Denali with longer lens

It’s shoulder season again so I went to Denali on Thursday. We left Fairbanks at about 10am and got home at 11pm which made for a really long day.  Although the park had snow over the previous weekend (during lottery pass days) we had beautiful blue skies and very mild cool weather.  We didn’t see a lot of wildlife, however since I was using new-to-me equipment, I’m kind of glad that I didn’t miss out on getting any once-in-a-lifetime kind of shots since a good portion of my efforts were with trying to figure out how to most effectively use the loaner equipment.

his time I took a (loaner) 300mm lens with a 1.4 extender and a metabones converter for my camera.  After that experience I’ve decided that such a long prime lens was too hard for me to find my subject, so I’ll be looking at the zoom lens again and now I just have to figure out what kind of glass I want and get the appropriate converter.

Maybe I’m spoiled by the lightness and compactness of what I’ve been using thus far, but I really didn’t like the weight or size of the Canon lens, even with a monopod to help support it, so I need to check out how heavy the Nikon lens are before I make a final choice I guess. A cursory inquiry at B&H shows me the Nikon lens for the 300 is almost 1/3 of the weight of the 300 Canon lens, so I’ll likely end up going that route.

 

Ice around the shoreline at Otto Lake.

Just outside the park we spot sheep! Fuzzy photo since I’m still figuring out how to focus the loaner lens.

So many sheep. There was a mom and baby too, but that picture is so fuzzy they just look like a white blob so I didn’t bother posting it. .

Bull moose, spotted before we even got to Savage River. This is the only animal we saw in the park before we got to mile 30. It was a quiet day for the critters, for sure.

 

The views were spectacular.

And Denali was out in full force all day long.

The pussy willows were out in full force. They were so pretty in the sunshine.

Grouse, I believe. There were a few of these at mile 30 when we got out to hike, but they were in the shade so I had to do some brighten and lightening of this picture so you could see detail. But the detail, WOW!

Wide open blue skies with Denali.

The river that you can see from the look out at mile 30 is starting to freeze. This was taken from the bridge we hiked to, hoping to see more wildlife.

We finally saw a young bull mosse on our way out. He was on the driver’s side, hiding in the trees. We backed up and stopped the car, hoping he would make a better appearance and he did. He crossed the road and it turns out he was chasing a female with a young baby moose.

He hung out on the other side of the road for quite some time and gave us some great pictures.

We decided to drive back into the park at dusk to see if we could spot more moose. We saw weird clouds instead, plus the moon rise.

 

Great profile.

I never caught sight of the two females after they crossed the road, but the male gave us some nice shots.

Crazy cloud formations. They looked like fire! There was a storm forecast for the next day, so maybe this is part of that storm?

Moon rise. I can even see the craters due to this lens!

Moon rise was spectacular.

My camera looks comical on the end of this lens. But it was an awesome learning experience and I’m grateful for the loan!

Alpenglow and Venus’ girdle, caused by something do to with sun reflecting and the earth’s shadow. I like science and will investigate more thoroughly, but it was just pretty to watch….

 

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