LENS CHOICES

FOR HIS WINNING PORTFOLIO IN WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR 57, ANGEL FITOR USED A VARIETY OF LENSES…

Your portfolio includes a Sigma 150mm macro, which is unusual because most underwater images I’ve seen have been shot with wide-angle lenses.

It’s one of my favourite lenses. For behaviour photography of small animals, it’s my absolute top lens to use. It allows you to keep some distance so that you don’t affect the behaviour, you’re respecting your subject. Normally the technique in underwater macro photography is that you stop down your aperture as far as you can to have maximum depth of field, but for me that is totally useless. I prefer working at the middle apertures like f/8 or f/11, not only because I’m gaining a lot of photographic quality, because of the lens performance, but also because you are creating a blurred background, and so you can highlight the subject in the foreground. That is exactly the technique used for making the pictures in the winning portfolio.