Lake Alice Wildlife
Tue, Sep 10, 2013
This weekend my family and I spent some time at Lake Alice on the campus the University of Florida. Even though the lake is in the middle of campus it's a wildlife sanctuary and home to loads of alligators. I was fortunate to get a handful of decent gator shots, so thought I'd share them here. As always, I learned a thing or two that I'll share here and I welcome feedback.
This guy was in a little pond by the Baughman Center:
Walking further down the shore a family pointed out a mother gator with several babies hiding under a palmetto overhanging the edge of the water. It took a moment to find them thanks to their superb natural camouflage, but here are close ups of the two babies that were on the shore:
The mother and another baby were floating just a foot or two off the shore. Here they are with the focus on the baby and then the mother respectively:
I'm still kicking myself that I didn't get a shot with more depth of field to get momma and baby in focus. I did *try* to stop down to get them both in focus; however, the longer shutter speed resulted in an unacceptably shaky shot. Given the situation - potentially dangerous wildlife with young to protect - I wasn't inclined to break out the tripod and invade their space anymore than I already had.
Update: On the suggestion of a friend, I tried to stitch the above two shots together to get both subjects in focus. Looks like I neglected some exposure adjustment around the baby's snout... oh well. Here's the outcome:
Last, but not least, in another area of the lake we found this ~4ft gator swimming with some enormous soft-shell turtles:
All-in-all it was a good day of snapping aquatic wildlife.
Cheers!