Totally Hung!

Totally Hung!

I was going to call this image "From Lemons to Lemonade" but thought the title I chose more aptly described the situation I was in when I shot this. And, of course, it's possible many may think this image IS a lemon and not sweet at all, so the "Lemons to Lemonade" title might have been a little presumptuous! Oh...and at least one other connotation of the phrase "Totally Hung" exists and was NOT lost on me - but this is a PG rated website and this is a FEMALE bear - so don't go there!

Have you ever been in the situation where you're faced with a great scene but are totally hung with the wrong configuration of gear in your hands? Most of us have - and that's exactly what happened when I shot this image. I captured this shot from the front of a Zodiac boat during a photo tour I was leading in the Khutzeymateen in late May 2011. Just moments before shooting this I was doing the "intrepid guide" thing and had got out of the Zodiac to lift and push it off some rocks. When I freed the boat I had to jump/dive in and so I ended up in the front of the Zodiac and all my camera gear at the BACK of the boat. Someone handed me my camera, which was fitted with a 400mm lens with rear-mounted polarizer installed. But all the rest of my camera was stowed at the back of the boat - way out of my reach. And...just moments later we were face-to-face with a female grizzly close enough to us that a 200mm lens would have been ample for a full frame shot. The bear was in the shade. I couldn't move around in the boat so changing lenses (or even pulling of my polarizer) was out of the question. What to do?

Well - all I COULD do was live with what I had in my hands. So it was portrait time! The bear was so close that I was in a situation where the head pretty much filled the frame with my 400mm lens. Which meant I had to stop down a fair bit to get all the critical bits into focus. And, because I was hand-holding the camera I needed some shutter speed to get a sharp image. And I had a light-sucking polarizing filter on. So...it was f6.3, 1/250s, and...6400 ISO! Well...pixels are cheap so why not try? This is the result...

What drove the conversion to Black & White (B&W)? I commonly hear folks say "well, this image had poor colour in it so I converted to black & white." I look at things a little differently when it comes to B&W. I LIKED how this image came out in colour, but when I looked at it critically I saw a very wide tonal range (some true blacks, some whites or near whites) AND a whole zone of nearly continuous mid-tones (in the bear's fur). Which made me think there was the potential for a strong B&W image in all that colour. Being more direct...I think it's often a mistake to take a mid-tone dominated image with "poor" colour and think it will work better in B&W - the end result is often a drab, grey-on-grey image with little to draw one's eye. You want good B&W images? Forget the images that "don't look good in colour" - watch for wide tonal ranges and look for an image with GOOD colour in it!

Finally - a while back I mentioned I liked shooting what I call "active portraits" - fairly "tight" shots where the subject is doing more than just sitting there and the resulting image conveys a little about the animal's "personality". This would be another example of what I meant.

Subject: Female Grizzly Bear (Urus arctos) giving me some face time!
Location: Khutzeymateen Inlet - Great Bear Rainforest, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D3s
Lens: Nikkor 400 mm f/2.8 VRII lens - handheld from floating Zodiac
Exposure: 1/250s at f6.3. ISO 6400. -0.33 stop compensation from matrix metered exposure.
Crop: About 85% of full frame

As usual, more info about the image (including more processing details for colour and B&W versions, etc) available here on my website:

http://www.naturalart.ca/galleries/latest/detail_2.html.

Any feedback welcome - and appreciated! I'm particularly interested in whether or not you have a preference for one version over the other (colour vs. B&W).

Cheers...thanks for looking...

Brad

PS: Yes - totally wild bear...