Pleasant surprises

[Al Agnew]

A couple weeks ago we were in Yellowstone Park in a snowcoach, and had a lot of good animal sightings, but many of them were at some distance.  I was shooting a Canon DSLR with a Canon 500mm lens for a good part of the day, but I knew that many shots were just too far for even that lens.  However, as an artist, I'm not looking for publication quality photos but simply stuff I can use as reference in my paintings, and the nice thing about a high quality lens (far more important than the camera body you use) is that if all the stars align, it gets you photos that are sharp enough that you can enlarge and crop the subject and still get some detail.  

This first photo is of a coyote that was foraging along the opposite bank of the Madison River, about 50 yards away, the quality also compromised by the fact that the day was dark and cloudy at that point.  I caught him in mid-leap onto a rock, but wasn't hoping for too much from the photo--I was hand-holding the camera with lens propped against the roof of the snowcoach.  It doesn't look bad as the full frame shot:

So I brought it into Photoshop, played around a bit with the levels slider, and then cropped and enlarged it, and was pleasantly surprised with the quality.  The 'yote is just slightly blurry, but somehow the clods of dirt or snow that were flying up remained sharp and clear:

Toward the end of the day, we saw a fox mousing, a long way off on the other side of the river and up a high bank.  I measured the distance from my vantage point to where I think the fox was by going to Google Earth and using the ruler tool, and it appears the fox was between 175 and 200 yards away from me.  I had the Canon on a tripod this time and was using a 1.4X extender, meaning I was in effect shooting a 700mm lens.  I got the fox pouncing on a mouse, but it had its back to me and that photo was nothing special.  Right afterwards, I took this shot; this is how it looks full frame coming from the memory card:

I enlarged and cropped the image in Photoshop and surprise, got this...note the sharp, clear mouse hindquarters!

Finally, a bit later the light really got yummy, and I really wanted something useful of that fox in that light, but wasn't holding out much hope.  I shot this one through a tree limb, which caused the dark, blurry blotches.  I enhanced it a bit in camera raw in Adobe Bridge, and got this result:

Enlarging and cropping, this is how it turned out...you may see a painting of this fox pretty soon because I really like this:

As an artist, I can work with that...I know how to add the missing detail, and there is a lot to work with!

[Mitch f]

Those shots are incredible!

[MOPanfisher]

Nice photos sir!

 

[Greasy B]

Yeah nice. I'll bet a snow coach ride through the park much less stress than the usual summer time traffic jams. Maybe a winter trip to YNP is the way to go, 

[Al Agnew]

It's certainly a lot more peaceful than during the summer traffic jams.  We went in through West Yellowstone, and I'd say there were maybe 25 snowcoaches and 100 or so snowmobiles sharing the roads with us.  But almost all of them were headed on to Old Faithful.  There were six of us in the coach, my wife and I and four artist/photographer friends.  There had been a bobcat regularly hunting along the Madison, and we told the snowcoach driver that we wanted to spend most of the day where the bobcat was expected to be seen instead of just touring as the others were doing.  So we hung out along the Madison all day while almost everybody else was long gone to Old Faithful or wherever.  By late morning, we had a good part of the road to ourselves most of the time.  We saw at least five different coyotes as well as the fox and the usual bison, a couple of elk including one big bull, and both bald and golden eagles.  But we never saw the bobcat.

[Greasy B]

Are there similar winter opportunities near the north entrance? I thought the road from Gardner to Cooke City stayed open. Using Chico Springs as a base for day trips would be a ideal. 

[Al Agnew]

Yep, Gardiner to Cooke City is kept open, the only road in the park open to auto traffic.  You can go on guided snowmobile tours out of Mammoth from Gardiner...drive into Mammoth, hop on a snowmobile and take the road toward Norris.  I did that once and didn't particularly care for it.  For one thing, it's a tour and you gotta stay with the group, and the tour guide seemed to think everybody wanted to go fast all the time.  Speed limit on park roads is 45 mph at most, but he kept us traveling at the speed limit on the snowmobiles.  We ended up traveling 94 miles total that day, which isn't a lot of fun when you're not used to driving a snowmobile.  I would have rather poked along and stopped now and then to photograph and soak up scenery.  It was beautiful.

Another option is to drive to Cooke City, where you can rent snowmobiles to travel on out the highway outside the park.  The highway is closed from Cooke City on and is kept more or less groomed for snowmobiles.

