National parks anywhere in the world are wonderful locations to photograph wildlife. They are excellent places to improve your wildlife photographic skills because of the variety and availability of wildlife subjects. Animals in national parks are protected and are used to seeing people, either driving by in cars, or hiking. You can approach and photograph them without scaring them so you can capture more natural looking behavior. But, just because these animals are approachable, do not push the envelope and get too close. You will either scare them away or cause them to react aggressively to defend themselves. You cannot outrun an enraged bison in Yellowstone!
There are two basic approaches to capturing wildlife images depending on the lenses you have available. If you are limited to lenses in the 300mm range or less, you will have more success capturing wildlife in their environment images. These images can be just as striking as portrait images that isolate the subject. The image of the pronghorn in the open plains on the eastern edge of Grand Tetons national park show the image viewer where these animals live. These medium-telephoto lenses are light and easy to hand hold. A zoom telephoto lets you easily crop to a composition you like.
The other approach uses longer, super telephoto lenses to isolate your wildlife subject making it the sole element of your image. These lenses allow you to maintain more distance between you and your subject making the animal and you feel safer. Fixed aperture, super telephoto lenses (usually F4 maximum aperture) are extremely expensive, very big and quite heavy. They are often impossible to handhold, except for the most experienced wildlife photographers, requiring the use of a tripod or bean bag or car window mount for stability. You become less mobile but the images you capture can be spectacular.
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For those of you interested in lower cost portrait image lenses, there are excellent alternatives. Sigma makes very good 50-500 and 120-500mm variable aperture lens that are 1/6 or less the cost of the big gun F4 lenses. Other manufactures make equivalent lenses. They are lightweight and have vibration reduction so they can be handheld and, being zoom lenses give you excellent composition cropping ability.Good luck!!!!
