I went for a late afternoon hike at the wildlife refuge with no particular photographic aim in mind. After hearing all the birds and seeing the lizards scamper about, I decided to stop at the park benches and put my longest lens on the camera and walk around with that. I also wanted to take a longer perspective on my old dead tree, but that did not work out well at all. But, I did see some wildlife.

The lizards are not easy to photograph as they run for cover quickly when you come down the trail. But at one point I just stopped walking and watched. I think they could no longer sense my foot steps at this point and thus detected no danger. And as I stood still, a lizard slowly wandered down the trail almost to my feet while I calmly took photos. So, perhaps I learned something about lizards. The lizards have stripes lengthwise down their body and wriggle back and forth as they walk and the undulating stripes often catch my eye. The lizard in the photo below has long stripes down most of his body but the stripes end at his hind legs and his tail is mostly brown. Up the trail from the lizard I found a butterfly.

I hiked around the top of the ridge and accomplished nothing photographically, but as I was walking back down the trail I came around a corner and found a rabbit in the trail. I stood still hoping not to spook it away and it hopped under a tree. I was able to maneuver to get a shot of the rabbit through the branches. Shooting through the branches, the shallow depth of focus makes the leaves nearer to the camera almost disappear so you get most of him in the shot. There wasn’t much light under the canopy of the trees and this image was shot at ISO12800, which is very high and results in a noisy image. I pre-sharpened and then used the automated noise reduction in Lightroom to recover the image. I think it turned out well.

Coming down the trail I found myself facing the setting sun with the lush plants on either side of the trail catching the light. I immediately took off my backpack and set up my tripod to take some shots. There weren’t many clouds in the sky to bring drama to the sky, but that’s OK as the main subject is the hiking trail leading through the grasses. I set the tripod at about waste height to get down among the plants but still show the path leading to the sunset. I frankly can’t believe how well this image turned out.

The image above had a long airplane trail running straight down the image and I really didn’t like it, so I spent some time in Photoshop removing it. I hope you don’t mind. There were also about half a dozen dragonfly streaks across the sky and I removed those as well. I tried a version with the aperture stopped down to make the sun really flare and I didn’t really like the effect. The above image is closer to what I saw.

The images above and below were created by combining five bracketed shots to get the bright sun and dark landscape lit in one image. You really have to do this when shooting into the sun as there is no way a camera can capture all that dynamic range in one shot. So, I did an HDR merge in Lightroom, then adjusted contrast and colors in the land and softened out the sun with a radial filter.

I had hoped these flowers in the foreground would catch more light and really stand out, but they get a bit lost. Perhaps I should have gotten closer to the flowers, but that would have blurred out the background even more. It is a decent environmental shot though, watching the sun set behind the distant hillside.

That was my hike with the lizards that ended with a nice sunset. Thanks for reading.