Jigokudani Snow Monkeys
Jun, 2015Views
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Behind The Lens
Location
This shot was taken at the famous Jigokudani (Snow) Monkey Park in Nagano Prefecture, Japan. I have been planning a trip to visit the friendliest and adorable monkeys for some time and I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Japan in 2014. However, I wasn't able to travel in the winter months where snow would be covering the entire park and Hotsprings. But nonetheless, autumn is still a good season for the monkeys due to the low temperatures.Time
It has been 2 years but I remember that we drove up the mountain and reached the entrance to the Snow Monkey Park at about 10.15am one cold morning. From the entrance, it was another 45 minutes gentle hike up to the Snow Monkey Hotsprings. If you were to walk a bit faster as the route was quite level, the route will only take you about 30 minutes. The day was a good day it was not raining that day. The cool weather will prevent you from getting too tired and you can start taking photos of the Snow Monkeys right away. When you reach the gate to the Hotsprings, you are required to purchase an entry ticket which will set you down about 500 yen per adult. The weather was still good but was a little cloudy.Lighting
Wildlife shoot is all about natural lighting. Therefore, being able to catch the right light was of the utmost importance. There were a few downsides to the lighting on the day of photo shoot. As it was cloudy that day, a substantial amount of 'light' was being 'cut'. Plus, as it was drawing near to noon, I had less than an hour to get the best shots. Noon lighting may be too harsh and the shadows may be too hard on the subjects and the surroundings. With the mists from the Hotsprings, a softer lighting would be advantageous for the photo shoot of the Snow Monkeys.Equipment
In most wildlife photography, you will need a camera body (preferably with high shutter counts), a long telephoto lens of about 600mm, a gimbal mounted on a sturdy tripod and wired/wireless trigger devices. But in this case, the Snow Monkeys are not one bit shy and therefore, you can approach them as close as possible without having them to shun away from you. Hence, what you need is a light setup. I had a camera body (Canon EOS 6D) mounted with a 70-300mm (Tamron) lens. And of course, you will also need to prepare extra batteries and SD cards just in case. All of my photos taken at the Snow Monkey Park were handheld shots. No tripod was used.Inspiration
I have had countless opportunities to capture many different kinds of shots of the Snow Monkeys. But I had really wanted to be able to capture how a mother snow monkey would behave when in comes to protecting her child. However, there wasn't much of an aggressive situation that day but on the other hand, to be able to capture that fierce look from the mother monkey was good proof enough to show that the parent of the little monkey was constantly on the lookout for predators and threats.Editing
Not much post-processing was done in this shot. Simple editing such as bringing the exposure, increasing the contrast, bringing down the shadows, saturation and sharpening were done in this shot.In my camera bag
The standard list of equipment that I normally have in my bag would be my Canon EOS 6D and a walkabout/ standard zoom Tamron lens of 24-70mm F2.8. Another handy lens that I always carry around would be the Canon 40mm F2.8 Pancake lens. If I am out and about taking widllife, I would add in my Tamron 70-300mm F4-5.6 Telephoto lens for a light setup. In some occasions when I need to take subjects at a much further distance, I would then remove my 70-300mm and replace it with the Sigma 150-600mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM Sports series and Telephoto Converter 2x.Feedback
Research prior to taking wildlife is the essential thing that one needs to get done before you step out of your house. You will need to know where the wildlife normally resides, season and weather, how to get there, best vantage points, etc. For example, I found out that Snow Monkeys are not shy and are tame in nature and that they will congregate in cold weathers. In conclusion, I knew that I could travel light and hence, the type of camera gears to prepare. As the subjects are constant on the move, you will need to set a higher Shutter Speed (e.g. 1/500, 1/1000, 1/2000) if you intend to freeze the subjects. Open up the aperture if you want to have a shallow depth of field (recommended), but there are no hard and fast rule if you want to have everything to be in focus in your shot. However, do keep in mind that if the bigger f-stop (e.g. f22), the higher the ISO would be for a correct exposure. Also, you have to ensure that the lighting is good enough for the ISO to stay in the lower end of the range (e.g. 100, 200, 320) so that you can better manage noise.
