Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Arizona”
Thought I would share a few images of animals from our Arizona winter backyard. This little desert cottontail had almost no fear of us, and often would hang around in the yard. he was appropriately named notches, and name we have used a few times over the years. Marana, Arizona.
It has been awhile since I have photographed bats. There were so many of them in the Chiricahua Mountains, that I started to play around with them again, although unsuccessfully since I didn’t have my proper trigger. Bats have really been hitting our humminging bird feeders in Marana, so set up again last night with good success.
On an occasional photo, I had ghosting, but not consistently. I have a feeling that might be due to the Camptraption flash triggers. I don’t think they are ideal for this – I used them since they stay “awake” all night. Tonight, I’ll try Phottix Ares II. The only drawback with them is that they turn off with a hour of inactivity. They shouldn’t be a problem, there are lots of bats!
It took a little bit of sense, and a number of nights with no success before I was finally able to capture a gray fox on this cool rock. @desertphotoretreat
Used camtraption trigger for the fox and flashes. I used four flashes here. One on each side of the camera, one to back light to fox (didn’t really do anything), and one of the background trees. This was an 8 second exposure for the sky.
Did another trail camera photo dump from the @desertphotoretreat Always fun to see what animals share the water hole. I knew a rattle snake was hanging around since I found a shedded skin a couple of week earlier. However, a snake has never shown up in the camera – probably because they are cold blooded. The reason this one showed was thanks to the gray fox.
You can see they interacted for a few minutes. At one point the snake curled up and raised its head while facing the fox. Ultimately it appears they were both just after a drink and in the last photo you can see the fox had no interest in the snake.
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This gambel’s quail family with at least 12 brand new little babies just showed up to the water drip at the Desert Photo Retreat! Granted, it is mid day light, and photographed through the dirty, tinted window of our RV. But, too cute not to share!
I had a trail camera set up in this little wash the last couple of weeks and noticed that the animals would sometimes use it to access our water hole. So last night I grabbed a bunch of flashes and set up knowing this would be the last night of this moon cycle to still capture stars in the sky. Got lucky and captured most of the fox! Normally if there is any abient light such as the moon in this case, the subject will be ghosted. Here the fox must have been holding perfectly still since it is sharp, maybe it sees a mouse.
Techs for the curious: Olympus OM-1, silent shutter, f/4, ISO 4,000 20 seconds. Usually I would go with a larger f-stop and shorter shutter speed, but the exact location of the subject wasn’t obvious, so I wanted a tad more depth of field. Two Godox flashes up close camera left and right at 128 power, another one on a stand camera right at 1/32 power which must not have fired since the right hand saguaros are dark, and a Nikon flash off in the distance camera left a 1/32 power. Camtraption triggers and sensors.
From last night. One of the advantages of a moonless night is the ability to capture the animal with stars. This is funny, I was working on the settings on the back of my camera when a striped skunk suddenly appeared on the LCD screen on the back of my camera. I thought, how could that be, it would have to be a couple of feet away…wait. Sure enough, I peaked over the top of the camera and watched a skunk walk right past me, past the water hole and off into the desert. It was like I didn’t exist which was pretty cool.
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