Salmon Nightmares

The Stuff of Salmon Nightmares

It's not that big of a stretch to think of many mammals - and particularly carnivores - as sentient. Watch them long enough and most folks will see instances where they seem to be clearly choosing between alternate behaviors. Look into their eyes and you partly feel, partly see, intelligence. But what about "lowly" fish? Are they sentient? Do they dream? Do they have nightmares? Can't say for sure - but if fish can think and dream - well...along one stretch of the central coast of BC there's little doubt that this image would qualify as the biggest nightmare a salmon could ever have!

The bear pictured above is a rare white Spirit Bear - of the Kermodei sub-species of black bears. How rare are they? There's believed to be about 250-300 of them - on the entire planet. How hard are they to find? Well...about 25 years ago a small handful of dedicated and adventurous souls spent years (upon years) looking for them (after almost a century of isolated sightings and myths about them). Eventually they found them - and a few places where they could be found with reasonable predictability, for at least part of the year.

How hard are they to photograph? In my view, they are one of North America's hardest carnivores to photograph well. The first layer of difficulty is STILL in finding them (and in getting to them) - the vast majority of Spirit Bears are found on extremely remote islands on a rugged section of the BC coast that can be very tough (and expensive) to get to. And, of course, they're most predictably found in a RAINFOREST - during the rainy autumn season when they're fishing for salmon. So...you have a rare animal that's found in a dark forest where it's commonly raining. And they're...uhhh...WHITE. So...a white bear in very low light (think high ISO) in a dark forest. How do you say shutter speed and dynamic range challenges? Right - with two words - Spirit Bear. But if you ask me two other words summarize the challenge of getting eye-grabbing Spirit Bear shots: Great Fun!

NOTE: For those who aren't familiar with Spirit Bears, they are a rare, genetically-based colour variant of the good ol' Black Bear. They can be encountered wherever black bears are found, but for some reason are found in high occurrence (10-25% of all black bears) in only one small part of British Columbia, Canada.

Subject: Spirit Bear (Ursus americana) eyeing it's next sushi dinner
Location: Great Bear Rainforest, BC, Canada
Camera: Nikon D4s
Lens: Nikkor AF-S 80-400mm VR lens @ 400mm
Exposure: 1/400s at f7.1 ISO 5600. -0.67 stop compensation from matrix metered exposure.
Other: Hand-held while supported on elbows while laying in stream (yep, got real wet). VR on and in Active mode.
Crop: This is about 85% of full frame.

More info about this shot on my website...including processing details (and a considerably larger version too)...

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

Comments and feedback greatly appreciated...probably better to view larger version prior to doing so...

Cheers...

Brad