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As mentioned in the previous post "Ready, Steady, Go..." the equipment that we used for this specific leopard photo is a Nikon D4 camera body with a Nikkor 600mm f4G:ED VR lens. Absolutely amazing quality equipment and it is just such a pleasure to shoot with it. The D4 is lightning fast and great in low light situations and the lens with its F4 aperture is just unbelievable. It is an incredible combination for wildlife photography, in our opinion, as long as you have a good support system for steadiness (we use a Gitzo Tripod with a Wimberley Gimbal Head).
So lets get on to the finer details... the basic camera settings for the photo:
Leopard, Lower Sabie - Kruger National Park, South Africa = 1/125 sec at f/5, ISO 640 | Av.
We're starting with the aperture (or F-stop) which determines your photo's depth-of-field (DoF). Now for this photo my aperture was only F5 which gives you a very shallow depth-of-field (DoF), only about 20mm when you take into consideration how close the leopard was and the fact that I had the 600mm lens on. Most of these animals, especially leopards, do not give you a lot of time to look at them so sometimes you have split seconds to make a decision about your settings and to change them at the same time. With this particular photo I had exactly two seconds to get that perfect shot. The first shot I fired was at 5:36:56 PM and at 5:36:58 PM (11 shots later) the leopard started to cross the road (see the times on the screenshots from my Mac below).
As you can see it is not always possible to change too many settings or to change lenses or cameras. That is why I prefer to shoot in Aperture-Priority (A or Av) mode because I only have to focus on adjusting the f-stop in situations like this, the camera adjusts the shutter speed accordingly. Believe me, it's still not an easy task to make decisions when you have so little time. In fact, with wildlife you never know how much time the animal(s) will give you, so our advice is to take one or two photos with these basic settings before you start with the fine tuning, like adjusting the light (EV), etc.
You’ll notice in the photo above, only the leopard’s face is in focus, the body and background is all blurred. That is exactly what I set out to achieve with this photo - to emphasise that beautiful face with the last few golden rays of sun shining on it. I, personally, always try to get the background as much blurred as possible to let the subject stand out more, and you can only achieve that with a big aperture (low f-stop number), hence the reason I used F5. In this case however, the leopard was so close (aprox. 5m from us) which means that a smaller aperture, like say F11 would’ve also given me a blurred background but that meant an even slower shutter speed and I just didn’t have the time to make all the changes.
The shutter speed 1/125 sec is relatively slow so it was perfect for the few seconds when the leopard was standing still, but any movement would’ve given me a totally blurred shot, as was the case when he started moving. I was also using a fixed mount for the camera & lens which helped to get a steady shot. Freehand I would never have used such a low shutter speed, but since the light was starting to fade my ISO was already on 640 so I couldn’t really up my shutter speed without increasing the ISO as well. And we all want the lowest ISO for the best quality image with the least amount of noise.
But that’s the beauty and fun of shooting in manual modes because there are so much to experiment and play with when you have the time. LOTS & LOTS of trial and error!
Now get out there and experience it for yourself. But most important....HAVE FUN!!!
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