Visiting pronghorn enjoy a tasty dinner of freshly-mown hay near Billings, Montana:
If there’s one thing I’ve learned while driving around in the Rockies, it’s to keep my camera with a long lens handy. I took this from the side of the highway on our way home from a long road trip last summer — could have used a bit more “reach,” but 200mm was just about enough for these guys.
A border collie gets lined up to catch a frisbee in the “Superdogs” presentation at the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Colorado:
I like this shot, but it absorbed far more time for post-processing than I anticipated. Let me count the ways:
1) The event center where “Superdogs” took place was lit far more dimly than I expected, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO (noise galore in the original image).
2) Given the pace at which the events took place, I spent much of my time shooting in “continuous” mode so I could pick a starting image that both had a survivable amount of motion blur, as well as had workable composition (i.e., you could see both the dog and the frisbee). Note that due to the lighting, I was able to take few images at faster than 1/80 second.
3) There was still “too much dirt” for my taste in the best starting image, so I used a little Photoshop (Elements) trickery to reduce the vertical space between dog and disk.
So a couple of hours of work later, here you have it. I’m still wondering if I shouldn’t have removed even more space in the middle, but I like this result (for now…).
On a trip to the Westminster Butterfly Pavilion a few weeks back, we saw this interesting crowd on a cluster of branches:
I’m not sure why it was such prime real estate for the little critters, but they were all putting in a good effort to chase their neighbors off the twigs. At any one time, at most 4 butterflies were on the branches while 3 or 4 were hovering nearby, trying to take their places.