MarkBarbieri
Semi-retired
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2006
- Messages
- 6,172
I went on a wolf shoot yesterday. It was with a local photography club and was hosted by fellow Disboarder Shawn Shoemaker. It was at the Saint Francis Wolf Sanctuary.
I'd never heard of the sanctuary and had no idea what to expect. Would we be shooting wolves way off in the distance? Wolves paraded around on leashes? Wolves in small cages? Having no clue, I brought a variety of lenses so that I would have options once I saw what we were in for.
It ended up being wolves in chain link pens. The fences were too high to shoot over. We could get up close to the fence. The fences surrounded the wolves on all four sides.
When I'm in a shooting situation with undesirable elements like chain link fences, I have two strategies. The first is to avoid the obstacle. Can I shoot over, under or around it? The second strategy is to use a wider aperture to make the depth of field as shallow as possible. If you can make the undesirable element way out of focus, it won't be as noticeable.
In the case of wolves in chain link pens, my approach was to get right up to the fence so the near fence would be way out of focus. I would then look for opportunities to avoid seeing the back fence. Sometimes that meant shooting at an angle where I couldn't see the back fence. Sometimes that meant shooting with other objects (like trees) behind the wolves. Most often it meant waiting until the wolf was far enough from the back fence (but not too close to me) so that it would be so out of focus that it wasn't noticeable.
One of the biggest challenges when shooting with very shallow DOF is getting focus correct. The focus rectangles in the viewfinder are smaller than the actual focus points. It's not uncommon to stick a focus rectangle on an eyeball and have it lock onto the nearby nose instead. I don't have a perfect solution for the problem. I just try focusing on lots of spots near the eye, take lots of pictures, and hope for the best. If the subject was stationary and I was using a tripod, I would use LiveView for precision focus. That technique is useless for wandering wolves.
Here are some of my favorites from the day.
I'd never heard of the sanctuary and had no idea what to expect. Would we be shooting wolves way off in the distance? Wolves paraded around on leashes? Wolves in small cages? Having no clue, I brought a variety of lenses so that I would have options once I saw what we were in for.
It ended up being wolves in chain link pens. The fences were too high to shoot over. We could get up close to the fence. The fences surrounded the wolves on all four sides.
When I'm in a shooting situation with undesirable elements like chain link fences, I have two strategies. The first is to avoid the obstacle. Can I shoot over, under or around it? The second strategy is to use a wider aperture to make the depth of field as shallow as possible. If you can make the undesirable element way out of focus, it won't be as noticeable.
In the case of wolves in chain link pens, my approach was to get right up to the fence so the near fence would be way out of focus. I would then look for opportunities to avoid seeing the back fence. Sometimes that meant shooting at an angle where I couldn't see the back fence. Sometimes that meant shooting with other objects (like trees) behind the wolves. Most often it meant waiting until the wolf was far enough from the back fence (but not too close to me) so that it would be so out of focus that it wasn't noticeable.
One of the biggest challenges when shooting with very shallow DOF is getting focus correct. The focus rectangles in the viewfinder are smaller than the actual focus points. It's not uncommon to stick a focus rectangle on an eyeball and have it lock onto the nearby nose instead. I don't have a perfect solution for the problem. I just try focusing on lots of spots near the eye, take lots of pictures, and hope for the best. If the subject was stationary and I was using a tripod, I would use LiveView for precision focus. That technique is useless for wandering wolves.
Here are some of my favorites from the day.
Thanks for sharing.
