Indian Star Tortoise

I was pretty excited by my first wild sighting of this species. I had been familiar with it before through newspapers and news channels. They are illegally collected and exported to southeast Asian countries in thousands every year and are critically endangered.

This guy was tiny, smaller than my palm. Of course, they can grow to be much larger. The rocky scrubland of Daroji in the Deccan is typical habitat for them.

PENTAX K 10D
TAMRON SP AF 90mm f/2.8 Di MACRO 1:1
Av Priority
Tv: 1/800 sec
Av: f/5.6
Ev: 0.0
ISO 400
Multi-segment Metering

August 2009, Daroji Wildlife Sanctuary

Cheers,
Aditya

Nice image Aditya, I liked the eye contact & its colors. I feel it can be more sharp.

Thanks Praveen. I think its not a lack of sharpness but a lack of depth of field that you're talking about. Since I used a relatively long focal length from a very short distance at a wide aperture setting, I couldn't get the tortoise sharp throughout the image. The sharpness on the eye and top of the shell is pretty good and may be it would have shown on the rest of shell and limbs had I used f/22 or shot from a distance. Neither of these were possible under the given conditions.

Cheers,
Aditya

Nice image. Nice patterns on the shell. Some more space around would have enhanced the image further. Agree about more depth of field for getting the whole body in focus. Nice clean BG.

Nice shot, agree abt the need for more space. Nice clear BG. I like the colour theme too.

Good colour theme. Higher DOF would have been nice... The sharpness is fine

Thanks guys. Have some other compositions, will share those too. This was meant to be a close up portrait. Have experimented with scapes, etc. Will share them soon.

Cheers,
Aditya

I like the colour scheme and the tortoise stands out from the background. I didn't see this fellow when I was there last year. :(

The comment about sharpness is because a small portion at the front is not in focus.

I am describing the technique to be adopted in these situations:

1) first stop down,
2) then press and hold the Depth of field Preview button
3) then move the focussing ring to bring the front portion into focus and see if the eye potion is in focus or not. If the eye portion is not in focus then stop down the aperture i.e make the aperture narrow from f5.6 to f8 to f11 etc till you find both the front portion and the eye in focus.

After this you know the aperture to get the right depth of field. Now we have to see if the shutter speed is high enough to give us a shake free picture. If not, then you have to decide on increasing the ISO, using mirror lock up etc.

Cheers,
Sabyasachi