Bad hair day

I made a mistake when I took this portrait of an Icelandic horse. I was using a 70-200mm telephoto using its maximum aperture of f/2.8. The horse turned its head toward me, which I like, but that meant the nose and eyes were about 3 feet closer to the camera than the horse's body. F/2.8 on a telephoto lens means very shallow depth of field. The autofocus mechanism locked onto the side of the horse because it was in the center of the frame, and in doing so the eyes weren't as sharp as they should have been. I used Topaz Sharpen AI to rectify that, but it would have been better to take this shot at f/5.6 or f/8. The distant background would have still been out of focus, but I would have been able to hold focus on the eyes and the side of the horse at the same time. There's a lot to think about every time you take a picture, and with animals decisions have to be made, often, in fractions of a second. My settings were 1/125, f/2.8, and 250 ISO. The focal length I used for this composition was 173mm.

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Bad hair day

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