2024 Roundup: Point Reyes Wildlife
I have a bit of mixed feelings about my Point Reyes pictures from this past year. I think part of it is that other than a visit early in the year, I only really started spending time there again in the back half of the year, and even then I only really got back into the photos when my new 200-800mm lens arrived in late July. It took a while to get to the point where I was as happy as the Coyote in the photo above with it (taken on it in November), and we had other things going on that stopped me from spending as much time as skill demands.
Something that I suspect is adding to my general sense of "meh" is the proliferation of wildlife images "edited" with Topaz AI and other tools that offer to not just fix myriad sins in post but to make images higher in detail and lower in noise than what might be considered possible "in camera." It's a slippery slope that for now I don't want to personally go down. But, as with the unrealistic expectations the internet puts on so many people in so many ways, it's not not frustrating to see pixel-perfect shots all over my social media feeds, even when I can tell they are manipulated.
Anyway, not all of these pictures are perfect, and there is more learning for me to do in 2025. But despite all this complaining, I am proud of these shots, and grateful to the many folks who have given me positive feedback on them. I liked that one photo of the Tule Elk so much that it is both the album cover (below) and my bio picture on Bluesky (@nickfwolf.bsky.social), which I'm working towards as a place to share one-off photos with a broader community than my private Instagram.
