Bear Sunrise+Repost

I do see some of the same issues that I was having with my one bear shot. Funny that our issues were both with bear images and in nearly the same poses.

The shot itself is great. I really like the rim lighting and the touch of blue at the top. It feels like morning.

I get a bit nervous just looking at the shot; can't imagine the experience in the field. Great depth of field and exposure. Compelling shot.

Beautiful rim lighting on the bear and beautiful tundra colors! Very nice. You will be able to pull more detail out of the shadow side with some post processing tweaks (I did a quick test on my image editing program and even found some eye highlights) and you will make an excellent capture even better!

Great image Neil. I like this very much. Where was this photographed?

Great bear shot! I don't see a problem here.

Thanks for the comments everyone.
Darren,
The shot was taken in Katmai National Park, AK.
Rick,
I used a Gaussian blur radius of 3.5 px on the background and it seemed to do the trick.
Lon,
Here it is with the shadows opened up even more. Is this in the direction you were referring?

Yes. In fact in my testing I also applied some selective additional sharpening to the face (avoiding the rim lighted edges) and equal parts brightness/contrast to the orbs of eyes, which I thought made a slight improvement as well.

Again Neal, this is one of those special moments where lighting, color palette and pose all come together and you made a good capture that is worth taking the time and effort to process to its best. And BTW I think you found the right fix to those condensation issues.

Fabulous light and the vibrant colours of the grasses, make the image for me.

The repost is much better, Neil.

Beautiful Neil, I love the colors, and the rim lighting is superb. Not sure what condensation problems you're referring to.. looks awesome to me! The repost in particular.

Hi Floris,

Not sure what condensation problems you're referring to..

When I first started posting here last November, Marsel van Oosten and others noticed a streaking in the background (see " bear walking upstream" posted 11-09-09 in my gallery, look directly above the bear ). I latter identified the problem to be condensation problem on the sensor and/or rear element. Probably on the sensor because of the sharpness of the streaking. I think the rear element fogging would just be a softer focus affect. Not unlike swirls on the bathroom mirror after a hot shower, they disappeared when the camera dried down enough and reappeared latter when the moisture level went back up.
I noticed a similar effect to one of Rick Gomez's Black bear post on 5-7-10. The fix would seem to be apply a slight Gaussian blur to a duplicate layer and masking the subject back in. Thanks Rick!
I missed a small area under and to the left of the snout that can be seen in the larger version here, but fixed it in the repost.
Hope that helps!
Neil

Very nice shot, great colours and light!