Wildlife Photojournalism

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Wildlife Photojournalism
Wildlife Photojournalism

If there is one thing I am NOT it’s a wildlife photographer. For years I’d read National Geographic or other magazines which has great animal photography and just didn’t get any sense of awe when seeing animals photographed. I think even now I assume that there are only two things necessary to get decent animal photos:

1. Patience
2. Really long, fast lenses

There are other things to factor in as well however.

1. Luck – right time, right place, right lighting, right weather and the animal doing exactly what you’d hoped for, or more
2. Time & ability to travel to distant lands to capture rare animals doing rare things.
3. Knowledge of animal – knowing animals habits and habitats, where to go to get expected results
4. Really, really, really long expensive lenses

This photo of a wild coyote was taken with my 70-200 along with my crappy Tamron 2X teleconverter. Even with this on, it only registers as 280mm, when I had it on and zoomed out to 200mm. Should read 400mm, but it doesn’t. I also had to sharpen the holy heck out of this thing and that was after I zoomed in a whole lot. I did get lucky with him jumping on its prey (which got away).

Just makes me wonder if I had a Nikkor 400mm f/2.8 VRII how amazing this shot would have been! Then again, that lens costs $7000 USED and really… who is going to buy this photo? I mean, it’ll probably just end up getting stolen or used on a blog somewhere. I get paid for my weddings so the equipment I buy that I use for weddings I can justify. But a long lens like a 400mm to capture wildlife, I can’t yet justify…. Well, not until someone buys this photo for…. $7,000.

© All Rights Reserved
Taken on: December 31, 2012
Tags: Everybody's photos tagged with coyote coyote Everybody's photos tagged with chesebro chesebro Everybody's photos tagged with cheseboro cheseboro more » Everybody's photos tagged with canyon canyon Everybody's photos tagged with wild wild Everybody's photos tagged with Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area Everybody's photos tagged with leap leap Everybody's photos tagged with jump jump Everybody's photos tagged with wild animal wild animal Everybody's photos tagged with nikon nikon Everybody's photos tagged with d4 d4 Everybody's photos tagged with Conejo Valley Conejo Valley Everybody's photos tagged with nps2013 nps2013 « less
Sets appears in:   • Animals   
Groups appears in:   • All Animals    • Nature Group: From animals to plants.    more » • Santa Monica Mountains    • Conejo Valley    « less
Camera: Nikon D4, f/5.6, 1/1250 sec, 280mm, ISO 800 (more info) (hide info)
Camera: Nikon D4
Lens: 70.0-200.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/5.6
Exposure Time: 0.001 sec (1/1250)
Focal Length: 280mm
ISO: 800
Exposure Bias: +1/3 EV
Flash: No Flash
Exposure Program: Aperture-priority AE
Exposure Mode: Auto
Metering Mode: Multi-segment
White Balance: Auto
Gain Control: Low gain up
Sharpness: Hard
Color Space: Uncalibrated
Software: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.1 (Windows)
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