Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Reflective Pose on Turtle Lake

























Last night I went for a drive after the heavy rain showers subsided.  My hope was too see some wildlife.  I was going to hike in to a lake to see if there were was a loon family on it.  Unfortunately I never made into that lake because of a huge mud hole that I didn't feel like walking through.  Plus, the mosquitos were AWFUL!  So, I went back to the truck and decided to just drive around for a little bit and maybe I'd get lucky and see something else.  Sure enough, as I was driving past Turtle Lake in Grand Portage, I saw a nice whitetail buck standing on the opposite shore of the lake.  He was just standing there motionless, which was a good thing because I didn't have much light to work with.  It was almost 9 PM and what little daylight was left was fading fast.  

I had to shoot this photo at ISO 3200 and f/8, and even then I was still only able to manage a shutter speed of 1/200 of a second with my lens at 600mm.  Generally speaking, with a telephoto lens you want your shutter speed to be at least the same as your focal length in order to get a sharp image.  With built-in image stabilization of lenses becoming more and more effective, though, we can shoot at slower and slower shutter speeds and still get acceptable sharpness.  Such was the case with this image shot with my Tamron 150-600 lens.  I'm amazed at how well this turned out, considering it was shot at 1/200 and ISO 3200 (which can also contribute to image softness).  Camera technology sure has come a long way!

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