Photo Friday: Wildlife
After the break: Malcolm Gladwell? more like Mehlcolm Gladwell, ghost games for betting, and Lana Del Ray x Billie Eilish at Coachella
I’m not sure exactly what’s going on, but I’ve sort of lost the thread on things to write about lately. I’m not sure if I’m going to have anything for you on Monday or not, but the good news is that I’ve still got the creative juices going for the Photo Friday posts.
Living in Dallas doesn’t provide a ton of opportunities to photograph wildlife with a really long lens. I’ve shot some birds at the lake and some squirrels in my backyard, but it’s a little different when you’re fifteen feet from a buffalo1, you know? I realized what the limitations of my 100-400mm lens were when I started trying to use it to get wildlife shots at that 400mm focal length. It was a lot harder to get clear shots without the lens stabilization that I was used to in my 70-200mm.
I did end up renting a fancy schmancy lens for the last two days in Yellowstone and while it helped, I still found myself making rookie mistakes in the excitement of seeing a real life big wild animal. Let’s talk through the shots!
Photos
1.
The aforementioned buffalo that was 15 feet away is the subject of our first image! If I was going to risk my life trying to get around it, I was at least going to try and get a picture.
I loved the opposite weighting in the corners of this image. Bottom left is heavy with the buffalo’s head, while the upper right has a geyser with the steam coming off of it. The runoff coming from the geyser gives a flow down to the buffalo as well, which helps draw your eye back to it.
I didn’t do a whole lot to edit this one. I just wanted to make it relatively realistic. I did try and bring up the exposure on the buffalo some, because the downside of the otherwise nice clouds was that it tended to make the bison we saw look like big black blobs.
Original:
2.
We stumbled on these antelope on the first day I had the rental lens. I was lucky that it went out to 600mm, which meant that I could get excellent, sharp images from very far away.
Except that I’m a bit of a supertelephoto noob, and kept forgetting that I needed to make sure the shutter speed was high enough to account for how much a little movement at the camera can create huge movement at the end of a 600mm lens! I kept getting really incredible images that had motion blur in them.
I also noticed that when you’re focusing that far out, the autofocus can be a little off. If you’re 100m away from the action, getting within a few feet of the target is pretty good, but when it’s in a camera, that’s enough to visibly miss focus. If I were better at shooting wildlife and had been able to hang out around these guys for a while, I probably would have tried manual focus. Is that what wildlife people do? Or do they just get even better lenses?
Thankfully, this shot was pretty sharp and the subject was in focus. I actually like the rock in the foreground because it gives the viewer a sense of how far away the shot was taken.
No big editing adjustments here, just a little crop and some exposure and color tweaks.
Original:
3.
At the end of the first day with the rental lens, we were up to our eyeballs in wildlife. We had multiple small bison herds and then the antelope, and as we were heading out from the antelope, someone saw my big, honkin’ lens and told me there were hundreds of bison a little further down the road. So we headed that way, and we had not been lied to.
One of the things I’ve grown to appreciate as I’ve spent more time as a photographer is that there are many beautiful things that you will see in the world that you will want to remember, but not all of them will make good images. Some of those landscapes you can keep for yourself.
Hundreds of bison grazing by a small lake is one of those things that is better to experience in person than try to capture as a whole in one image.
It was hard to find one interesting composition in the sea of possibilities I saw before me. There was always something in the way or half a bison that would get caught in the frame or the image was just boring. You don’t want to get an image of a single buffalo when you’re facing a whole herd; you can get that image in plenty of other situations. You want to capture a group. Plus, it was cloudy and we were experiencing lower light conditions at the end of the day, so the bison were becoming dark and blobby again.
I was so lucky that I got this group all together in a way that was visually pleasing, but no one was crossing into or out of the edge of the frame. The edits were able to bring out the little bit of sunset light we had on the bisons’ backs, and one or two of them have their heads up so they’re not all face down in the ground.
I do wish they’d been facing me instead of facing the opposite direction, but I’m not going to complain about this shot. I genuinely walked away from that scene thinking I hadn’t gotten anything worth printing, so this was a really great surprise.
Original:
Bonus
This is not a good image! I know that. I shot it at the long end of my 400mm lens before I had the rental. I just wanted to share it because I was extremely stoked about the bull elk we saw as we were leaving the first night. Look at the rack on this thing! He was absolutely massive and while I wish I’d had a longer lens, it was still an incredible moment to see an animal like this.
Links
1. Forget Gladwell by W. David Marx
The problem is that every Gladwell book falls into this pattern: A weak thesis with obvious flaws treated like the sole way to view the world. But wouldn't he be right at least sometimes? His track record for constant error is a real mystery.
I have disliked Malcolm Gladwell ever since I first came across his writing. I’m reflexively untrustworthy of books that claim to have “it all” figured out. Especially when one person has written four or five of them to great acclaim. There does seem to be some growing pushback against Gladwell that I’m happy to see, because it seems that his books are not particularly rigorously researched and often just…wrong. If you have an opinion, either for or against Gladwell, this will likely be an interesting read for you.
2. Stream Teams: Battery Farming Sport For Bets by Bellingcat
A Bellingcat analysis of 1xBet’s website found that 1,297 games of short football were live-streamed during a 24 hour period in September. By comparison the Bundesliga, Premier League and La Liga play a combined 1,066 league games per season. Should these figures be indicative of 1xBet’s daily output, the number of amateur football matches broadcast to the gambling site each year would be almost half a million.
And the model has been replicated on an industrial scale. 1xBet streams videos from various locations hosting other non-professional tournaments ranging from basketball, volleyball and floorball to ice hockey, tennis, table tennis. Games are played in marquee warehouses and converted arenas that look like sets from the television series Squid Game.
This was an insane story. There has been a lot written lately about the massive issues with the growth of legal gambling both worldwide and specifically in the United States. Prohibition doesn’t stop people from gambling, but not allowing people to open their phones and place bets on any game at any moment of the day certainly reduces the share of people who gamble their entire life savings away. But at least there are only a fixed number of events that people can bet on at any given time, right?
Wrong. 1xBet, an extremely sketchy betting site, is in the business of running completely bogus sporting events just for the sake of setting odds and taking bets on them. As if there aren’t enough legitimate games to bet on.
The article is incredible, but the actual subject is incredibly gross.
3. Ocean Eyes/Video Games by Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish
I’m not a massive fan of either Lana Del Ray or Billie Eilish generally speaking, but I do really like Ocean Eyes and Video Games. Someone posted this on Bluesky earlier today and I absolutely loved watching these two artists perform together.
It’s especially cool to see Eilish clearly living the dream performing with someone who inspired her to make music at the end of the video.
By no fault of my own! I was standing on the approved boardwalk by a geyser and the buffalo just sauntered over and crossed in front of us like we weren’t even there. Which is much better than them crossing like we were there, I guess. But we didn’t know what to do, so we just froze and then waited for the buffalo to start grazing and then tiptoed away as quickly as possible.
Of possible interest to you, Alexandra, is this new museum show (gift link to the WSJ review)...
< https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/fine-art/discovering-ansel-adams-review-capturing-natures-drama-70eac91d?st=5xRBAh&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink >
It would be extra great, as in convenient, should the show be near to your home.
You’ve got great creativity and imagination, Alexandra, and something quite unique in your Substack. There is no need to keep a regimented posting schedule. We “live in interesting times”, and everyone is feeling a lot of stress right now, which changes our desires and motivations. Take time to breathe, contemplate the stars, or whatever, and go where your heart takes you.