Elk Near Gardiner, Yellowstone, MT, USA

By John Gerlach

This bull elk was feeding on a hillside near some buildings in Mammoth. As it was snowing quite hard, that was the primary reason I was photographing it: I like to show falling snow with my winter animals. Of course, the hard part is to get a sharp focus on the elk, as the autofocus of my Canon R5 with the RF 100-500mm lens tends to focus on snowflakes right in front of the elk. So I used my in-camera autofocus bracketing trick to get a sharp focus. Using Increment 1 and five shots in the set, most of the time, the 3rd or 4th images were in sharp focus on the elk. I rated only the keepers, then sorted the file for rating and deleted all the unrated images that were not sharp. This worked way better than I expected.