On Tuesday I promised bison later this week. Here he is!


I took that image from here. So I hope that's okay. Now back to serious photography. I promised bison, and I have bison. I also have fly fishing practice and an experiment in capturing time in photography. The last two are actually the same thing.



Mmmmmm bison. Not to be confused with M. Bison, Mmmmmm bison means they're tasty.


They're also pretty dusty.


All kidding aside, the bison paddock at Golden Gate Park is a vitally important part of why bison even still exist. After settlers slaughtered all but a few hundred of the hundreds of thousands of bison in North America, San Francisco purchased about 150 bison and moved them to Golden Gate Park. This led to a successful captive breeding program. In fact, all the bison in Yellowstone and anywhere else in the U.S. are, insofar as I know, descendants of the original bison in the Golden Gate Park paddock.

People's opinion about zoos are mixed, ranging from seeing them as valuable scientific and conservation-focused institutions to horrid eyesores that prevent wild animals from experiencing free-range life. Wherever one may stand on that spectrum, it's important to note that bison would absolutely be extinct if it weren't for this paddock and keeping the animals in captivity.

Today the bison are cared for by the San Francisco Zoo. So the question is, are zoos today protecting animals for future generations -- in fact some animals exist only in zoos any more -- or are they putting animals on display for show and profit? I am decidedly, very far in the camp of the first possibility. So I say go out and support your local zoo. Take your family there or go alone. Get photos of animals you'd never be able to see in the wild, and thank the zoo by buying a souvenir cup or one of those smelly molded-plastic elephants.


This is a Photoshop composite from about 30 images, each of a different cast. I began this by having Photoshop open each image and layer them in a stack. I then ran the auto-align function so they would be lined up neatly. On my first try I had Photoshop automatically merge the images. I was less than thrilled with the result.

For this image I deleted, one layer at a time, everything except the fly fishing cast line and splash, if there was one. I then set the eraser to a feathered setting and 80% opacity and began blending each layer on top of the ones below. That took about five hours. Longer than the automatic settings, but, for this image, much more effective. The next image was entirely automatic.


I did one manual thing for this image. The guy practicing his casting looked like an octopus ghost after the compositing process. So I copied a good capture and pasted it over the ghost, blending as described above.