Photographing Bull Elk, Antelopes, and Bighorn Sheep

Hey Doug, patience. That's the name of this game? Isn't it? Absolutely. Three days we've been trying to work this bull elk here.

The first day he's a long distance away on a hillside tucked up at the edge of some trees. The second day we find them down in that canyon, just completely unworkable. We couldn't do anything with that. Nothing at all. Look at these, he's taking his antlers and knocking the snow off of the limbs all over him.

That's very cool. Then here the third day we're out before sunrise, we wait them out. It comes up over this ridge like this, right in front of these beautiful Douglas, firs. I mean, this is just absolutely fantastic. You know, when you get behind the camera and a situation unfolds in front of you you have to quickly make that decision, lens, length, where I need to be where I need to position myself.

And you know, this stuff, this scene right here kind of unfolded real quick. He came up out of that draw. And now he's just coming right up over this, you know, this is really nice. Yeah. This is beautiful.

You know, one thing that we have to be really careful about here is the fact that we have a white sky and white snow in the forest. You think about elk, at least in my mind, you know these are iconic animals that you think about when you think about the Rockies. Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's nothing more majestic than a big mature bull. And that's exactly what we got here.

I mean, he is beautiful. You know, we, haven't seen a lot of big mature bulls this week in the park. You know, most of them, like you said migrated to other parts of the park. Thousands of cows. But as far as the bulls go, it's been pretty sparse this week.

Yeah. So it likes to put in your time in it finding a subject, working it and tracking him down and staying with it, you know, it's paid off. Absolutely It really has. So in this particular situation as he emerges up out of the Canyon you actually have the opportunity for two different shots. Right now I'm shooting a 500 millimeter lens.

So I'm very tight on him. So I've got a very tight vertical shot as he comes up out of there. Now, as he comes up, I'm going to try to back up a little bit and get more of an environmental scene. Now, if you were shooting a zoom lens, like a two to 400 which is a suburb large mammal lens, especially in park settings, you could do it right here on the spot and widen out a little bit and get more of an environment in which the animal is sitting in one thing to keep in mind as you're making that conscious decision of whether this is going to be a portrait or an environmental portrait, keep in mind that environmental portraits sell much faster than the very tight fine art type shot because environmental portraits have a lot of room. It tells more of a story.

It has more users. It can be used for inside two page double truck spreads and magazines. It can be used for billboards or anything that needs tax dropped in on top of it. And so your image is going to bring more income if you decide to go that route. So it's real easy to get kind of lost behind your lens like this.

You know we've spent some time now photographing this bull elk and we've moved around a little bit and we've worked our way down into these thick willows here the problem is, what we didn't realize at first is that there's actually bison just behind this elk here. And as we sit here photographing slowly but surely these bison have kind of work their way in and we've got four of them now that are pretty close to us. And so this is one of those sort of situations that if you're not constantly aware of your surroundings then you can very quickly find yourself in a lot of trouble. So we need to go ahead and wrap this up and move out of this situation before we get ourselves in a pretty bad, pretty bad predicament. Sounds good.

I'm going to take one last shot here. There's always that one last shot. There is always that one last shot. Whoa, those guys are fast. I tell you what antelope man.

They're cool animals. Yeah. They are. You know they're actually the second fastest animal on earth. The cheetah runs about 70 miles an hour.

The pronghorn antelope runs at 60 miles an hour. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're so graceful looking now what a beautiful animal they're real smooth and petite looking, you know that light-colored fur.

And man look at the way, all the snow around us is acting like a gigantic reflector, you know? So you don't have those dark shadows under their bellies like we're used to see and you know, and when they're in a more neutral tone setting but what a pretty animal. And with these guys, you know, they're pretty much just grazing so you almost have to kind of wait for let them do something interesting or getting near some kind of interesting background or to add compositional elements to your photograph. Oh, got a little buck coming in here on the left. Pretty animal.

Tell you what One thing to keep in mind in these cold temperatures, you have to hold your breath when you're behind the camera, because the slight bit of of steam that comes out of your mouth and your nose it comes right up here on the thunder instant fog. And that can mean the difference between getting a photograph will completely missing several And we spotted this big horn sheep from the road. Now he's up here on the side of the slope and from the road, it wasn't a very good shot. We're looking straight at the slope. So it was a very flat unappealing scene.

