great shots! The head on shot of the gator with his mouth sligltly open is a bit frightening. Those critters give me the willies some times.
You get them to grin like that by tickling them on the bottom of their mouths. They really like that. Just be careful because if they wag their tail too much someone could get hurt.
Nice! Love the Dragonfly shots
An interesting bit of trivia...those dragonfly shots were taken at f/8, f/11, and f/16 respectively. You'd think that the background would still be in reasonable focus on an f/16, wouldn't you? Obviously, the background in my shots is way outside the sharp DOF range.
If you play with a DOF calculator, you'll see why. The dragonfly was about 10 feet from me. Taking a shot with a 50mm lens on an APS-C camera of a subject at 10 feet with an aperture of f/16 gets you a DOF range of about 8 feet. Switch to a 600mm lens (I actually used a 300mm with a 2x teleconverter, but the math is the same) and your DOF drops to a tiny 1/2 inch.
Here's the part I find interesting. If you have a very trusting dragonfly and you approach with your 50mm until you get 10 inches away from it, it will fill the frame exactly like it would using a 600mm lens from 10 feet away. So what is the DOF of a 50mm lens shooting a subject at 10 inches? It's also 1/2 of an inch.
This is one of the big challenges when shooting macro. Its hard to get much DOF. It doesn't matter if you use a long lens from way back or a wider lens from up close. The DOF is essentially constant with the level of magnification.
You should tell people you shot the alligator with a 35mm prime LOL.
Those are great shots Mark.
Another random bit of trivia. If you shoot a gator with a 600mm lens or use a 35mm lens and the crop it so that it has the same field of view, your image will be identical. OK, the first one will have a lot more pixels, but the perspective will be identical. People talk about long lenses having compressed perspectives, wide angles distorting foreground objects, and all sorts of stuff like that. It isn't the lens that is changing the perspective. It is the position of the camera relative to the subjects in the picture. People associate those perspective characteristics with lens focal lengths because the focal length of the lens generally dictates your distance from your subject.
Just remember, zooming doesn't change perspective...moving does. Zooming is just optically cropping.
