Don’t fence me in

I was at the San Diego Zoo recently for the Nik Summit and I faced a challenge we frequently find ourselves in at the zoo – I had to shoot through the fence. If you mouse over the shot above you’ll see the nasty fence I was shooting through, yet you’ll notice that the final image is fine. There’s no Photoshop magic in this photo to remove the fence as I did that in-camera.

I set my Canon 1D Mark IV using my new Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens set to f/2.8 (to remove the fence) at 1/500 sec (to freeze motion) ISO 100 (to maximize the image quality)  and zoomed out to 200mm (to maximize my reach) to capture this image. The net result is that despite the fence, I made it disappear because I put my focus point on the lion instead of on the fence (as I did in the hidden shot – mouse over).  The fence was rendered invisible and there’s no apparent image quality loss from this decision, so once again I found myself getting the shot that others missed because they didn’t like the ugly fence in the shot.

Now in my shot you’ll notice that I also have the same ugly fence in the background. While this is a discussion of how to remove the fence from the foreground, if I the lions had been farther away from the fence I could have blurred the rear fence out fairly well too. Unfortunately for me that wasn’t the case in this or my Tiger shot below, but there’s tricks to deal with that which I’ll discuss in the future on my photography blog.