The Yellowstone River flows northward through Montana’s Paradise Valley, winding its way through farms and ranches. On my recent visit, I saw a number of pronghorn, but they were always rather distant. I did, however, come across plenty of elk within reach. The bull elk above was keeping an eye on his ladies and (presumably his) offspring. In addition to the ones shown above, there were more a short distance upstream:
After making a bunch of images similar to the ones above, I started thinking about what else I could do to make the images a little more interesting. Since the elk were pretty much just standing in one place, I decided to try a longer exposure to see if I could get motion in the water and still have the elk sharp. So I broke out the tripod and my 6-stop dark polarizer and took a whole bunch of exposures (18) assuming that they would all be still in one of them. Well, their ears in particular didn’t cooperate, so I had to stack the images in Affinity Photo and mask bits and pieces to get them all mostly sharp. Having eighteen 45-megapixel images loaded into Affinity Photo at the same time definitely hurts my eight-year-old computer, so it was a little painful and I eventually declared it good-enough-for-the-blog; if I thought the result was worth enlarging, I would spend more time with it:
I think it was a good idea and I am glad I tried it, but next time I will probably try to mix in fast exposures, too. Rather than screw and unscrew a filter repeatedly, it would probably be good enough to interleave some higher ISO exposures to get crisper animals. (That would be a good time to have magnetic filters, I suppose, but I have it on good authority that they are easy to lose. I am sure opinions are polarized on this…) Unfortunately, bracketing on my camera always changes the exposureโwhat I would love is a way to automatically cycle through two or more ISO-shutter speed combinations with equivalent exposures. That would also be handy for making variations of blurred water. As it is, I can do it, just not as quickly and it is more likely that any given elk will take a step or turn its head in the interim.
The image above features the same bull elk as was pictured in the river earlier. He had just chased off a pimple-faced 4-pointed buck with delusions of grandeur. He had at least as many females up on the field as he did in the riverโprobably moreโso he was busy defending his claim. When I passed by again later in the day he had gathered them all up on the south end of the field. A half mile away, on the north end of the field, was a rival bull elk with an equally numerous harem of its own. I suspect that they spent a lot of time glaring at each other and plotting how to filch each other’s ladies.
This last image was from Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park. There were a few elk wandering around the area despite the tourists. This one enjoyed drinking the runoff from one of the geothermal springs. I like the way the sunlight is bouncing off the far side of the elk and illuminating the mineral deposits behind it. Given the obviously high mineral content, I have no idea what it tastes like but I am sure its kidneys had a busy evening.
I hope you enjoyed these images and thanks for stopping by!