seancrane

Thanks. This was shot with a Nikon D200 camera with a Nikkor 70-200mm lens (at 130) f/5 at 1/200th of a second.

Nice shot Siegried. Funny stuff. I haven't seen these guys anywhere else except for Corcovado National Park — and I saw about six of them on one hike.

Hey Dick, yes, I ran it through the Nik dfine noise reduction plugin in Photoshop -- at least the background, not the owl. I rarely use noise reduction because I like the look of noise better than the plasticky look of heavy noise reduction, but in this case it seemed to help.

No, this was handheld. I handhold almost all my wildlife shots these days with the 200-400mm. It's just small enough for me to do so and it allows me to be much more stealth with unpredictable creatures. With the vibration reduction, I'm able to get sharp results down to 1/15th of a second (not always, but a good percentage of keepers). The way I see it, I need to be at least at 1/250th or 1/125th anyway with an animal in motion. I still carry the tripod, but a smaller one and use it pretty much exclusively for landscape shots when I need longer exposure times with smaller apertures.

Thanks Dick. I was using my Nikon 200-400 (at 340mm) on a Nikon D800.

Thanks Grayham,

This was handheld with my 200-400mm lens (at 400mm). As for the unfortunate lighting, I was actually quite pleased with the overcast conditions seeing as it was the middle of the day and the sun would have been deadly to the photo. The real action happened just after the mother served up a fish. A male that had been circling above, attacked the chick and tried to steal the fish. After a brief but intense battle, the chick emerged victorious. http://seancrane.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/frigate_2.jpg

This one is from my recent trip to the Galapagos Islands. We were swimming with the

sea lions and they were moving into and out of a shadowed area caused by a nearby

cliff. Whenever they went into the dark area I was getting pretty slow shutter speeds

due to the lack of light. I decided to try some panning/motion blur shots as they swam

below me. On this particular exposure, I was able to keep the focus point on the sea

lion’s head to get sharp focus on the eyes while blurring out the colorful sea floor. The

circular blur was caused by the 8 inch dome port on my Ikelite housing. Thanks for any

comments (and click for larger view). Thanks.

It's real. I was photographing the fox to the left and my girlfriend accidentally made a noise with her water bottle and all of a sudden the other guy popped up from behind.

I was photographing the owl in front when all of a sudden the other one swooped in and

they began mating. Thanks for any comments (click for larger view).

Hey Clayton,

Yes, this was an HDR capture. 5 shots on a rainy day. I try to add quite a bit of contrast back into the scene in Photoshop after Photomatix does its work — making it look less obvious HDR. I agree on the horizon, should have evened it out a bit. Thanks.