victorvandijk
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Winner in Just Lizards Photo Challenge
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JLODonnellPhotography
September 30, 2016
Congratulations on the challenge win! You deserve it, what an incredible capture! Well done!
Same photographer See allBehind The Lens
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Behind The Lens
Location
This photo was taken in the reptile house in the Artis Zoo in AmsterdamTime
When walking through a zoo, it is easy to loose the sense of time. This was somewhere after lunch.Lighting
Lighting conditions where not easy. An overcast day, inside a greenhouse and hidden between foliage. iso 1800. f/4 and 1/40s. Putting a lot of trust in the image stabilisation with the 70-200mm zoom.Equipment
Canon 5D mark II and the EF 70-200 f/4 IS L zoomlens.Inspiration
This little guy was enjoying the attention of all the photographers and other visitors. Due to the relatively large distance between the lizard and the background I knew I was going to get a beautiful out of focus background.Editing
Basic post processing in Lightroom. Whitebalance, sharpening and noise reduction. Final touch to give the image a bit more pop by adjusting the blacks and whites. This also makes the colors a bit more vibrant.In my camera bag
When I go to a zoo, I usually take 3 lenses. A 24-105/4 IS for general purposes, a 70-200/4 IS for medium distance and a 300/4 IS with 1.4x teleconverter for the longer distances and closeup shots. The f/4 lenses are relatively small, light an affordable compared to their f/2.8 counterparts. A slight bump in ISO to compensate for the smaller aperture is no problem for todays camera's like the 5D mark II. I always take a flash, but I seldom use it.Feedback
In many zoos, the lighting situation is not perfect. Many times I am working on the edge of usable shutterspeeds. If you need to make a tradeoff between ISO and shutterspeed, always go for the right shutterspeed and raise the ISO. A blurry image cannot befixed. Noise is easy to fix and especially if you resize the image for publishing on websites, it will not be visible.