by Kimberly A. Cook (Twitter@ WarriorTales)
Photography is one of my true passions and I was thinking about the photos I didn’t use in my blog last year. Thought I’d give you a peak at a very fun experience I had with my buddy Joann, aka Gate Girl, while we were on our way out to the thunderegg beds last September.
Gate Girl can spot any animal at 1,000 yards, I swear. She can also tell me what fashion accessory they might be wearing. A hunter and country girl, she is always asking me to see stuff I can never find with my challenged eyeballs. So concentrating fully on the rutted dirt road to get us to the mining beds, this was my first alert.
“Sheep! Big Horn Sheep!”
Since I didn’t see any standing right in front of me on the road, I turned to see her pointing directly left. I could see a desert slope, some trees, rocks. No sheep.
“Look, right there!” she exclaimed.
I pulled Subie over to the right side of the one-lane road and proceeded to scan. Nothing. Then I grabbed my first ELPH camera and went full zoom. Maybe a brown something, Might have legs. Dug around in the other bag and grabbed out the newer ELPH camera with the longer zoom. By jiminy, brown sheep things!
“I think that’s a rock,” she added at the large clump next to one of the sheep in my viewfinder. “It moved!”
Besides almost throwing the camera over my head at that outburst, I tried to find the moving brown rock with my Canon Powershot ELPH 340HS point and shoot. Given the camera is the size of a deck of cards and doesn’t have a zoom lens to balance in my left hand like the 35mm, I tried not to get seasick at the same time.
I managed to find the rock, er sheep, focused and took several shots. They started to move; sheep are such unreliable models that way. At the end of the short time before they ran off, I took 23 photos and waved three cars past who were blocking my view. They had no clue there were sheep.
Back at the Richardson’s Rock Ranch gift shop we asked about the sheep. The family brought six of the Barbary Coast Sheep over from Africa about five years ago and now they had close to 200. They are not for hunting, just amazing animals on the ranch.
And I got to see them because of Eagle Eyes Gate Girl and my zoom lens. Never leave home without it. Priceless! Got zoom?
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