Photo of the Month 05/10

River Siesta

As I'm going to Alaska again in a couple of months, I thought it would be a good idea to go through the images from the previous tour and have a second look at the ones I selected then. As always, I noticed that there are shots that I didn't select back then - apparently I didn't like them - but that I do like very much now. And there are shots that I did select, which I don't think are very interesting anymore. Fortunately, there were also some shots that were part of my initial selection that I still like, and this is one of them. It's interesting to see how your taste changes over even a very short period of time.

Instead of waiting for that salmon-leaping-into-the-mouth-of-a-bear-shot, I decided to focus on a spot with the least action; a sleeping bear. By choosing a relatively slow shutter speed, I was able to blur the water (while retaining subtle texture) to give a moody feel to the scene and emphasize the motionless state of the bear. I used a polarizer and small aperture to get my shutter speed down.

Nikon D2Xs, AF-S VR 70-200/2.8, 1.4x TC, polarizer, 0.6s @ f/16, ISO 100