Reesie Stalks Her Prey!

Throughout most of my life I have learned and practiced my photography skills in solitude.  However, this year I decided I would join our local photography club, “Wichita Wildlight Photographic Society“.  We meet once a month and enjoy being in a room with people who are there because they have some degree of passion for photography.  It’s a real mixture of people, representative of any group of 50 people you might form from the Walmart crowd.  Anyway, back in October, about 20, or so, of us loaded onto a bus at the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center for an excursion into the Special Use area.  The Special Use area is closed to the public and contains well over half of the Refuge itself.  I had never been in this section of the WMWR, so I was excited to go even though 3:00 PM is not the best light to for photographs.It was difficult to decide what equipment to take along on this Southwest Oklahoma safari.  I watched the weather reports closely, trying to get some feeling for what the conditions might be that day.  I finally decided, regardless of sunshine or overcase skies, I would enjoy the sights, but photograph the people instead of the wildlife.  Having to the public use areas of the WMWR more times than I can guess, I figured we’d never get close enough to the real wildlife for even my longest telephoto, a 400 mm Sigma APO, even using my 1.4 teleconverter.  My best chance, I decided was to pack light taking only my Sony 70-200 G.  As it turned out, my thinking was exactly correct, for me!

When 3:00 PM arrived and we were loading on the bus, the sky was 100% overcast with heavy dark grey clouds.  I boosted the ISO on my A700 up to 400, from the usual 160 or 200.   I grabbed my monopod from the pickup, an extra battery, and my Gepe card case containing 4, 2GB CF cards, and headed for the bus.  I intended, from the outset, to try my hand at high dynamic range photographs of my fellow club members.  The overcast skies, and my ISO, would force some slow shutter speeds so I knew I would not be able to take multiple exposures bracketing like usually do.  I would need to make one image and then use my RAW converter, of choice, to create two more images, one -2 EV, and one +2 EV.  The afternoon proved to be exciting, challenging, and rewarding as I was able to come up with some results I like.