Patience

Patience

Another shot of the rare Spirit Bear from my recent trip into the Great Bear Rainforest. As with another image I posted a few weeks back, this one is mostly courtesy of the generosity of the Gitga'at First Nations who generously permitted me and my group into a portion of restricted Gitga'at traditional territory that few are ever privileged to visit. My sincere thanks are extended to them.

This is the same bear I used to create the "animalscape" shot entitled "The Great Bear Gauntlet" that has proven to be quite popular (thanks for that!). In this shot the bear had moved further upstream, and I decided to grab a considerably longer lens and move in tighter - including only the bear and a select few key elements in the frame (i.e., a bear plus its immediate environment - what I often refer to as an "enviroscape"). I liked the diagonal flow added by the flowing water and the "depth" of the scene. I also liked the touch of colour added by the blood-red evidence of this bear's success at fishing.

This is a shot where I had to balance a lot of creative and technical factors, with DoF and shutter speed concerns dominating the list. I settled for a "slow-ish" shutter speed approach - where the harshness of "freezing" the water with a high shutter speed is gone, but it isn't "uber smooth and silky" like it would be with a shutter speed of 2 seconds or more (this was shot with a shutter speed of 1/5s).

Of course...with even a shutter speed of 1/5s you end up with a whole lot of blurry shots produced by bear movement - I took 107 in the shutter speed range of 0.1 to 1.0 seconds - and in 95 of them the bear was blurred. So...I'll let you decide for yourself if the image title refers to the fishing bear or to me!

NOTE: For those who aren't familiar with Spirit Bears, they are a rare, genetically-based colour variant of the good ol' Black Bear. They can be encountered wherever black bears are found, but for some reason are found in high occurrence (10-25% of all black bears) in only one small part of British Columbia, Canada.

Subject: Spirit Bear (Ursus americana) fishing
Location: Great Bear Rainforest, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D4
Lens: Nikkor 400mm f2.8 VR lens
Exposure: 0.2s at f16. ISO 100. -0.33 stop compensation from matrix metered exposure.
Other: Tripod-mounted, Live View, cable release
Crop: This is about 97% of full frame - just a real small tweak for composition.

More info on my website...in this case quite a bit more about the decisions behind my approach to this shot (and a considerably larger version too)...

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

Comments and feedback greatly appreciated...probably better to view larger version prior to doing so...

Cheers...

Brad