Untamed Images Blog

A Greater Roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) raises its crest in a regal pose.

Around mid-morning on my second full day at the Laguna Seca Ranch in Linn, Texas, this Greater Roadrunner approached the water feature with its partner for a drink. After drinking its fill, the roadrunner stood at attention within point-blank range. I quickly added a 1.4X teleconverter to my 500mm lens and concentrated on getting a nice head shot of the bird. The roadrunner cooperated by showing off its profile while intermittently shifting slightly to angle its bill towards the camera. Only a few seconds had passed before it raised its crest as well, allowing me to take this handsome portrait.

I captured this image from the Bulldog Pond blind. Like several of the blinds at LSR, this blind is recessed several feet below ground allowing the photographer to position his or her camera comfortably at ground level.

I went to South Texas for the birds, but this Leopard Frog was a nice surprise.

I took this photograph in early April at the Laguna Seca Ranch in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. While the primary objective of my trip was to photograph some of the birds that are found nowhere else in North America except in South Texas, when the bird activity waned, the Leopard Frogs and several species of snakes made good stand-ins.

Using a 500mm lens with a 2X teleconverter to photograph a subject at the minimum focus distance of 15 feet results in a vanishingly small depth of field. For this shot I stopped down two f-stops from the maximum aperture to increase the DOF to a still-tiny 0.2 inches.