Nothing But Bear!

Nothing But Bear!

Hey all,

Just got back from leading a few weeks of photo tours up in the Great Bear RAINforest on the northern BC coast. Those who attended the trips can attest to the fact that the RAINforest is well named! But even with the rain the region and its inhabitants was - as always - simply magical...

I captured this grizzly bear portrait during my second of two back-to-back photo tours in the Great Bear Rainforest in October of 2014. An eagle-eyed spotter from our first photo tour actually first saw the bear about 3 days before I shot this image - and as we were re-tracing our steps on the second trip we saw it again near the same spot along the shoreline of the inside passage. Because we saw the bear twice in the same area we thought it likely that it was feeding on something. So we decided to leave the sailboat we were traveling in, hop in our Zodiac, and check it out. As it turns out, the bear was feeding on a Harbour Seal carcass which it either killed for itself or it happened to find washed up on the shoreline.

The conditions under which I captured the shot weren't quite gawdawful, but they were the next thing to it! It was fully overcast and raining - and incredibly dark for mid-day. The bear was just a few feet above the waterline, but the boulder-sized rocks in which it was eating gave us few clear views at the bear. And, whenever we DID get a clear shot the tidal current intervened and quickly managed to replace our view of the bear with with a great look at some rocks! I tried a few wider angle shots (in an effort to show the bear and the seal carcass it was feeding on), but quickly gave up on that. Instead, I decided to get a very raw portrait of the bear - complete with droplets of rain, pine needles, and red bits of seal flesh littering its facial fur. But hey...this is what a REAL working (and rain-soaked) bear looks like!

I continue to be amazed by what current high-end photographic gear can allow us to capture under tough, tough field conditions (and I also continue to wonder how the "old guys" managed to do it back in the film era). I captured this shot by hand-holding a 400mm f2.8 prime lens while standing in a small Zodiac inflatable boat that was fighting a strong current and pitching around as you'd expect. To get a shutter speed that would produce a sharp image I needed to do a major bump in the ISO - in this case up to ISO 6400. Imagine trying to do this with Velvia 50 and without an image-stabilized lens (insert one "not bloody likely, mate" here!).

Subject: Adult Grizzly (Ursus arctos) wondering if we want to share its seal carcass!
Location: Great Bear Rainforest, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D4s
Lens: Nikkor 400mm f2.8E VR. Hand-held from floating zodiac. VR on and in "Sport" mode.
Exposure: 1/400s @ f6.3; ISO 6400. -1.0 stop compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting.
Crop: Very minor - this is over 95% of the full-framed image

More details about the image - including post-processing details and a 2400-pixel version of the image - can be found here on my website:

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

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

Cheers...

Brad