Picture of the week

Grazing the sunset

A pair of wild horses grazing a sage prairie up on a mesa close to sunset. This pair were part of larger herd of about a dozen horses found at a remote location of the San Rafael Swell in southern Utah.  I happened upon them during a road trip out to do some canyoneering with some other friends to explore some little-known slots, starting at a location known as Baptist Draw, that feeds into a separate slot canyon known as upper Chute.  The place is very out-of-the-way near the end of about 40-50 miles of dirt roads; which probably help explains the presence of wild horses in the area.  We encountered this group of horses twice, once on the way in to our dry camp location, and again the next evening when departing the area. This image above was captured on the on the second encounter, as it was possible to get closer, with the horses apparently being more at ease with our presence.

While there we also ran into some pronghorn antelope that appeared to have just had some type of skrimish with these horses, as they were first spotted running away from the horse herd.  It was quite a spectacle to see both species of animals in action interacting in this way in a more undisturbed setting.  At one point the antelope headed toward the vehicle I was in before veering off at the last couple of seconds about a hundred feet away (see the shot to the left).  Shortly thereafter a straggler followed the same route, making me wonder that perhaps they were following some type of established game trail.

The images above were shot using a Canon 70D with an EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS lens handheld.  This has been my go-to lens for more spontaneous wildlife opportunities like this.  It is compact enough to have in my camera bag most of the time, while being reasonably sharp, with good color contrast and reproduction, and sufficiently fast in its auto-focus performance.  There have been countless times like this where I have been able to capture wildlife situations, that otherwise would potentially have been lost with some lens with lesser reach or build.  The settings for the horse image were: 400mm, 1/1000 sec, f/9, and ISO 800. I tried to apply a slightly tighter aperture in order bring a bit more of the sage into focus, applying the focus point just in front of the horses.

All content and images are property of Stephen Fischer Photography, copyright 2014.  Last updated: 10/26/2014   ()