So when you have the opportunity to work your subject, try to change your angles. Now we've talked about changing angles in the past. And a lot of times that's just literally moving to the right or left. But in this instance I want to really show the animal's environment and show the type of area that he did the terrain that he lived in. So I've climbed up the edge of the slope to try to get our level with him.

Now I'm using the slope as a compositional element and the light by doing that, I've changed the light the lights coming at 45 degrees off to the side and we're getting a much more dramatic shot now. So Doug, this part of the park is what we call the Northern range. It's a lot different than the rest of the national park here, as you've seen so far, you know we're a lot lower elevation here and you can see there's quite a bit less snow. You know, it's kinda more of like a desert Lake situation. We've got sagebrush, we got rocks.

It's very different than the deep forest in the interior. And the key thing about this area in the winter time is because it's lower elevation because it's exposed to the Southern sky. It has less snow, and it's easier for these animals to access their groceries, basically. Yeah know, you were telling me, you know, the amount of snow in the, on the upper part of the mountains, you know determines how far it pushes down like the elk and the, you know, the rest of these animals. Exactly.

You know, one thing I noticed with a lot of beginner photographers is that they're very scared for some reason to move that little sensor point around inside of their viewfinder, just like you have to kind of constantly check your exposure and you're constantly checking your histogram as the lighting's changing as these animals move across this Hill face, or this cliff face you also need to be constantly working that auto-focus button. You know It seemed like this. We got a lot of this giant Sage around, as you can see and it's neutral tone and the body of our big horn, cheaper, neutral tone. So, you know, exposing you would think cause you need to expose to those neutral tones since the scene is primarily a neutral tone scene but we still have patches of white. And as with all photography you want to expose to those highlight areas.

You know, we still have to have consideration for these white snow patches that these magnificent animals are standing in and around. So staying on top of your exposure is key here. You know, another thing that you notice here, you look at the coloration of these big horn sheep compared to the color of the Sage brush and the rocks and the dirt that's exposed here. And you see they're all pretty much the same color. They're very camouflage to this.

And so photographing these sheep against this hillside , like this they just blend right in. There's nothing to really make them stand out. And that's going to be kind of the key challenge to photographing these animals this time of year in the wintertime, when they're down low like this is trying to figure out exactly how to make that animal jump out or leap out at your viewer. And so in this sort of situation, it's absolutely perfect. We're just about 90 degrees to the angle of the sun here.

So we have maximum polarization naturally in the sky. And so you can see this one Ram that starting to walk his way across the Ridge of- The steady on the move. Exactly. So you look at it suddenly we have this Ram that steps up on top of these rocks. And instead of a Brown background for a Brown animal we have this just beautiful cobalt blue sky behind them.

And it just really jumps out at it. So it's far more interesting than, you know photographing this guy against, you know, just kind of a brown and rather blursday background that we had earlier. Yeah. Separation is the key. I mean, with all photography, you know you don't want it to blend into the background.

So anything that can create separation whether that be a shallow depth of field, you know that can help create separation. Like you said the background can do it well, you know, making that that subject pop out from the background is key. You know, when you're photographing these animals you really want your photographs to capture the essence of these magnificent animals. I mean, these are the true icons of the hierarchies and you want your images to say something. You don't want the same old blursday image that everybody else has got.

So a lot of times just simply waiting on body position, stay on the animal as he moves across the slope here, you know, just to animals sitting against a flat slope that doesn't stand and tell a story but wait for that big Ram to step up one foot up onto a rock and turn and look back over his shoulder or he's angled away from you. And he turns back and looked over his back at you, or it looks at the rest of the herd. Those are the type of images that express some kind of feeling. Jerry, I think I got some pretty good shots. So this you you're doing good.

Yeah I'm good. Do they're making their way. It looks like the whole herd is making their way down the round, this, the edge of this mountain this let's proceed on that hill might find some better angles. And you know, who knows what we'll run into? We got some deep snow here.

Yeah man. Dude, this is beautiful. Even though we're not in the park technically or this beautiful through here. Yeah. It really pays to learn some of the back roads around the area and get up in the hillsides up in the national forest.

And we even got some mule deer right up here on the slope in front of us. That's why we're here Doug. Wow, this is beautiful. So Doug, after the creation of the national park, Congress realized that the political boundaries that Yellowstone doesn't actually encompass the entire ecosystem. So what they ended up doing was surrounding the entire national park with national forests.

Okay. Which are all fantastic places to photograph like we're in right now. And so, you know, you really want to get off the main road sometimes kick it into four wheel drive and cruise up into these back roads. Safely. Yes.

