Several weeks ago while visiting the zoo, I overheard a teen complain to her friend that all her pictures she had taken of this monkey were blurry. Naturally, I took the opportunity to explain to her what could have gone wrong.
As you can tell in this picture, the lighting wasn’t the best. Actually it sucked big time. For the teen with the point and shoot camera, this meant her camera tried to compensate for the low lighting by opening the hole (aperture) in the lens as wide as possible to let in more light. Not a problem except for one thing: Remember back to tip # 7, the wider the opening, the narrower the depth of field. This means if your focus isn’t exact, the entire subject will be out of focus, or the wrong part will be in focus.
Another problem the teen might have had to deal with is low shutter speed. In order to compensate for the low light, the camera would have also reduced the shutter speed, especially if the aperture wasn’t sufficient for the available light. If the shutter speed is too slow, any amount of camera shake would have resulted in a blurry picture. Based on the height and angle the teen had to hold the camera to take the picture, it was impossible for her to avoid any degree of camera shake, unless she was made of stone. A tripod would have solved the problem. Of course nothing can solve the problem of a fidgety subject, which would have also resulted in a fuzzy picture.
One thing you don’t want to do in this situation is use a flash. Otherwise you’ll get a not so lovely bright glare in the picture from the flash bouncing off the window. It also does eerie things to the eyes of the animals, much like the red-eye effect in humans. And more than likely, the animals won’t be too impressed with it, and will put an end to the modeling shoot. Not exactly what you want them to do.