First shot of the Day. D4 200mm f/4 1/1000 ISO 400
For my first blog post on my new website, I figure I should start with something that was very exciting and fun for me and my wife! I just bought a Nikon 200-400mm f/4 VR 1 for an excellent price and I really wanted to use it for something before it gets too cold here in Bismarck, North Dakota. For future blog posts I'll probably end up trying to take more "behind the scenes" photos to fill out a few more pictures.
 Nikon D4 with 200-400mm f/4 VR 1 lens. This is in a different league than the 70-200. |  That front element is crazy. Also Sony, Nikon, and Fuji product boxes in the background. |
Now a lens of this size and weight takes some getting used to, and I had gone out a week earlier (the day after I got it) up to the Audubon National Wildlife Preserve to try to get some pictures of birds or anything that moved and it didn't really go too well. For most wildlife applications, 400mm just isn't long enough. I was really feeling the need for something longer, or a crop-sensor camera (something like the Nikon D7100). But my D4 is still on the top of the heap for me in terms of speed and quality, so I stuck with it.
Really the only good shot I got of any birds from the wildlife refuge. D4 400mm f/4 1/2000 ISO 200
So feeling like a photographic failure I planned a bit more ambitious trip out to Teddy Roosevelt National Park here in North Dakota for the next weekend. Fortunately it intersected with a weekend that my Wife was actually able to be home from her job in Williston (Civil Engineer), and we were able to make a day of it!
So Saturday morning we headed off down I-94 west, stopping in Dickinson for some lunch. One seemingly amazing thing about being this far north is that the light just seems to be good all the time. With the sun as relatively low as it is in the winter we get a bit more oblique angle, giving it just a bit more yellowish tint even at high noon. Something that I never really thought about before moving here.
We arrived at the Park entrance probably around 1 in the afternoon, with the sun fairly high in the sky and the temperature surprisingly pushing 75 degrees. If there was any wildlife around it seemed like a perfect day to go hiking around to try to find it.
So Saturday morning we headed off down I-94 west, stopping in Dickinson for some lunch. One seemingly amazing thing about being this far north is that the light just seems to be good all the time. With the sun as relatively low as it is in the winter we get a bit more oblique angle, giving it just a bit more yellowish tint even at high noon. Something that I never really thought about before moving here.
We arrived at the Park entrance probably around 1 in the afternoon, with the sun fairly high in the sky and the temperature surprisingly pushing 75 degrees. If there was any wildlife around it seemed like a perfect day to go hiking around to try to find it.
D4 400mm f/5.6 1/500 ISO 400
Bam. Right off the bat like 5 minutes into the park there is a Bison just chilling by the road. While many people will probably say it is a lazy shot, I think it is great. You don't get many chances to be this close to a big animal like this with a big lens you can use to fill the frame with this massive bison face! So I was starting to feel pretty great about the trip already, with 2 printable shots in the bag!
One animal that I didn't really think about taking pictures of yet there are thousands of them in the park just so happens to be the Prairie Dog. While they are a completely normal animal to see in the wild for me, having grown up in Colorado, to a lot of other people they are a novelty that they have only ever seen in a Zoo. So we decided to stop by a fairly large "colony" I guess you would call it, and I crawled out towards some of the burrows in search of a really nice depth of field photo.
One animal that I didn't really think about taking pictures of yet there are thousands of them in the park just so happens to be the Prairie Dog. While they are a completely normal animal to see in the wild for me, having grown up in Colorado, to a lot of other people they are a novelty that they have only ever seen in a Zoo. So we decided to stop by a fairly large "colony" I guess you would call it, and I crawled out towards some of the burrows in search of a really nice depth of field photo.
D4 400mm f/5 1/1600 ISO 400
Even though most of these creatures in the park are quite calm around humans, it was still fairly difficult to get close enough to get a good shot filling the frame. And it is also quite hard to crawl forward while toting a 10 pound lens with a 4 pound camera attached. But I think I did all right. My wife was also taking photos of the Prairie Dogs on the other side of the road, giggling at their little squeak-bark noises.
After having enough of these dumb little animals we continued on on the road around the park, a 20 mile or so drive which seems to take us around 4 hours to do whenever we go out there. There is an area with a hiking trail called the Coal Vein trail or something like that (I should really look it up, but it isn't too important here), and we decided to head up there to see if we could find some of the wild horses that live in and around the park. That is something that, even coming from Colorado, blows my mind. I have never seen horses in the Wild before, so that was really cool.
After having enough of these dumb little animals we continued on on the road around the park, a 20 mile or so drive which seems to take us around 4 hours to do whenever we go out there. There is an area with a hiking trail called the Coal Vein trail or something like that (I should really look it up, but it isn't too important here), and we decided to head up there to see if we could find some of the wild horses that live in and around the park. That is something that, even coming from Colorado, blows my mind. I have never seen horses in the Wild before, so that was really cool.
