Rainforest Nobility
One of my favourites from my late spring Khutzeymateen photo tours. Definitely not dramatic or exciting...but just the kind of shot that works for me (and probably few others
)!
You're sitting right at the top of the food chain. You're sitting high on a rock overlooking a long coastal inlet on one side, and a thick section of temperate rainforest on the other. Your cubs are fed, safely tucked in, and snoozing just below you. What's there to do? Relax, look around with your nose slightly upturned, and convey as much of an air of royal haughtiness that your status as rainforest nobility allows you to. After all, right now you're the self-proclaimed Queen of the Khutzeymateen!
Subject: Female Grizzly (
Ursus arctos) laying atop
Fucus covered rock on the edge of the forest
Location: Khutzeymateen Inlet, northern Great Bear Rainforest, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D4s
Lens: Nikkor 400mm f2.8 VR. Hand-held from floating zodiac. VR on and in "Active" mode.
Exposure: 1/500s @ f6.3; ISO 1000. -0.33 stop compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting.
Crop: None - this is full frame
More details about the image - including why it works for me, post-processing information and a higher res 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
Comments
11 commentsYou are correct. We had several sets of cubs (and tons of adult bears) to work with on this trip, but the only ones accessible at low tide were these ones (and this Ma had two cubs - the blonde one and the darker one depicted in "Flat Out"). Fortunately they were quite the performers!
Cheers...
Brad
I think everyone would agree that your images are top notch. We are all also familiar with your work flow to achieve these results. However, when I look at some of your posted images, I can't help but wonder what you started with. Would you consider posting an initial image so we could take a look at the before and after? This one might be a good candidate.
Jerry
I'll post an untouched version here either later today or first thing tomorrow (have some deadlines to deal with). One thing to keep in mind - it's pretty much impossible to post a truly "untouched" version - the minute it's in my raw converter (Capture One Pro) there's adjustments made (default tone curve for the camera, in some cases lens profiles applied, etc.), and the same is true if you're using Lightroom or ACR (tho' the images look immensely different when one is looking at "previews" in Capture One Pro than they do in Lightroom or ACR).
Cheers...
Brad
And such a noble creature, you've really done it justice here..
Excellent work
As requested - the "rawest" form of the image that can be seen (I think you know what I mean by that). This one is how it looks in Lightroom - NOT Capture One Pro (my reasoning is that there are far more users here of Lightroom than Capture One Pro). A few things to note:
1. As is often the case, Lightroom preview (as seen here) is lacking contrast and saturation. The preview in Capture One Pro (before adjustments made) had more colour (so much so that I had to desaturate the greens and the yellows) and much better contrast.
2. I "shoot to process" - not for in-camera results. I intentionally over-exposed this shot with the thought I would bring the exposure down in processing. I'm not a big proponent of ETTR, but in this case there were lots of subtle tones/hues in the coat of the bear that I wanted to make sure I recorded (in the raw file). Odds are if I backed off the exposure in the field these wouldn't have been lost (in this case), but just playing it safe.
3. In a sense this raw vs. final image comparison isn't too instructive in that I did little with the overall tonal balance (which I do monkey with in many of my images). What I did do was really work on the tonal separation in the coat of the bear (mostly by manually tweaking the mid tones via the exposure blends I performed.
Cheers...
Brad
Thanks for taking the time to do this. It was very informative, as always.
Jerry