The picture I wanted most out of the Grand Teton/Yellowstone photo tour was a bison covered in snow or frost. Our first day in Yellowstone was beautiful and there was a lot of snow on the ground, but the trees had no snow on them at all. That night it snowed, and the next morning was magical. The entire park was white. Bison use their massive heads to make a clearing on the ground from which they can eat grass, so it’s easy to find animals with white faces. But I also wanted their bodies white. We came upon two large bison along the Madison River, and this is exactly what I wanted. My only regret was that the animals were about 20 feet below my shooting position, and I don’t like photographing down on animals. It would have been too dangerous, however, for me to walk in the waist-deep snow to their level. So, I made the best of the situation. I used a 100-400mm Canon zoom along with a 1.4x teleconverter, giving me 560mm of focal length. My settings were 1/1000, f/8, and 1250 ISO. Due to the low light level late in the day, the images came out bluish because I was using daylight white balance. Using the temperature slider in Adobe Camera Raw, I tweaked the color to look more correct.
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