On The Road Again – Lubee Photo Day 2026

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  Well, what can I say? It’s been a minute since I have been able to sit down and post anything on the blog. Oh, who am I kidding? I’ve been too fat and lazy to take the time to write anything. That needs to change!  The two main purposes of having the blog in Korea was to give me an outlet to share my photography, work on my writing and editing skills, to have an excuse to get out of the house, and in some way to promote Korea). Over the past several years, while I have gotten out, it isn’t often enough! So let’s change that in the waning months of 2026 and into 2027!

  What could possibly be a better place to start than with BATS?! It was once again off to the Lubee Bat Conservancy. Unlike my previous trip, while I had everything ready to go I did not start loading the car until 0800 the morning of the trip. This did not cause any issues though and I was on the road exactly when I had planned. The only drawback was that I forgot several important items that made my modify my menu. The drive to Gainesville is always a slog, and this time proved no exception! 5 hours is a long time to drive continuously! I did stop halfway through at one of Florida’s great rest areas for a quick bite! It has been raining almost continuously for the past month and about 90 minutes out of Gainesville the sky just decided to open up! Visibility went to zero! If it wasn’t for the adaptive cruise control, I would have been panicking a little bit! I had a chance to pull off to a rest area but weighing the odds, I decided it was safer to stay on the interstate!

  This year I stayed in a 1-bedroom cabin at Mike Roess Gold Head Branch State Park in Clay County. I chose the cabin for several reasons. First, it was still too hot and humid to sleep in a tent, and lastly. Remember all that rain I had been telling you about? I am glad I did! It was a well-maintained historic wood cabin built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. In the 1930s and included this stone fireplace! While it was still raining Friday night, I thought about starting a fire here, but running the AC with a fire going seemed a bit daft!

  I know I know, you thought you were here to talk about bats, photography, or both?! So, I guess we should pivot and get into it! The previous year we mostly played with the Canon 70 – 200mm f4L and my trust Holga lens. This year I decided to utilize a piece of gear that rarely has a chance to come out of my camera bag! The 150 – 600mm Tameron super telephoto!

The last time I got a chance to use this lens was at a Blue Angels training performance. I not only forgot how heavy this beast really is to hand hold, how easy it is to lose your subject at 600mm, but that all in all. It actually is a very versatile lens!

Kermit, Chiang Kai Bat, Clara, Rescue and I have arrived and are checking in!

Everyone takes completely accidental throw away shots now and again, here is mine. I was walking to put the bats back in the car to go check in, and managed to bump the shutter button. The camera was still in timer capture mode, so I just kept walking thinking I’ll put whatever it gets on the blog. So here you go!

Besides being a relative beast to hand hold, at 600mm the focus can be a bit tricky to lock in. It definitely is not as fast as the more expensive Canon glass, and with the darker subjects the black auto focus point is bit hard to see. Here are a couple of photo’s where the focus is completely off!

Just when I was questioning if the Tamron was the wrong lens for the job and should go swap out for the venerable 70 – 200mm F4L, Tammy decided to start behaving and the shot’s started turning out great! Here is one of Lubee’s Malayan Flying Foxes. Two things amaze me with this lens, one os the color reproduction, the reds and oranges just pop with this lens, and there appears to be little or no color fringing, something that is always a worry cheaper lenses (Like the Rhokinon/Samyang 85mm). The other thing this lens is very good at is bokeh rendering, which again surprises me! At 600mm your depth of focus is RAZOR thin. Even with a narrow aperture of 6.3 (It’s widest at 600mm), you have a relatively narrow focal plane, though instead of falling off into a glaring jumbled mess. It renders the out of focus portion of the picture in a beautiful subtle cream.

Here is another Malayan Flying fox, this time going after a fruit Kabob.

 

Learning to crop will definitely be in your future, as at 600mm it is very easy to end up with things in your photo’s that you were not intending. You can do this in post-production, or take the shot again with a little bit of reframing.  Here I chose to just slightly crop out the left side of the photo to remove what I thought was distracting in the background.