Ah yeah, yeah Tell you what with weather like this is, you know you've really gotta be careful. Oh definitely You can drive off the road in a snow drift and it might be the end of you That's right. You know, these animals, they don't know the boundaries. And that's the cool thing about this. Can you believe this, look at this big buck I mean, he's not a monster buff, but he is a very respectable mule deer laying down right here in front of us.

Yeah. And this isn't a typical South Carolina white tail behavior is it? No, it was not no round home dude they're trying to get away from possible. This is really nice. That's why we work here, You know, look at that little button buck coming up behind me.

Yeah. You get ass on my shot. Oh, we're getting a little bit of behavior. Yap, That's what I'm talking about. It's an intimate moment right there.

Yeah. Looking On the behavior looking at it, they're interacting together. He's kind of rubbing his snout up there against it. The big buck's antlers. Very cool.

Oh my gosh. I'm really tight on this. You know, I'm shooting a street 500 and full animal framed frame. Yeah. Doug I'm shooting with a 600 millimeter here in order to capture these tight portraits as well.

But personally, I also like to carry in a shorter lens, whenever is possible. And so that's why I dragging this 200 to 400 with me. And you know, normally this is the type of lens that most people would lock down on a tripod. But as long as you're using proper long lens handholding technique you know, you can get away with handholding something like this, especially in such good light. And so what I like to do and really I guess is the proper way of doing this as you take the barrel of the lens and rested in the Palm of your hand and you just kind of bring the camera in nice and tight lock your elbows into your sides, into your chest here.

And you use your entire upper body to rotate with the animal as it moves across instead of swinging your arms around. And that gives you a pretty steady, a pretty steady platform to shoot like this. Okay. This is a really nice scenario here. You know, I found it that it seems like most beginner photographers they really stress themselves out about photographing subjects and white snow especially dark subjects of white snow, you know and really it is just a simple way to get an exposure if you know how to do it properly.

When it comes down to photographing in the snow probably the easiest way to do it is to just simply use manual exposure. And so what I like to do is I'll switch my camera over to spot metering. I'll spot meter off of the brightest area on the snow, in my composition. And since I'm shooting a Nikon that means I'm probably going to end up adding about one full stop two thirds to one full stop of compensation. Canon cameras, they have a little bit different type of metering system.

You're probably going to end up closer to one and two thirds full stop, maybe even two full stops. He sets your exposure that way turn recomposed and start shooting. And you're really not even going to have to change that exposure until the light changes considerably or otherwise you move. And one rule to go by is if you expose properly for the highlights, no matter what the scenario was a shade or full sun, you deal with white or bright subjects. If your exposure is coming out so that the white areas is exposed properly and the dark areas are just going black, you know the situation is too contrasty.

So you need to, you know, relocate change angle or get a little more creative. Well, exactly. You know, it today, you know, the kind of the buzz word and photography is histogram. Check your histogram. That's the end all be all of your exposure.

You know, we go back to the days of film and slides and it wasn't histogram. It was 18% gray, you know? And so the problem is I feel that a lot of photographers don't truly understand how the exposure, you know system inside of their camera actually works. And though we have digital technology, we have histograms to work by. We still work with a metering system.

That's exposing for 18% gray at all times. And so, as long as you know, that that snow is technically white and not gray, you know that you can meet her off of the snow, add light by slowing down the shutter speed or upping your ISO or opening up your aperture. Of course. And you can turn that gray snow into white snow, like it's supposed to be Exactly. It's really simple.

And then histogram, you know people make it a lot harder than it really needs to be but basically you want to, you know, to adjust the exposure so that the information on the histogram is as far to the far right side, as you can without touching that far right wall of it. And your exposure will be just right. It's real simple. As long as you understand exposed to the right the right side of the histogram are the lights of the bright. So Rights are brights and the left is dark.

And that's it. This is some beautiful light on this buck there I tell you. Really nice. And this is one of those situations. It is easy, easily exposure, you know, just exposed to that white and he's neutral tones.

So we know that he's not going to be underexposed. That's right. Ahhh. This was really nice. We got a bit of a drag to get out of here, Doug.

So we should probably go ahead and show her the tripods though, I don't wanna leave this though but I don't want to be left here. Yeah, I don't wanna be roof food either. Yeah, and it's already a minus eight degrees. So this is a nice Heat wave Yeah the heat wave compared to this morning. I'll refute lets go Jared.

All right, lets do it.