Just over a week ago, my mother-in-law passed away. She lived in Poland. My wife recently was able to spend five weeks with her family before her mother passed. Zofia loved foxes. We had given her several printed 8×10 photos of my different fox images over the years. She made her first trip to the US the year our first child was born and I don’t think we could have survived those first months without Zofia’s help. She made two more trips to the US with her last one coming in 2019. I’ll never the forget the hospitality she gave me the first time I visited Poland and my then girlfriend’s family. She was warm, caring, and immediately welcomed me as part of the family. So, given her love for my fox photos, I thought I would share this one today. While taken with a telephoto lens, I cropped it in tightly and then enlarged it with Gigapixel AI.

My daughter turns 5 in less than a week and I took her into Yellowstone for the first time this season a week or so ago. I’ve been seeing a snowshoe hare in the same spot fairly reliably, so decided to take her there in the hopes she’d see it. We were the first ones out on the trail and sure enough, I spotted it. She was really excited and, using her kid camera, began photographing it. I did too and while I was taking this image, I heard her say in quiet, controlled excitement, “Dad, there’s another one!” I’ve never seen two in this spot, at least not out at the same time but I indulged her and looked at where she was pointing and sure enough, a second hare was nibbling grass nearby. So my surprise for her turned into a surprise for me too!

I mentioned in my last post about seeing some bear cubs. The sow, or female, had two cubs, born in the winter den and now out in the world for the first time. This little bear was reaching for an old stalk of grass while standing on a log. If you look at my camera settings under the image, you can see that I was using a long lens set up, and I then had to crop this image significantly and resized in Gigapixel AI. There was so much clutter and the subject really got lost in the image without the crop. The quality on this isn’t great and it’s probably not worth printing, but it’s a fun one to share.

I hadn’t taken a photo of a wolf since January 2019. Last week, I had probably the best photo shoot with a wolf in five years or so when this wolf came up the river, crossed the road and walked along a hillside near where I parked. The wolf is collared though the angle of the animal’s pose hides the collar pretty nicely. A couple of days after this photo, I saw my first bear cubs of the year but I haven’t taken a photo since. Hopefully things will pick back up soon. Today is also my sister’s 51st birthday and I’d like to wish her a happy birthday! She has been battling brain cancer for 6 years and is currently in the hospital. We love you Sharyn!

While I certainly like the cleanness that a snowy background provides, it doesn’t always tell the whole story. This image gives an idea of a bears life, or a day. What does a bear eat? Short answer, everything. You can see in this photo that the ground around the bear looks like it has been plowed with a rototiller. But that’s the bear’s doing as it digs up the ground searching for anything edible. Anything edible can be bugs, roots, grasses, larvae or anything else that provides calories. This is the same bear I’ve been photographing for the last month or so now.

First, to my knowledge, this is the same bear I’ve posted the previous two times. While I’ve heard of a couple of other grizzlies that have been seen I don’t want to create the perception that more bears are being seen than actually are. That said, I was able to find this bear again last week. Actually, there were a handful of photographers already on the side of the road as this subadult grizzly grazed about 150 to 200 yards away. After a long wait and a few nice chats with some photographers I haven’t seen in several years, the little bear took a long stroll, eventually going over a snow field. It was this moment everyone was hoping for as it’s always nice to a have bear on the snow. He or she made it’s way to another mucky area were it continued it’s search for grubs, roots, grasses, and anything else edible this time of year. As the light was getting harsh, I packed up and headed home satisfied with the snow walking bear photos.

I mentioned previously how I was pleased with some new software I have been using for a while now. Well this is another of those posts. This isn’t just about the software but also the camera. When I first started in photography, I shot film because digital wasn’t a thing yet. For nature photography, the most popular films had ISO’s, or speeds, of 50 or 100. Anything higher tended to have too much grain for the nature photography market. So with that background, I’ve always been hesitant to use high ISO’s even today. But a few weeks ago, as I went into Yellowstone, cloud cover made the light really low. Seeing this fox, I had a choice to use a lower ISO and most likely have blurry, unusable photos, or go higher than I like and hopefully come away with something. So I went up to ISO 6400 and shot away. I was really happy with the results straight out of the camera. As noted in the caption, I was shooting my Canon R5. I then ran the photos through Topaz DeNoise to clean them up and the software did a great job getting a clean, low noise background while keeping the detail in my subject. Again, I don’t get paid by either of those companies and I don’t receive the products for free, but did feel like sharing the success of using both as it does open up more possibilities than in past.

Even when Yellowstone is not completely open, there are decisions to be made about where to go. On May 4th, I intended to head south towards Old Faithful in hopes of finding some baby bison, but the fog was so incredibly thick, I changed my plans and headed towards north in the hopes of finding a grizzly. I thought to myself as I neared Norris Geyser Basin that if Steamboat was erupting, I wouldn’t stop for it this time. It hadn’t erupted since March 30th, so I didn’t expect it to be erupting anyway. But as I drove through Elk Park there it was, the massive steam plume indicating Steamboat was indeed erupting. The temptation was too great and I parked in the parking lot and headed towards the world’s largest active geyser. I was the only person in the parking lot surprisingly, even though it was barely after sunrise, so I grabbed my bear spray and camera gear and walked down the trail. Everything was soaked from the eruption and there were marble sized chunks of rock along the icy boardwalk. I would later learn the eruption started at 4 am but even 2 to 3 hours later, it was still an impressive sight. This image was taken at approximately 7 am. For the second year in a row now Steamboat was started my summer season with an early morning eruption.

This photo was taken last week on one my my explorations into Yellowstone. Nothing screams Yellowstone to me more than an image that shows both bison and thermal features. Yellowstone is home to the largest free roaming herd of bison in the world and is also home to the largest concentrations of thermal features any on the planet. While certainly not one of my best bison or thermal feature photos if you notice carefully, the cow bison has a nasty scar on her face. In the shape of an “L” it fortunately has healed nicely and she seemed to be in good health. Whether it was caused by the horn of another bison during a conflict, or perhaps an encounter with a predator, there’s not way to tell, but she is healthy and also very pregnant and will soon bring another bison calf into the world. Speaking of which, while I saw my first bison calf last week, and in a very pretty situation for a photo, there was no where to legally stop along the road, so it will remain a pleasant, unphotographed memory.

During my “down time” last month, I went back and re-worked some older images, mostly for fun. I also was trying out some new software to see what it was capable of doing. I’ve had the software from Topaz Labs for some time now but usually only use DeNoise Ai for noise reduction. But I spent some time playing with two other products, Gigapixel AI for enlarging files and Sharpen AI for sharpening images. I usually don’t talk about the equipment and products I use for photography much and I’m also not paid by or make any money from any of the companies I mention. I wasn’t super keen on Sharpen AI but Gigapixel AI did a nice job. The image above of a bobcat was cropped in from a larger file that showed the entire animal but I thought it would be fun to have a close up. If you’ve read my posts before you know I’m very keen about keeping respectable distances from my subjects to minimize stress and behavioral changes. And while I use a 500mm lens, often with teleconverters, it would be really difficult to get this image without being too close. For Gigapixel AI to work well, the original image must be really sharp and in focus, otherwise the enlargement will simply show the flaws of the photo even more. In the end, I was able to create a file that is sharp enough for large size prints and am pretty happy with the result.