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Fur detail

I photograph animals at my local zoo. What’s the key to capturing all the lovely detail in their fur or feathers? Catrione Cook There are a lot of different factors that come into play with this type of project, Catriona. You’re looking at achieving the right combination of aperture, careful focusing and ultimately exposure – and, of course, environmental factors can come into it too.

When it comes to aperture, there is no right or wrong choice as such, but if you want as much fur detail as possible, an aperture like f/8 will give a little extra sharpness but be careful using this doesn’t then make backgrounds too distracting. Focus has to be accurate. Normally this will be on the eyes; I’d suggest that you use just a single active AF point to make that very precise.

Then get the exposure as perfect as you can when shooting. You don’t want to underexpose and lose any of that important detail, so push it to the right of your histogram and make sure you are capturing all the detail.

That’s exactly how I shot this image of a seal in Antarctica. Lying down on the ground, I used a 300mm lens with an aperture of f/8 and focused very carefully on the side of its head (the eyes were shut on this occasion) and then make sure the exposure was perfect. In fact, in this case I need to add some plus (+) exposure compensation to keep the detail in the darker fur. As you can see there is a lot of detail in the fur.