperture setting here...the flash firing at 1/200 would also freeze most of the apparent movement, and once again I wanted the DOF to be shallow here to place emphasis on the one in front chewing. :confused: I was compensating with the ISO setting for the histogram which exposed too far to the right at higher ISOs.
If you raise the ISO by one stop you can stop down aperture by one and get more dof.. would shoot at f 11.0 with same shutter speed.
You indicate you were trying to isolate the one up front so why stop down to f 8.0 which gives you more dof? Shoot wide open and then can even soften bg in PS a bit more. I think that is the confusing point.
Which would look better? Can't really say and don't know if you had the time while shooting for trying both. Given enough time would have tried wide open first then stopping down as far as possible for maximum dof then compare later... the in between is what doesn't work for me.
Again this is a fine image any way you look at it, works well as shot and would be proud to have in my files !!!
thanks Harshadbhai and thanks Al for explaining a bit further what you meant.
I know that you can trade off ISO and shutter speed and aperture, from your initial comment I thought you meant to only adjust ISO (which is what I didn't see the point of), so it's merely misunderstanding on my part.
Regarding shooting wide open - I have come to learn the hard way with these close-ups that my lens is quite shallow wide open when shooting close subjects (focusing distance here was 4.97m), and I didn't want to end up with only half a sharp face up front. f8.0 is also the sweet spot of my copy of the 100-400 regarding sharpness. I think I probably should have tried to do that in the moment, but you know how it goes. I decided on a settings combo that I knew would work and then my energy went into trying to capture the right moment as they didn't look up that frequently. It was only after a little while that I decided to change settings and by then they had finished the bulk of the buck and each taken a leg and sat feeding apart from each other. :)
Great action, Morkel and agree that more DOF would have made a stronger image, especially the visible eyes of the one on top left.
Of course, DOF becomes more shallow with closeness.
Lack of eye contact from the front cheetah hurts this one for me. If the one in the back would've been looking forward towards the feeding one, I think it would work. Flash looks good/natural to me. Regardless of my opinion on this photo, must've been a great experience to be a part of and I probably would've spent more time watching rather than photographing.
thanks Steve...yeah I rarely had good eye contact during feeding as they were solely focused on their meal. I did spend my time about 50/50 photographing and just watching :)
Party of Five...
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