Rocky Mountain Bighorn Sheep

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This fellow was photographed in Jasper National Park, some 12km northeast of the town of Jasper. He was caught by the morning sun on a small (for the area) rock outcropping where he had a commanding view over the Athabasca river valley.

For those photographers who may be interested, a mirror lens was used for this image - a 500mm reflex-Nikkor. Mirror lenses are small and light for their focal length, but don't have a good reputation in general. Mirror lenses are said to be fuzzier than their all-glass counterparts, have less contrast, bad variation in image brightness (much lighter in the middle and dark on the edges) and distracting out-of-focus highlights. While this particular lens does have odd-looking out-of-focus ringed highlights, this particular image has everything in focus. If you look carefully, you can see that the lens hot-spots just a little bit (very slightly lighter in the middle, darker at the corners), but is quite sharp and contrasty. We've had this lens for a long time and enjoy using it.

This image was recorded onto 35mm Kodak Royal Gold 100 film. The shutter speed was not recorded, but it is thought to be 1/250s. The lens has a fixed aperture of f8. Even though the camera and lens were not too heavy, a tripod was used along with a cable release. The mirror of the Nikon F4 camera was locked up prior to exposure. The film was scanned at a setting of 10,000 samples per square millimetre.