These photos were taken a couple of years ago at the San Simeon elephant Rookery. These are pretty amazing animals. They only come to land twice a year, the rest of the time they spend at sea. Them keep coming back to this location to breed and have their babies around December to early February, then back to sea, they then come back in mid summer to molt. Each time they spend about a month laying on the beach fasting. The males have the large nose that looks like an elephants trunk. The Males can grow to 15' and weight up to 5000 pounds.

What a neat photo and animal - beautiful eyespots! With those feathery antennae, I'd say it was a male. Too bad. You may have problems getting eggs! It's also been through the wars, all raggedy. The males spend nights scouting for receptive, more sedentary females, using the moon, if up, to quarter the breeze (or, unfortunately, a street light and fly in circles). Females emit alluring pheromones, the males pick the scent up by receptors on the large surface area of the antennae and fly up-wind when they sense a female, zeroing in sometimes for several miles in a light breeze. Your guy is probably near the end of life, but might still find a female. They usually overwinter as a pupa in a cocoon, eclose in spring to early summer, and look to get together for a quickie before moving on. The cats gorge all summer before spinning a cocoon and pupating.

I've been making occasional visits to a nearby bog, both for the exercise and for photography. I wanted a lens with a bit more reach but preferably not too much bulk and not too expensive. With some doubts I decided to take a chance on an inexpensive 500 mm mirror lens. This morning I took it back to the bog to take some sample pictures, some of which I show below. The captions show my recollection of how far away but they are simply guesses, not measurements and not even the better estimates that with some forethought I could have read off of the lens.

The lens has a fixed aperture of f8 and that gives no control over depth of field (and bokea). The narrow depth of field should be apparent in all of the images below. Focus is pretty critical and is manual only.

With a fixed aperture my usual habit of shooting in aperture priority seemed to make no sense so I shot in shutter priority, but I left ISO as automatic so that the camera had a chance to make adjustments for low light; but the lighting was strong enough so that did not come into play. I'm not sure what would have happened if I'd use aperture priority, however. Perhaps that would be a better choice.

As if one experiment were not enough, I decided to try something else today at the same time. In the past I've used a monopod at the bog, thinking a tripod would slow me down too much. Animals just don't stay still long enough to set up a tripod. But I have a tripod that has one removable leg so you can build a monopod out of it. I've never used it for that, but it occurred to me that I could also take advantage of that to construct a bipod with more stability than would be possible with a monopod. It is also more bulky to carry around but I think the extra stability is worth it.

I've been making occasional visits to a nearby bog, both for the exercise and for photography. I wanted a lens with a bit more reach but preferably not too much bulk and not too expensive. With some doubts I decided to take a chance on an inexpensive 500 mm mirror lens. This morning I took it back to the bog to take some sample pictures, some of which I show below. The captions show my recollection of how far away but they are simply guesses, not measurements and not even the better estimates that with some forethought I could have read off of the lens.

The lens has a fixed aperture of f8 and that gives no control over depth of field (and bokea). The narrow depth of field should be apparent in all of the images below. Focus is pretty critical and is manual only.

With a fixed aperture my usual habit of shooting in aperture priority seemed to make no sense so I shot in shutter priority, but I left ISO as automatic so that the camera had a chance to make adjustments for low light; but the lighting was strong enough so that did not come into play. I'm not sure what would have happened if I'd use aperture priority, however. Perhaps that would be a better choice.

As if one experiment were not enough, I decided to try something else today at the same time. In the past I've used a monopod at the bog, thinking a tripod would slow me down too much. Animals just don't stay still long enough to set up a tripod. But I have a tripod that has one removable leg so you can build a monopod out of it. I've never used it for that, but it occurred to me that I could also take advantage of that to construct a bipod with more stability than would be possible with a monopod. It is also more bulky to carry around but I think the extra stability is worth it.