I'll be Watching!

Hi all,

I'm heading off in a few days for 10 days of shooting whales (Orcas, Humpbacks and more) and other aquatic mammals (sea lions, seals, sea otters) on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. During this time I'll have sporadic internet access at best - I may be able to WATCH what's going on in the gallery, but odds are I won't be able to contribute images or comments to the gallery again until near the end of August. Have fun in the interim and don't be too hard on Vincent and Lon!!

Just a griz - caught in the act of swimming across a channel in an estuary at the head of the Khutzeymateen Inlet on the northern coast of BC.

What makes this image work for me is the nuanced lighting illuminating the head of this bear. This image is also a great example of why I just love the power and control of shooting digitally, and especially why I love shooting raw images. When I was watching this bear swim by our Zodiac I was struck by how the thinly overcast sky (sun above and slightly behind the bear) produced light that allowed both fantastic detail and colour to show at the same time.

There was no real "trick" in capturing this image. Even though there was a light cloud cover, between the bear being wet and the sun striking the bear from above, I had to be careful not to blowout critical highlights in this shot. So, I underexposed the image slightly (just to the point where I knew the highlights would be completely "retrievable" with my preferred raw converter), with the knowledge that I could easily return the shadows to the state I observed in the field during image processing. To fully return the image to that I remembered seeing in the field required making 3 separate raw conversions from the original file and then combining (or compositing) them in Photoshop. This was necessary to pull out the nuances of the lighting and colour, simply because our cameras - while getting more amazing each year - still aren't perfect, and most images presented "as shot" don't accurately reflect what we saw through the viewfinder.

Subject: Grizzly Bear (Ursus arctos) eyeballing me while swimming a channel in a coastal estuary
Location: Khutzeymateen Inlet, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D3s
Lens: 400mm f2.8 VR - hand-held (VR on) from floating zodiac
Exposure: 1/500s @ f4; ISO 2000; no compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting of camera.
Crop: This is about 85% of full-framed image horizontally; cropped slightly more (to pano) from top and bottom

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

Cheers...

Brad