I photographed this bison in Yellowstone National Park last year. Bison are not easy animals to photograph because they are, essentially, large brown blobs of fur with barely discernible eyes. When they are covered in snow, however, they are a lot more compelling. It's interesting to watch them use their huge heads to push aside the snow so they can feed on grass and leaves buried by the white powder. That's why their faces are always white in winter. I used a 100-400mm Canon zoom for this shot along with a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me 560mm of focal length. Because of the contrast between the dark fur and the snow, I checked the exposures carefully on the LCD monitor on the back of the camera to make sure I had detail in both the highlights and the shadows. I study the picture rather than the histogram because it's easier for me to assess an image by looking at the detail rather than trying to ascertain artistry by looking at a graph. My settings were 1/640, f/8, and 1250 ISO.
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