Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

I was fortunate to get to visit some pretty cool places last year, and to photograph some awesome critters, many of which I had never seen so well before. Here are the best of the lot.

In March I went out to Black Mesa with my mentor, Rich Cifelli, and a Native Explorers crew led by Kent Smith. Rich and I saw this pronghorn on the way in, and I got the shot by holding my phone up to Rich’s binoculars.

Later that same day, I caught these pronghorns crossing the highway in front of us. You can tell from the glare and splotches that I was shooting through the windshield. It was that or no shot.

A few days later, we got absurdly lucky. Everyone was driving back to base at the end of the day, with Rich’s truck at the end of the train. This herd of bighorn sheep picked that time to jump a fence and run across the road, right in front of Rich’s truck. Everyone else missed it, they were too far ahead. The bighorns crossed the road in front of our caravan again a couple of days later, and Kent Smith and Jeff Hargrave got some good photos of their own.

I like this landing-and-recovery sequence, illustrated by four different individuals.

Check out the two at the edge of the road, running in step.

A final wide shot. Thank goodness for burst mode shooting. These are all cropped iPhone photos, by the way.

Then in June I got to go with my son’s 5th grade field trip group to Santa Cruz Island in Channel Islands National Park, where we camped for three days and two nights. The dwarf island foxes were always around.

I think people have actually been good about not feeding them because they don’t beg. Neither are they afraid of humans. They treated us as non-threatening and inedible chunks of ambulatory matter. This one was startled by something in the bush and decided that running past me was the lesser of two evils. It might have been another fox, we saw and heard several get into tussles.

Another burst mode catch was this raven on the beach.

Here’s a crop. Not bad, sez me. For a shot of a stinkin’ theropod.

And here’s my favorite shot of that trip, and my second-favorite of the entire year. On the boat ride out to the island, a pod of dolphins came and surfed our bow wake. They did this for quite a while, and everyone who wanted to was able to cycle through the front of the boat and get close-up shots. I’d seen dolphins from shore before, when we lived in NorCal, but I’d never gotten to see them up close from the water. This is yet another burst-mode catch, taken just as this dolphin was breaking the water and before most of the bubbles coming out of its blowhole had popped.

I’m going to use my son’s standing as a tetrapod to sneak this in: sunset at Dead Horse Point, near Moab, Utah. That’s the Colorado River down there, 2000 feet below the clifftops. If you’re ever in that neck of the woods, this is the place to come see the sun set. Trust me on this.