Kathy Eyster's Blog

Cow Moose and Calves Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming On a fall visit to Yellowstone National Park, I parked along the roadside to capture some photos of this mother moose and her offspring. There was plenty of constant light, so I selected manual exposure mode. The animals were quietly grazing so 1/500 second shutter speed was sufficient to freeze their motion. I opened the lens to its widest aperture of f/5.6 and used ISO 100 in the warm afternoon light. I used a 70-200mm lens with a 1.4x tele-converter on a cropped sensor camera which provided an equivalent focal length of about 234mm. but the animals were a long way from the road in the middle of the meadow, so I cropped quite a bit. The exposure and light did the work for me in this image, so I only needed to make a few edits to the raw file. I darkened the bright grass a little and lightened the shadows in the trees and the moose. Manual exposure mode, raw photo files and photo editing software can help you produce great images...