Yet another Printable Image. D4 400mm f/4.5 1/1600 ISO 400
D4 200mm f/4 1/1000 ISO 200
They were pretty much completely carefree about us being there taking photos of them, which allowed me to get surprisingly close (for using a 400mm lens) to get some really nice and detailed shots of the little family of 3 horses. We took quite a few photos here (my wife got quite a few nice ones with my D800 and 70-200 as well, I just won't post them here since they are her photos), before moving on. More success, in my mind.
Pretty much 10 minutes later after leaving that little trailhead we run into a pack of cars stopped on the little road. More horses, of course. This time a larger group a bit farther away than the previous group.
Pretty much 10 minutes later after leaving that little trailhead we run into a pack of cars stopped on the little road. More horses, of course. This time a larger group a bit farther away than the previous group.
 D4 400mm f/5 1/800 ISO 200 |  D4 200mm f/5.6 1/1000 ISO 400 |
All of the D4 photos were taken with the 200-400. Surprisingly I didn't change lenses at all on that Camera. We changed a few times on the D800 though. This nice black and grey horse seemed to be the lord of the group, just sort of stood there eyeing us as I took photos.
D4 400mm f/5.6 1/800 ISO 400
After getting even more printable photos (my gold standard for quality, apparently), we decided to stop up at the highest point in the park. The place where I proposed to my now Wife on July 4th 2013. Pretty much the same, though now it is brown instead of green. But it was nice to be up there again and re-live the moment a little bit.
D800 70mm f/6.3 1/2500 ISO 400
As much as I love getting a nice shot of an animal, I grew up with Landscape photography, and it was what got me into it in the first place, with an old Kodak "Point and Shoot" 35mm film camera in southern Colorado that I shot so much the first week I had it that I actually broke it... oops. Since then I have been searching for the camera/lens combination that can get it as close to what my eye sees as possible, and I think I found it in the D800. But this isn't a Camera review, so moving on.
As we were coming down the road, there just happened to be yet another Bison chilling by the road. I did actually get out of the car this time to take photos, since the angle from the road was awful. While I was maintaining a nice safe distance from the beast with my long lens, there was a group of older tourists that literally just stopped like 10 feet away and got out to take pictures with their iPhones. I guess that is my pennance for going to a park to take photos instead of to Montana Wilderness or something. This is probably the best one, with the tail there as its rutting around in the ground
As we were coming down the road, there just happened to be yet another Bison chilling by the road. I did actually get out of the car this time to take photos, since the angle from the road was awful. While I was maintaining a nice safe distance from the beast with my long lens, there was a group of older tourists that literally just stopped like 10 feet away and got out to take pictures with their iPhones. I guess that is my pennance for going to a park to take photos instead of to Montana Wilderness or something. This is probably the best one, with the tail there as its rutting around in the ground
D4 350mm f/5.6 1/800 ISO 400
Since this guy was fairly close to the road (you can see a guard rail in the background there) we decided to move on. We didn't see too much wildlife past here, but we did stop and take some more nice landscape photos a bit farther on. I decided to challenge myself and try to get good landscape photos with the 200-400, since most people just take a wide-angle lens and point it at the landscape. It was a fun challenge, and I was getting more used to using the massive lens both on a monopod and hand-held (though not for very long).
 D4 240mm f/8 1/1000 ISO 400 |  D4 400mm f/8 1/1250 ISO 400. Trying out a 400mm landscape instead of a 14mm landscape |
The river going through the park was ridiculously low, and it was making some really awesome patterns in the water between that and the angle of the sun. While the color version of this was nice, I really felt that black and white brought out the texture more, which was the more interesting part.
Now this post is getting fairly long, especially for a first post, so I will begin to wrap things up. I did bring my Fujifilm X-T1 as well as the Nikon Gear, just because you can never have enough cameras (we ended up having 4 interchangeable lens cameras with us). I'll post a little gallery of the photos from that so I don;t take up too much more time or space. It is a super fun little camera with crazy good image quality. I did some tests comparing it to the Canon 7D Mark 2 and Canon 6D and it beat out both of them in low light performance and resolution. But that'll probably end up being in my next blog post, so photo nerds stay tuned.
We decided to head home before the sun set, just to get some light for driving, but we stopped off before leaving to get a couple more photos when the light was just awesome. I really want to try to get out to the park here in the winter, just for a different perspective.
Also Justine took a great little timelapse of our trip with her GoPro!
Also Justine took a great little timelapse of our trip with her GoPro!
D800 42mm f/5 1/400 ISO 200
For those of you who read this, thanks a ton! I'll try to do more posts on here in the future. I had an older blog that I updated regularly for a couple years, so I know I am capable of doing it. Maybe I'll try to import some of those old posts about sports photography and such. Anyways, have a good day!
Kevin Fedde
Fedde Studios
Kevin Fedde
Fedde Studios
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