After last year’s first attempt at photographing leaping salmon and 12 months of getting more familiar with the 5DIII and its autofocus system, I thought it was worth another go. This time I took the 135 mm prime lens instead of the 200 mm (too long for the close-up shots).
There was more water coming down this time, which made the whole thing a little trickier, but it added to the drama of the backdrop to the shots. Last year I gave up trying to autofocus on the fish in mid leap and went for pre-focusing on a point in space, hoping that a fish filled it the correct distance from the camera. That resulted in too many shots just slightly off-focus. This time I bit the bullet and concentrated on trying to pan with the fish as it jumped and hoping the camera’s autofocus could lock on to the fish before it disappeared beneath the foam. To give the camera a running start, I sat with my thumb on the servo focus button so that I was effectively keeping the motor running the entire time – 2 hours of it! This tactic paid off, giving me many more sharp shots than last year. I shot the close-ups with the 135 mm f2 lens, and the wider shots with the 24-105 mm f4 in the 50-100 mm range. For both, I set up the AF to give priority to objects suddenly appearing in the focus point(s). For the 135 mm I made the centre group of 9 AF points active, while for the 24-105, I used just the centre AF point, assisted by the 8 surrounding points.
As last year, I used evaluative metering, but added some +EV compensation to allow for the bright background with dark fish (+0.5 or +0.67 stops). On reflection, even +1 stop may have been better. Shutter speed was 1/1500s for the 135 mm and 1/1000 or 1/1250s with the 24-105 mm. The light was quite good at the start, but was failing fast later, causing the ISO to hike its way up from 100 at the start to around 3200 and even 4000 by the end of the shoot. I didn’t auto-ISO, but kept pushing it up to give me at least a little depth of field – for example, f4 to f5.6 with the 135 mm. It wasn’t much, but at least it wasn’t f2!