Escapism

One of the forms of photography that I miss the most is portraits. Over the next few months, I’m going to be moving around a lot, so I don’t have my usual group of friends around me to take portraits. I’m moving so much that I’ve condensed my belongings into just the essentials and unfortunately, my portrait lights don’t fall in that category. Instead, I can turn to another niche corner of photography: wildlife.

Whenever I go to the aquarium or zoo, I always try to take pictures of the animals. When taking the pictures, I realized that this was the first time I was limited by my prime lenses. Most animals are significantly further than what my 85 mm can reach, so I had to do some cropping with my photography edits to get the composition just right.

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As a side note, this is also the first time I took animal photos with a full frame camera. Because of this, I feel that I have a lot more leeway with my cropping before I start to get artifacts from my lens and sensor. For example, if you look really closely around the head of this owl picture, you’ll see a little bit of purple fringing at the very top of his head and along some areas of his body.

I’m fully aware no one cares about these things except pixel-peeping photographers, but it’s the small details for me that makes all of the difference between a good and great photo. I’m my own biggest critic. And it’s my own critiques that push me to take out my camera the next time to take that next step forwards.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading through my ramblings. In summary, I learned that using a telephoto lens to take pictures at the zoo would make my life a whole lot easier, but it’s definitely not necessary. I can make due with what I have, but I’m definitely pushing the limits of what I can do.