Lurking...

One of my favourite things about photographing bears is that after being in the company of them for awhile it becomes clear that each has its own personality. Some are bold and aggressive, others curious and playful. This adult female was quite shy and wary and seemed very reticent to ever show her eyes. She was always lurking, but almost always watched us from behind objects that obscured her eyes, which - more often than not - was usually long blades of grass.

I decided I wanted to capture an image of her in a pose that was suggestive of her personality, which meant that I wanted to capture her shy, reclusive nature. I thought showing her in the deep grass in which she liked to "hide" (and eat, of course) with much of her obscured would be just the ticket. Of course, I wanted to capture her beautiful eyes, and I did want both of them unobscured by the grasses. Which meant I had to wait (and wait, and wait!). But, eventually, she looked up just enough to give a clear view of both eyes and I captured this image. This shot will always remind me of this particularly beautiful but particularly shy female grizzly!

Those who know my work and thoughts on wildlife photography will already know that I often don't like images that have multiple out-of-focus zones in them. But this is one of those cases where I had to compromise a little and be willing to throw away my own biases. In this image I REALLY wanted the eyes to pop so I decided I wanted them to be the sharpest element in the image, with everything else somewhat softer. So I opened up the aperture on my 400mm f2.8 VR fully, even though I knew that meant the foreground grass would be rendered somewhat out-of-focus. I also knew that because the background vegetation was much further away from my focal point (compared to the foreground grass) that it would be rendered much softer than the foreground grass. Which meant that there would still be only one easily recognized sharpness gradient in the image, but that those eyes would just pop! Of course, shooting this image from a very low angle was critical to making it work - I shot this one from my knees (no, I wasn't praying) to ensure the camera would be on the same level as the bear's eyes.

A final technical note: This is the kind of shot where it's critical that your camera (or lens) has a manual over-ride on the autofocus system. While the right eye of the bear (left side on this image) is totally unobscured by vegetation and it is what I chose to focus on, the grass immediately below the eye was overlapping on the focus bracket I was using and confusing the AF system a little. I always leave my AF switch on my super-telephotos on the "M/A" setting, which means that when you have to over-ride the system your manual adjustment takes priority over the AF system. I did have to use the over-ride for this shot, and the manual over-ride setting worked like a charm!

Subject: Female grizzly (Ursus arctos) shyly peeking out from deep grass
Location: Khutzeymateen Inlet, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D3s
Lens: 400mm f2.8 VR) - hand-held
Exposure: 1/500s @ f2.8; ISO 800; -0.33 stop compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting of camera.

All the contextual information surrounding this shot (including processing details) can be found here:

http://www.naturalart.ca/galleries/latest/detail_4.html.

All comments and critiques welcome, but probably better to view larger image first.

Oh, and by the way, I KNOW there's a few out-of-focus grass blades obscuring parts of the face and that I COULD clone them out. Feel free to tell me if they distract you, but I'm not likely to give in to suggestions to remove them!

Cheers...

Brad