The Rock Garden

The Rock Garden

It's funny how your outlook on what's an interesting image shifts over time. I shot this image almost two years ago and managed to overlook it in my collection until April of 2015. So it sat in raw form in my image library, collecting virtual dust! Fortunately, when I was searching for an "enviroscape" image of a coastal grizzly and clicked on the appropriate keywords ("grizzly bear" and "enviroscape") in Lightroom this image popped up (thankfully I'm disciplined enough to keyword all my images!). Obviously shortly after the trip this image didn't impress me much (I can't deny I ignored it for some reason), but now I find myself quite liking the overall scene.

This image is quite characteristic of what one sees in the Khutzeymateen Grizzly Sanctuary. In this particular case one of the more unique aspects of the photo regards the lens I used to capture it with - a Nikkor 600mm super-telephoto lens. Now shooting 'scapes isn't the most common use of "big glass", but it is something I do on a fairly frequent basis (which means I'm probably a little odd!). More commonly I use a 400mm lens for distant 'scapes, but in this case I distinctly remember looking at the scene from our Zodiac and thinking "...by the time we get there that scene will be history, so I better shoot it now". So I grabbed my 600 and fired away!

When I captured this image the big guy was finding the fastest way in to the Khutzeymateen estuary. Which means swimming. And, for reasons I'll never figure out, this bear likes to swim with the bulk of his head (including his eyes) under water. His head had only been above the water for a few seconds when I snapped this shot.

One of the biggest challenges in using a super-telephoto lens effectively is controlling the depth of field (DoF) in your scene. The big glass can be great for "isolating" your subject (partly owing to their narrow fields of view and partly owing to their generally thin DoF), but creating enough DoF for an effective 'scape with a super-telephoto can be tricky. In this particular case I would have preferred to stop down more, but I didn't have a ton of light and I needed to use a reasonably high shutter to hand-hold that monster lens. I'm not a fan of having a lot of out-of-focus elements in the foreground of most scenes, and the busy rock-grass-log foreground would have looked pretty hideous (at least to my eye) if it was thrown out of focus. I judged the minimum aperture I could stop down to in this shot was about f6.3 (in balancing off ISO with shutter speed). But I also knew if I focused on the bear and used that aperture the foreground would be out-of-focus and I'd chuck the shot out. So...I focused on the grass in FRONT of the bear, and I hoped (using an educated guess) that the DoF would extend to the "front" of the frame AND include the bear. Luckily, I guessed right! 

Subject: Female Grizzly (Ursus arctos) emerging from rocks
Location: Khutzeymateen Grizzly Sanctuary, northern BC Coast, Canada
Camera: Nikon D4
Lens: Nikkor 600mm f4 VR - hand-held from floating zodiac. VR on and in "Normal" mode.
Exposure: 1/640s @ f7.1; ISO 2500. -0.67 stop compensation compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting.
Crop: Extremely minor - this is about 95% of full-framed image

A lot more info about this shot - Including a bit more background on the bear-viewing vs. bear-hunting debate and a 2400 pixel version of the shot, 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

PS: Like all wildlife images on my website and that I post on NPN, the subject is fully wild and completely unconstrained. Besides the potential impact of my presence, nothing has been done to intentionally alter or affect the ongoing behavior of the subject and, of course, there has been no use of any form of bait or other form of wildlife attractants (including vocalizations)