My Fish!

Joseph,
Great shot with lots of detail! Love the grumpy expression and position of the bear, great work!

Wayne

That is some face. Love the water swirling and foaming around him. Not too gross for a partially eaten salmon. Excellent details. And did I say...that's some face. Love it.

Double dare ya! Super shot Joseph-very expressive.

Wow, there are so many interesting details to look at here: the enormous claws, the swirling, foamy water which looks frigid, the look in his eyes, his nose sniffing to one side, his thick wet fur, the half of a fish (and is that roe?). Really fabulous shot!!

Beautiful in detail, setting and composition. The whites are a bit bright and need to be toned down in front of the bear - but otherwise this is an award winner. The bear looks so humble and peaceful even while it's essentially ripping into it's meal - a wonderful juxtaposition.

I hope you don't mind, but I brought it into CS3 and masked the bear/salmon. Then I did a big curves adjustment on the left side to bring down the whites, I then did some selective burning of the highlights, deselected the mask and did light burning around the edges to eliminate any possible halos. A much stronger image in my opinion. Again, hope you don't mind!

- Luke

Great portrait, Joseph. Crisp, clear colors and contrast. You managed to preserve textures in the darkest shadows and bright highlights, no easy feat. Only one nit: The image looks a tad oversharpened. Or is it just my eye?

Hey Joseph,
Great image. I looked at this at work today and my first impression was slightly over sharpened and a little hot on the highlights. I think Luke's tweak increases the impact substantially.
Nice work!!!!!

Neil

On my monitor, the whites look fine as you originally posted it. I like the detail, especially the eye and the one lifted claw of the right "hand."

Thanks Everyone! This feedback is great. I just recently found this site and the constructive feedback so far has been superb, much better than the other site I was on. Luke, many thanks showing me what's possible with Photo Shop, I do like your version better. My PS skills are rudimentary at best so I guess it's time to start reading that PS "how to" book that's been collecting dust on my shelf.

Wowser, this is great! I can see the details of the fish scales! Exceptional job on the exposure, that couldn't have been easy with all that white.

Cool image Joseph! Excellent detail, good eye contact and good exposure control. Though I can understand Luke's suggestion to try to tone down the whites, IMO he overdid it a bit here. Great image, well done.

Great shot! Love the eyes and the half-eaten fish. Great light and color as well.

Great shot! Both presentations are good, but I like the second more. Thanks for sharing. By the way, just how close was that second bear?

Absolutely terrific image Joseph! I am pretty sure I have seen your work posted on another site as well and really liked what I saw there. I thnk the whites look fine on my monitor. I miht have toned them down a tiny touch more if it were mine, but I don;t think they were blown either. The detail and sharpness look great and the look on his face is simply proieless.

For Jack -

The second bear was just below us next to the platform. This is taken from the viewing platform below Brooks Falls so the bears get extremely close with no risk to the bear paparazzi. The trail to the platform is plenty exciting though, we had to step aside to let bears pass on a number of occasions while walking to and from the viewing area. Once we came close to getting bowled over by two sub-adults who were so involved with chasing each other they never saw us. They ran right past us while we scrambled off the trail and into the woods.

Fantastic!!!!

It's been all said.
Jagdeep Rajput

Hi Joseph,

Sorry for jumping into this one so late - last week was dominated by lens testing and writing up the results and I knew this image wouldn't be lacking for comments! But I feel compelled to comment anyway...

I really like a lot about this image - almost all of which surrounds the terrific pose in that setting. Love the eye contact, the claws, the half-eaten fish and, of course, the bubbling water. Just terrific. I do agree with the previous comment(s) about the water being a little too light and think the second post above looks better to me. There's one other thing I have to say: to me (and on my monitor) the bear itself is too bright and lacking in subtle contrast differences - to me it looks like a flash-filled image where the flash fill was just a tad too bright (I'm not saying it was flash-filled, but that something in the processing has produced this look). If the image were mine (and that's definitely an "I wish"!) I'd tone down the overall brightness on the bear just a tad (my guess is about 1/3 of a stop) and tweak the contrast slightly, including darkening some of the shadows just a very small amount. I realize that part of the brightness is likely owing to the lightness of the water (reflecting back on the bear) but I think a few very subtle adjustments would take this already excellent shot right over the top! But well done and I definitely envy the experience...

Cheers...

Brad

Wow, what an excellent shot, a real pleasure to view. The look of the bear and clarity of image are wonderful, well done.

Amazing sighting, loved Luke's processing and think an effort like that is worth for an image like this. I might be wrong but it looks like a shot using the metering from the camera, which perhaps needed some compensation. I would have loved to see an exposure of this shot using incident light metering instead of a reflective metering done by the camera perhaps. Fantastic image.