A lot of people have been asking me about depth of field and f-stops lately, so here’s a good example of what your camera’s aperture can do. The first shot was at a wide aperture of f/5.6, while the second, was at f/18. Ordinarily on a landscape shot like this, I’d opt for the smaller aperture of f/18 in order to get edge to edge sharpness, but on this example I actually think I like the first one better because of its odd sense of motion. These are blue columbines, the state flower of Colorado. The location was in the northern part of the state up by the Wyoming border.
Here’s another of the black bear cubs that I saw at a rehabilitation center in South Dakota. Black bears can be any shade of black, brown, cinnamon, or even white. This guy didn’t seem too enthused to be getting his picture taken.
This is an agile gibbon, also known as a black-handed gibbon. You can tell that this one is a male by the white cheeks. He was quite habituated and very curious about me and my guide. In fact, he was hanging only about a foot or so from the front of my wide angle lens when I took this picture. We were in Tanjung Puting National Park in Indonesian Borneo.
I posted a very similar shot to this a while ago, but there was only one pale legged hornero on the capybara. These three look like they’re sending some sort of a secret message, one by one, to the big guy. To refresh, capybaras are the largest rodents in the world. This particular capybara was resting riverside in the Pantanal of Brazil.
Another of the honey badgers that I saw in the Central Kalahari of Botswana. These guys have very few natural predators due to their ferocious attitudes and unusually thick skin. It’s literally thick — and extremely loose — enabling them to escape the grip of much larger predators. If a predator does get a grip, the honey badger is able to turn around inside the skin and fight back.
… At least it looks like he might be taking a leak. Another of the very charismatic meerkats from the Makgadikgadi Pan of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana.
I know, two posts in a row with no discernable animals, but I promise you, there were plenty of hippos in this swamp. The photo was taken first thing in the morning right outside of my tent in the Linyanti swamp area of northern Botswana
Here’s another of the African wild dogs that I saw in the Linyanti Swamp area of Botswana. There were probably 12 or so dogs in the pack. They all have the painted spots on their coats and very large ears. Like most members of the dog family, they pursue their prey in a long open chase. 80% of the time, the hunt ends in a kill (compared to only about 30% for lions).
For those who have been receiving my posts for a while, you might remember these guys. This is a Verreaux’s sifaka lemur from Madagascar. They prefer to stay in trees, but when on land they perform a bit of a ballet dance when traveling from one tree to another.
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A lot of people have been asking me about depth of field and f-stops lately, so here’s a good example of what your camera’s aperture can do. The first shot was at a wide aperture of f/5.6, while the second, was at f/18. Ordinarily on a landscape shot like this, I’d opt for the smaller aperture of f/18 in order to get edge to edge sharpness, but on this example I actually think I like the first one better because of its odd sense of motion. These are blue columbines, the state flower of Colorado. The location was in the northern part of the state up by the Wyoming border.