I don’t know what this lil guy is plotting, but it doesn’t look good…

I mentioned in last years blog, that bats do not actually eat the fruit, they use their tounges to mash the pulp against the roof of their mouths to extract the juic and then spit the remaining pulp and seeds out and that their noses a specially shaped to funnel the the remains away from their forehead. You can clearly see the ridge in this picture.

This was a pretty cool moment caught with the super telephoto, the only problem is the glaring distraction of the branches between me and the bats…  If you chimp you probably would have caught it in the field and stepped to the left to move it out of frame.  I don’t as it is a habit I broke myself of while doing street photography, so I just cropped it out.

Here is a Golden mantel flying Fox. So here is your photo debate of the blog. Which photo would you use? Would you crop out the “naughty bits”? Or keep them? I will leave both versions up and you can vote in the comments. I am not a prude, but for would you go for natural or lean for a less potentially distracting photo, or again lean completely into the shock / education value?

One of the difficulties I had with this lens, since it has such a long reach, and using only a single auto exposure and focus point, is that you are reaching into areas you are not used to (I normally shoot with wider angel primes), were you are close enough to your subject were there are no exposure surprises, what you see is what you get. Where you really find yourself here with some deep area of shadows that you can not do anything about. The only thing I could think to mitigate this is using small reflectors, you would just need to bring an assistant because you are not going to be able to shoot with the Tamron one handed.

However, when you get the lightening right, the photos on this lens just pop!

Again the depth of focus with this lens is mind bending. I am shooting wide open at 6.4 and the subject isolation is incredible! If this had been one of my prime lenses, both subjects would have been in focus, but at 400mm you are starting to see that focal plane become razor thin. I should have stopped down to 8.0 (Or higher if I had a tripod, because higher than f8 and the auto focus becomes hit and miss.).

The other draw back of the Tamron, is it’s auto focus distnace, it is quite out there but then again with a super tele objects are not supposed to be that close to you, which left me scrambling a bit here and the focus hunting.

Here is one where the framing works, the auto exposure just can’t pull it, maybe something to play around more in post processing, or make is a Black and White? How might you salvage it? Feel free to leave comments.

Wanting to try something different, but not just falling back to the 70-200 f4.0l, I put the 85mm f1.4L/IS on. Here is a bat giving us a blep. One thing right away, after an entire morning of being able to zoom right in. The whole right side of our photo is useless, and would need to be cropped away. We want the person looking at our photos to focus on the subject, and the subject here are the bats, anything else is a distraction and disctractions turn photos into snapshots!

The other thing to note, is that even wide open at 1.4, the super tele was able to do a much better job of isolating the background, and the 85mm, or a wider aperture would have been to do that, if we could have gotten closer to the subjects.

Here I was able to get closer to one of the bats, and you can see when using the lens properly you do get a nice washed out background, and you can se the finer more expensive optics coming through here.

It was soon time to head back to the car and wrap things up. I of course had to get some photos with the plush bat gang! Here is Chiang (Clara hiding in the background), Rescue, and Kermit (Wanting to go back and grab a fruit kabob?) and of course your author! Look I cut off my ear!

The two love bats found this cool display in front of Loch Lubee and talked me in to a couple of quick photos.

Clara was expecting Rescue to propose to her, but he just mentioned something about the moss being green.
Clara and Rescue invited me into the picture for the last photo of the day!

I would like to give a shout out to the wonderful staff at the Lubee Bat conservancy, not only for putting on these events, but for sharing all of your wonderful knowledge about bats! Here is Anna dropping some bat trivia after putting out some more goodies.

I really enjoyed this year’s photo day! It was great being able to use a lens that so rarely even gets put in my bag, let alone used! I am now thinking of things to work on for next year.  I may ask for permission up front to focus more on photographing the staff interaction with guest to round out my Lubee and Photoday blogs.  We shall see what I come up with!

Thank you for coming back to Brent’s World, I hope you enjoyed this weeks entry. Please come back next weekend for more great content!

If you would like information on the Lubee Bat Conservancy and their events, please go to www.lubee.org