January 23, 2013
Gray Wolf in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Gray Wolf, Canis lupus, or simply wolf. This magnificent animal is associated with the wild and remote locations of North America, and Yellowstone National Park is a great place to view them in their natural habitat. View is the key word there. Folks gladly stand behind their spotting scopes and watch these magnificent creatures 1/4 to 1/2 mi (0.4 to 0.8 km) or more away. While it's always exciting to watch a wolf, such distant viewing opportunities are not good for photography. Viewing wolves from a distance is common. Photographing wolves up close is uncommon.

Yesterday morning, my last morning in Yellowstone for this trip, I had one of those uncommon experiences as I was driving down the Lamar Valley before sunrise. After I crested a hill, I saw a canid in the distance very close to the road and heading away like it had recently crossed the road. Because coyotes are more common to see up close than wolves, I immediately thought it was a coyote. As I kept watching it as I got closer, it didn't quite look like a coyote. Then it hit me: OMG-it's-a-wolf! I quickly set up to shoot from the car with the 1D X, 1.4x III, & 500 f4 even though it was dark (1/30 sec, f5.6, ISO 800) because encountering a wolf 50 yds (45m) away is very rare. It was wolf 755M, the alpha male of the Lamar Canyon Pack, sporting a new radio collar. It started paralleling the road, about 50 to 75 yds (45 to 70m) out, and I stayed ahead of it. In order to increase my chances of getting a sharp image, I increased the ISO to 1250 and had a whopping 1/180 sec shutter speed. While the wolf was a bit small in the frame, I didn't want to switch to the 1D Mk IV or 7D when I needed such a high ISO to get a still-slow shutter speed. The light kept coming up, and I finished shooting after official sunrise but with the wolf still in the shade of the nearby ridge and it was still pretty dark (1/350, f5.6, ISO 800). 755M started moving further and further from the road so I left, extremely excited to have had that 35 minutes or so in close proximity to a wolf in the wild going about his business. And yes, it stop to mark its territory a couple of times.

I only performed a small crop on the image to clean up the edges. That's how close the wolf was towards the end of our encounter. I also performed a little noise reduction because the noise at ISO 800 with the 1D X is mildly annoying to me in the out-of-focus dark background in a 100% view. The noise at ISO 200 with the 7D is really distracting in an out-of-focus dark background and significantly reduces the subject's fur or feather detail. I'm beginning to wonder if the 7D was a good investment and I'm once again lusting after dreaming about the Canon EF 600mm f4 L IS II USM.

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