Pictures By Alan

Lens is 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS, used at 185mm f/2.8, 1/250 second exposure at ISO 125, hand held.

The image stabilizer was handy here. The lizard was quite calm; I was only about 4 feet away. The main trick here is moving to where the in-focus portion of the lizard is pleasing. I got one rear foot and the eyes, with most of the rest close to in focus. At f/2.8 focused this close, the depth of field is very narrow. One very sweet feature this lens has is "full-time manual" focus, which means you can always (even in autofocus mode) just grab the focus ring and tweak the focus a bit. That was very useful for the butterfly and lizard, since the AF can't tell exactly where the focus ought to be. It gets the focus close, then you finish it manually. It's wonderful to be able to do that without flipping switches to turn autofocus on and off.

The first lesson I recall from my first photography class was "If the eyes are in focus, the picture will look in focus." All these years later I can't think of a better place to start explaining photograph composition.