You'll see critters just driving from Mammoth to Cooke City, but not as many as we did along the Madison out of West Yellowstone.  Much of that road is in high, snowy country and most of the animals leave it for lower ground in the winter.  You'll see some bison, a few elk, and probably coyotes and a fox if you're lucky.  If you were basing at Chico, you could do a day driving that road, another day snowmobiling, and then you'd have probably exhausted the motorized park possibilities out of Gardiner.  But if you're energetic, the cross-country skiing and snowshoe hiking off the road is terrific.

And if the weather is decent, which it often is in Paradise Valley, you can get in some good fly fishing all winter on the spring creeks.  Cost to fish DePuys is only $40 a day in the winter!

[marcus]

thats a nice camera your using my cell phone pic quality makes all my pics look so fuzzy 

[Al Agnew]

When your living somewhat depends upon getting decent quality photos of critters that might be too wary to get close to, and decent color quality pics of landscapes, it's easy to justify buying good (and expensive) equipment.  But the truth is that the difference between cell phone picture quality, point and shoot camera quality, and the more inexpensive DSLR combos you can buy at big box stores, is not all that wide.  It's really amazing, when you think about it, that the lens on your cell phone, which is about a quarter inch wide, can give you photos that are hardly distinguishable from those taken with a halfway decent point and shoot.  The newer IPhones have 8 megapixel resolution.  I can remember when high end point and shoots only had 5 or 6 mp, but now most have 10 mp or more.  

If you have a newer generation cell phone and you're getting blurry pictures, there may be something wrong.  I've found that IPhone pictures are usually sharp enough to make pretty good prints up to 5X7 inches in size.

I shoot photos with a bunch of different camera systems, each working for a particular situation.  The IPhone is almost always in my pocket, so it gets used when an unexpected picture opportunity presents itself, like a dead critter on the roadside that I want to photograph or a nice sunset when I'm driving, but I actually used it a bunch when Mary and I did our Grand Canyon raft trip, because it was the easiest piece of camera equipment to keep the battery charged.  We used external battery storage devices to keep it charged throughout the 16 day trip.  

My next step up is a waterproof point and shoot.  It goes along on EVERY outdoor trip...float trips, hiking trips, etc.. Being waterproof, I just keep it in my pocket, ready to grab instantly and shoot, without having to worry about dropping it in the river, etc.. I know it won't work for longer distance wildlife photography, but it works very well for close-ups of fish, underwater shots, and general landscape stuff.  

Next comes the superzoom point and shoot.  These things are amazing, even though they aren't the easiest cameras to use.  Mine zooms out to the equivalent of an 1100 mm lens on a DSLR.  Had I used it to shoot the photos above, the critters would have filled up almost twice as much of the frame.  And they are inexpensive compared to a good DSLR.  But they do have serious drawbacks.  Even with built in image stabilization, shooting hand held at full zoom will give you a lot of blurry photos, and trying to find a critter in the rather poor viewfinder or the LCD screen when you're fully zoomed is often very difficult, so you have to zoom back out, find it, then zoom in again.  Still, it's useful for when I'm on a reference gathering trip like this one and suddenly a critter shows up, moving fast, and I know I won't have time to set up a big lens on a tripod.  Just grab the thing and shoot.  And they are small and light enough that if I'm on a long hike or backpacking trip, I know I can carry it rather than a DSLR and big lens that takes up a huge amount of space and weighs 20 pounds or more.

After that, I carry two DSLRs on reference gathering trips like this one.  The lens is everything in DSLR shooting.  One of mine has a Sigma 150-500 mm zoom lens, supplemented by a 2X doubler, giving me up to 1000 mm of lens.  The advantage of it is that it's considerably smaller and lighter than my other DSLR set-up, and I can easily pick it up, carry it around for a bit, and shoot hand held without a tripod.  The drawback to it is that it isn't very good in lower light situations, which is usually the case with wildlife photography.

So my "ultimate" set-up is the Canon body with the 500 mm F2.8 lens, plus the 1.4 X extender.  The lens is big and heavy, and you won't want to carry it around.  But if you have time to put the thing on a tripod, you can shoot long distance critters in low light and get good results.

And yes, on a reference gathering trip where I'm mostly driving or riding, as this one was, I'm carrying every one of those cameras!

[Smallieguy87]

I don't think I ever truly appreciated photography on this kind of level until i joined OAF. Great shots!  What would you recommend as a decent water proof camera for fishing? i'd used a go pro but really didn't enjoy the bulky housing and smaller screen size. I was looking at spending somewhere around $300-400 and had the olympus TG model in mind but don't really know a great deal about them. Upon looking a bit more the Panasonic Lumix looks good for the money. It will mostly just be used to taking quick shots of the fish usually underwater and maybe filmed swimming off.