Oh Give Me A Home, Where Buffalo Roam, Where Ranchers And Photographers Play

And for the final leg of my Salt Lake City trip, I headed up to Antelope Island State Park which is in the middle of the Great Salt Lake itself. I didn't see any antelope, but there was a whole mess of Bison. I love how the above photo turned out; It's an HDR and everything came out blurry except the American Buffalo because it was so windy that I had a hard time keeping the camera steady through three exposures. I have a weird affinity for blurry pictures anyway, so this was really a bonus. I did get a clear one, and here it is but I like the blurry one way better.

I really wanted to go for a swim, and I didn't even care that it was windy and cold. But the beaches were closed and anyway it seemed like the lake was at low tide or something..? I'd have had to walk through about 100 yards of mud before getting to the water, and I was simply not prepared for that. Sigh. But here's the causeway you drive on to get to the island.

Yeah, fascinating. I like the vanishing point though.

Caught a bison checkin' me out.

They're so strange looking, like they're wearing a fur stole or the hide of an enemy they totally head-butted to death. I drove up to a nice viewpoint over the island. Got some landscape shots.

Neat. I like the next one also though because I caught some mist coming off the lake and the Sun looks cool through the clouds.

There's a bison ranch on the island too, where you can go and check out more bison. And the ranchers who are also an odd-looking species.

When I got there they were busy herding the buffalo down these chutes until they could pin 'em one by one in this metal boxy thing in order to tag 'em or give 'em a vaccine or whatever crazy ass thing it was they were doing.

I got a couple of fairly typical shots of them running away from the scary man-people.

Sigh. I need a better telephoto lens, dammit.

Check out this scary monster.

Whew, the nice bison got away from that nasty beast.

And that's it really. I had a great time bopping around the island, obsessively changing out my lenses a million times because whichever one I was using was never the right one but you know, that's the nature of being an amateur photgrapher. I was stalking this one buffalo as he was grazing, and it was only after I got home and looked more closely at my pictures that I realized I may have been in any danger. This one really must be sick of the tourists; that is a mean mean eye.

Comments

[dad]

Nice work Mike. That little contraption that holds the Bison was invented by an autistic woman who didn't like the way cattle were branded - it actually calms them whilst they are violated... but more humane than roping and tying them down... weird stuff at any rate...really great "clear Buffalo with blurry background" pic!

[messiestobjects]

Yeah I saw that movie. They didn't seem very calm in that thing though; one guy especially was struggling like a mad cow. I got a picture of him leaping out 3 feet into the air once they opened it but it was too blurry for publication.