Words Not Required...

Words Not Required

This one is a monitor tester!!

During my short academic career I did research on vocal and non-vocal communication in animals. Since then I've always been fascinated by how universal non-verbal communication is (i.e., how much of it crosses the lines between species) and by just how much can be communicated without a single word being spoken. If anyone doesn't think that non-human animals actively communicate their emotions (and ponder some pretty complex things) then they're either not really watching the wildlife they're looking at or they're just choosing to ignore what they're seeing (and what the animal is clearly "saying" to them). If this bear's posture and facial features aren't directly telling me both that he's intrigued by my presence but all the while feeling a little ambivalent about what to do next (and pondering his options), well...

I really like shooting what I call "active portraits" - fairly "tight" shots where the subject is doing more than just sitting there and the resulting image conveys a little about the animal's "personality". The powerful eye contact of this black bear is the dominant "theme" in this shot, but I think the implied motion of the bear's left paw - while being fairly subtle - still adds a little dynamism to this image and, at least to me, makes the shot much more interesting (and certainly helps put it in the category of "active portrait").

Whenever I'm working closely with an animal - like when shooting these active portraits - I try to include enough visual information about the the animal's surroundings to put it in the right environmental context but not so much detail that it becomes visually distracting. This is one major reason why I'm so darned anal about trying to control and use depth-of-field (or DoF) effectively in the field. I always try to ensure that key areas of the image - those spots where I want the viewer's eye going FIRST - are rendered sharply. In the case of this image I wanted the entire head of the bear (and, of course, especially the eyes) very sharp. But, as much as this, I also wanted most of the rest of the image rendered softly and out-of-focus. I knew a few of the foreground rocks would be sharp and was pleased after the fact when it turned out the rocks with water lapping at them were the sharp ones!

But what about the raised leg and the claws? Would it have been better if they were "tack" sharp? Should I have stopped down and widened my DoF? It's debatable (and feel free to debate it! ), and I had the light to do so. But to my way of thinking - no. In my opinion, both of these elements are sharp enough to "do their job" while not competing as much visually with the head as they might if they were really sharp. And, of course, pulling those elements into reasonably sharp focus would have meant stopping down to at least f8 (or possibly f11) and then the distant background would have been much less smooth, more detailed, and more distracting.

Subject: Black Bear (Urus americana) on stream edge
Location: Great Bear Rainforest, northern BC coast, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D700
Lens: Nikkor 600 mm f/4 VRII lens supported on tripod with Wimberley head
Exposure: 1/250s at f5. ISO 720. -0.3 stop compensation from matrix metered exposure.
Crop: This is about 90% of full frame

As always, more details about the capture and processing this image are on my website - right here...

http://www.naturalart.ca/galleries/mammals/bears/detail_87.html.

Comments & critiques welcomed. Probably better to view larger version first...

Cheers...thanks for looking...

Brad