Tales From a Yellowstone Photo Safari

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently went to Yellowstone again and took some more pics. It was a really good day for seeing animals of all sorts, but for some reason, it was a lousy day for getting anything in focus. I struggled to get my 70-300mm lens to really focus. I may have to clean it really well or get it checked out. Truth be told, I don't really properly clean my lenses often at all. I don't even have a cleaning kit. Guess it's time to invest. I wondered if maybe it was the bright light causing me problems and refracting or fringing to blur things out. My polarizing filter helps with that, but it's also a cheap one which is probably not as good as the big lens. Maybe I should invest in a higher-quality polarizing filter, too. Anyway, because of the blurriness, some of these pictures are pretty heavily manipulated to make something of them, since they simply weren't going to be beautiful, crisp images as shot.

On this trip, I also decided I was a bit bored with playing the "let's see how close I can get and take pictures of animals' faces" game and looked more for scenes I could frame and make something of.

First, the bald eagle nest on the way into the park which held up traffic for an hour. I zoomed way in, cropped way tight, and added some blue to salvage what I could of a fairly hopeless shot.





Then the grizzly. This one moment of excitement was when it lifted its paw and acted, for a moment, like it might be waking up. Nope. No such luck. Went right back to sleep, and the masses huddled around the hill not 25 yards from it settled back down after much gasping and pointing. The settling down was followed by yet another reminder from a park ranger that if the bear wakes up, showtime is over and everyone is to leave immediately. Fat chance, pal. We're waiting with our cameras. You don't think we're gonna scurry off without stealing a few frames, do you? P-shaw.





On Mt. Washburn, I found a few things to grab pics of.

Interestingly, this shot of a plain ol' bird is my absolute favorite from the trip.





Those brushed metal trees I mentioned:




Tower Falls: there's quite a hike to the bottom, but we didn't do that. We just went to the lookout a short walk from the road. I also snapped a shot of a rock with all manner of colorful stuff on it.






Random terrain shot. I actually took this from the moving car.





The osprey posed beautifully for us. Sadly, I got not a single focused shot. So I did some fun toying with the sky and increased the contrast to distract from how incredibly blurry it is, sort of like a cheap magician waving one hand to distract you from the other. ...I think it works about as well as a cheap magician's hand-waving: most people may still think it's neat, but those in the know will see right through it. *sigh* ;-)





I liked this solitary, almost black bison just standing in the field. I brought out some contrast and color in the terrain to spice it up a bit. Still trying to decide if I went too far...





Confession: this is completely doctored, and not even that carefully. The black bear was really blurry, and it wasn't standing near anything interesting, so I had a choice: scrap showing the black bear or cut and paste it by the tree it was some distance from, and crop it tight around them for some kind of composition (since the bear was too tiny if I kept the original composition and too blurry to be of any interest cropped by itself). I cut and pasted. And didn't even take care of all of the edges. I was exasperated by another useless shot.





Pronghorn running across the prairie. Again, blurry, but I was so excited to have gotten them running in the yellowing light before dusk, I couldn't bear to scrap it.





A scene from an outhouse. The mosquitoes here were terrible. I was literally running from place to place, taking one or two shots at a time before flailing my arms and running away from the cloud to the next spot until they caught up with me again.





We ran across what appeared to be adolescent mule deer. They were itchy and hungry.





This one waggled its bum at us and stuck out its tongue.





On our way out of the park, we saw a trio of baby elk with their family along the opposite side of the river and took dozens of photos. They were all blurry. All of them. Too bad, too, because there were some beautiful scenes.







The fish had just started jumping, too, to chomp the copious swarms of bugs now gathering over the slow-moving river. I took dozens and dozens of pictures of the surface of the water. No fish. Therefore, you will not see what I saw there. Instead, enjoy this non-motivational poster I made from one of my shots of the deer: