Alert Bighorn

Hi everyone! John here. I wanted to introduce you to yet another wildlife photographer-in-the-making in our family, my 8yr old son, Josiah. Jim and I spoke almost a year ago about setting up a membership for Josiah, but my wife and I decided to give him a little more time to see if this was something he really wanted to do. Turns out it is, and he appears to be following in his big sister's (Jenaya's) footsteps.

Posts from Josiah will be a little different, as will his comments on other images I expect, as for the time being he is relying on me or his sisters to help him out on this front...but he spends a ton of time every week looking through the wonderful pictures here, and is excited to be able to express his appreciation with comments now.

I also wanted to mention something I know I would have been wondering about. Josiah's pictures really are HIS pictures. What I mean by that is I do NOT believe in setting the camera up on the tripod, get all the settings and focus right, and having him come and press the button. Josiah often wanders off "on his own" with one of my cameras and lenses as Jenaya or Marlise and I are engrossed in some wildlife subject, and returns with a dozen or so pictures to show us. Jenaya and I do offer suggestions for ISO or aperture sometimes, or exposure compensation if he tells us his highlights are blown, etc.

In any event, Josiah is a huge wildlife lover and is often the first member of the family to ask to go out in search of something to photograph. He also shares my passion for hiking up to get bighorn pictures in their environment (within reason, of course), which brings us to this image!

And this is where I'll let Josiah introduce his very first picture on NPN (and in this case, I had headed off after different sheep and was 50yds away, watching him work his angles as he found something he liked). Thanks in advance for letting him be part of the community here despite his young age. I think you'll find him to be a great guy and remarkably observant and thoughtful for his age.

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This is one of my favourite bighorn pictures. My dad and I spotted a group of about 30 bighorn rams on the side of a mountain in Waterton Lakes National Park and hiked up to photograph them. My dad really wanted to get some pictures of the two biggest rams, but I saw this guy and hiked up a little higher to get a good picture of him. I like how he posed for me! We were almost out of light so my dad told me I needed to be super still to get sharp pictures. They didn't all turn out but I was happy this one worked!

My dad is teaching me which apertures to use to get the animal sharp like this and the background soft. I really like the way this one turned out!

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Nikon D300
Nikkor AF-S 300mm f/4 IF-ED with 1.4TC
ISO 500
1/100sec @ f/7.1
monopod
full frame