Autumn Sunrise...

Autumn Sunrise in the Great Bear Rainforest...

I just got back from two consecutive (photo) tours of duty in the Great Bear Rainforest on the northern coast of BC, Canada. Both trips were a big success and a good time was had by all. While we had good bear shooting, this year "other" species (such as American Martens and Humpback Whales) tried to steal some of the limelight from the bears! So expect images with a wide diversity of subject matter to be coming your way in the next few weeks...

This image was captured early on an October morning just as the sun was rising and breaking through the clouds and fog. The subject - an adult female grizzly who had a cub with her - was being kissed by light beams. When she paused to look up (and smell the air) it was almost as though she was paying homage to the sun - or, perhaps, to the two bald eagles high in the left-most conifer in the near background (mid-ground?). I liked the ethereal quality that the sunbeams and background mist gave to the scene...

There were significant challenges in both capturing and processing this image. On the image capture end of the equation, this scene had a huge brightness range - while MOST of the fog was in the mid-tone range, a few portions of it were very bright. And, the shaded regions of this scene - including both the side of the bear and the lower edge of the river bank were very dark. Fortunately I was using a camera with a sensor that has a very wide dynamic range (a Nikon D7000). So...I was confident if I exposed for the highlights I could bring back any shadow detail needed during image processing.

Things got trickier on the processing end. It's my experience that most digital SLR's tend to flatten out mid-tone contrast too much (compared to the original scene). In this case that meant that the sunbeams in the fog on my raw image were MUCH less pronounced than what we saw in the field. To return the scene to what I saw in the field required a lot of post-processing work on the mid-tones. Going into detail into everything I did to bring back the sunbeams and apparent "depth" in the image would result in the production of a short book, but it involved the use of exposure blends (using luminosity masking techniques), selective curves adjustments, and the use of one my favourite lighting tools - a product called LightZone.

Subject: Female Grizzly (Urus arctos soaking up the sun
Location: Great Bear Rainforest, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D7000
Lens: Nikkor 70-200 mm f/2.8 VRII lens (@ 110mm - EFL of 165mm) - handheld from floating Zodiac. VR on and in "Active" mode.
Exposure: 1/160s at f6.3. ISO 110. -1.0 stop compensation from matrix metered exposure.
Crop: Minor - this is about 90% of full-frame image

Alert - Digitally Manipulated Image: This image clearly crosses the line from simple digital correction to digital manipulation. In the case of this image, I digitally removed (using the clone tool) one stem of grass that crossed the bears throat and cheek region.

All the gory details about this shot (processing details, conservation, etc.)

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

Comments and critiques welcomed - probably best to view the larger version prior to doing so!

Cheers...thanks for looking...

Brad