Photo Story: Bighorn Sheep Lambs Butting Heads

Even as lambs, Bighorn Sheep practice head butting. This is not just a game for the lambs. The head butting activity begins to establish rank within the group of sheep.

Bighorn Sheep Lambs Butting Heads

This photo was taken along the road between Mammoth and the North Entrance to Yellowstone National Park. The Bighorn Sheep ewes and their lambs can frequently be seen on the cliffs along the east side of the road.

It can be hard to find a shot with a good background as the Bighorn Sheep’s camouflage can blend the sheep in with the tan colored background.

However, this is a good location to get action shots of the young sheep as they chase each other and butt heads on the slopes.

Big Horn Sheep Lambs Photo Details

Camera: Canon 7D
Lens: Canon 500mm f/4 + 1.4x Telephoto Extender II
Focal Length: 700mm
ISO: 400
Aperture: f/9.0
Shutter Speed: 1/1250 of a second
Exposure Compensation: +0
Lighting: Sunny Evening

Photo Processing

Cropped the photo in Lightroom 5.
Cleaned up the background using the Clone Stamp and Healing Brush Tool in Photoshop CC.
Applied the Detail Extractor and Lighten/Darken Center Filter in Color Efex Pro 4.

Used Viveza 2 to selectively lighten the darken the image.
Selectively removed noise from the photo using Topaz DeNoise.
Selectively sharpened the photo using the Unsharp Mask Filter in Photoshop CC 2014. The layer mask was copied and modified from the last processing step.

Written by Martin Belan

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