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| 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. Learn these tools in Advance Your Digital Photography class, beginning September 1, 2026, at the Lifelong Learning Center in Missoula, Montana. Click here for details and registration.