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Jim,

Glad to hear you finally got to the park and thanks for sharing the wildlife images. I do have a technical question about the first three. It looks to me like you might have had to do a significant crop on these. The thing that really struck me though was the pretty rough looking bokeh with these images. Is that an issue with the lens you were using? I have to say that your results with the Nikkor 800mm has me looking around for one of these. That image of the eagle at ISO800 with that lens is just great.

I know what you mean here. Yellowstone scenery is all about geological features, river meadows, and waterfalls. But you can always drive south for 30 minutes to the Tetons for spectacular mountains. However, nothing in the lower 48 beats Glacier for snow capped mountains and valleys.

Again, thanks for sharing.

Geo

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It's easier to show the full image versus trying to say how much was cropped so here they are unprocessed and just downsized.







As for the bokeh, it is busy but so were the backgrounds. In careful processing of these I would normally use a blur routine to selectively even out the background. I was really work pretty quickly on all shots as the animals were up close but moving. With the coyote I had actually been shooting some ground squirrels, caught motion out of the corner of my eye, turned, and there was the coyote in the sage about 20 feet away.

This shot better shows what the surroundings where like:



As for the 800mm, it can deliver. But it is also a bear to work with if the light is not good. At least on my D300 it is because the viewfinder is not really set up for manually focusing. Liveview can help if time and light allows. Just trying to follow the one bear while moving the tripod and 12 lb lens was a challenge, then getting focus on the moving subject in the forest was, well, not very successful. I shot 4 young badgers and the mother with it from a distance of about 50 yards. A quick glance through the 100 or so frames has not found any where I truly hit focus. For more seditary well lit subjects the 800 can rock and is a bargain compared to most modern equivalents.