Red grouse photography on the moors

After finishing a commercial job in Pately Bridge, I decided to drive home across the moorland from Pately Bridge to Ripon in order to photograph red grouse. I had packed the D500 and 200-500mm Nikkor as I’d a good idea that I might take this route home, so with the widlife camera combo on the passenger seat, I set off in search of grouse. It didn’t take long! Just after leaving the last coupl of house and heading out onto the moors, I came across a male red grouse sitting on a dry stone wall. As is often the case, he was uterly fearless and sat there as I manvered the car backwards and forwards trying to get an angle. Unfortunately, I was looking up and it was a bland sky behind him but I managed plenty of shots.

Just further along the road I came across a couple of males displaying in front of a female and one kindly stood on a rock for his portrait. In my rush to photograph him, I didn’t check my exposure and the camera was in manual exposure after photographing the guy on the wall. I blasted off a sequence of him on the rock in full display, and this lasted just a few seconds. I reviewed my images only to dioscover I was roughly 4 stops under exposed! After much cursing I left the images on the card and hoped that the lossless ISO of the D500 would aloow me to pull the image back through and fortunatley it did! A bit grainy but at least I salvaged the shot.

I ended the shoot with a male grouse on a standing stone against a sunset sky.