The treepie might not be the most colorful bird in India, but it is one of the most fearless. Or so the story goes. They share the same forest habitat as the Bengal tiger and are sometimes called the tiger bird or the tiger’s toothpick because they have been known to pick meat from the teeth of a resting tiger.
Nikon D300 with Nikkor 200-400mm lens (at 400mm) ISO 800, f/7.1 at 1/400th of a second
Black bears are very good climbers and this young cinnamon black bear appeared to be having a good old time climbing through the trees in a northern Minnesota forest.
Nikon D700 with Nikkor 70-200mm lens (at 70mm) ISO 800, f/2.8 at 1/400th of a second
For this photo, I got up close to the wombat and used a fisheye lens to get as wide a view of its vast environment as I could. I also wanted to get in all those stormy clouds above the distant mountains.
Nikon D800 with Sigma 15mm fisheye lens, ISO 800, f/4 at 1/1600th of a second
If you’re going to be a simple black bird, might as well have really cool hair. This is the tawny-crested tanager. The males get the orange top whereas the females are a dark olive brown throughout. I only saw two of these birds on my recent trip to Panama. This will be my last post until next Monday as I’ll be taking a few days off this week.
Nikon D810 with Nikkor 200-400mm lens (at 400mm) ISO 400, f/4 at 1/200th of a second
I love the way these little glass frogs always look like they’re doing push ups. It’s hard to distinguish between all the different species of glass frog in Panama and other parts of Central and South America, but I believe this guy is the Fleischmann’s glass frog.
Nikon D810 with Nikkor 105mm macro lens, ISO 250, f/16 at 1/250th of a second, two Nikon SB-900 flash units
Here’s another one from the American west. This time South Dakota’s Badlands. The sun had long since set, but there was still just a bit of light in the sky when I came upon this bison on the horizon. There wasn’t enough light, however, for a silhouette, so I used flash to illuminate the bison and the foreground grass, while exposing for the night time sky. I used a very high ISO and slow shutter. If I hadn’t, the background would have been black.
Nikon D700 with Nikkor 70-200mm lens (at 70mm) ISO 6400, f/2.8 at 1/13th of a second.
I like slowing the shutter speed down every now and again and panning to get more of an abstract look — especially when trying to convey motion. For this shot, I went even slower than usual at only 1/10th of a second. As I’ve mentioned before, pronghorn are second only to the cheetah as the fastest land mammal in the world. This herd of them was photographed last fall in Yellowstone National Park.
Nikon D800 with Nikkor 70-200mm lens (at 200mm) ISO 800, f/5.6 at 1/10th of a second
This Nazca booby chick looked like a pile of cotton with a beak. The Nazca is one of three different species of booby that I photographed while in the Galapagos Islands. The other two being the blue footed and the red footed boobies.
Nikon D700 with Nikkor 200-400mm lens (at 360mm) ISO 400, f/4 at 1/2500th of a second
A mother reticulated giraffe and her calf pose for the camera in Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya.
Nikon D700 with Nikkor 70-200mm lens (at 200mm) ISO 400, f/4.5 at 1/2000th of a second
These two photos are from Maria Island in Tasmania, Australia. The patters in the rock were caused by groundwater which seeped down through the sandstone thousands of years ago and left behind iron oxides which stained the rock.
Top photo — Nikon D800 with Nikkor 17-35mm lens (at 17mm) ISO 100, f/18 at 1/4th, 1/15th, 1/8th, 1/2 and 1 seconds
Bottom photo — Nikon D800 with Nikkor 17-35mm lens (at 17mm) ISO 100, f/18 at 1.6, .4, 1/10th, 1/5th and .8 seconds