As I’ve mentioned before, I’m easily distracted. So I’m taking a short break from our portrait series to introduce a new topic: Taking animal pictures at the zoo.
With the winter weather finally coming to an end (maybe), people are flocking to their local zoo. And many of these eager individuals are carrying their cameras in hopes of grabbing National Geographic style photos. Now you don’t need to risk your life to take great pictures. Actually, I highly recommend you don’t try. While the animals might enjoy a light snack or even the exercise as they chase you around the enclosure, your family, friends, and the zoo officials won’t be quite so impressed.
In these two photos, I was lucky the tiger was close to where I was standing on the other side of the fence. I don’t own one of those huge, thousand dollar plus camera lenses you see on TV, but apparently the tiger took that into consideration for these pictures.
What you don’t see is the chain link fence between me and the hungry animal. So how did I make it invisible in the photo? In tip # 7, I discussed depth of field. We’re going to use those principles here to make the fence disappear.
The first thing you need to do is set your camera to a shallow depth of field (the smaller aperture numbers). Next, you want to focus on the subject. Okay, that’s not always easy to do when the animal is pacing. Best thing to do is focus your camera on one spot (and set it so it doesn’t keep auto focusing every time your subject moves) and take pictures—lots of them—whenever the animal walks into that prefocused area. If you’ve aimed your camera straight on (not at an angle to the fence), the fence will disappear. You’ll still see the lines when you shoot the pictures, but they’ll be out of focus. If done correctly, they will disappear or be less noticeable when you have the photos developed (or when you look at the LCD panel on your digital camera).
Not all cameras will enable you to do this trick, though. It will only work with those that allow you to set the depth of field. So go forth now and experiment, and amaze your friends with those incredible zoo photos you’ll take from now on.