Grizzly Bear Head & Shoulders

[Mike Diersing]

Canon 1DX Mark II, 600 f/4L IS II

ISO 500, f/4, 1/1000

-Khutzeymateen Provincial Park, BC
-A rare moment of evening sun

Interested to hear your thoughts.

[greg cowle]

A really nice background, and I like the lighting on the bear. If you have a little more at the bottom for the feet it would be better.
Greg

[Basil Dardagan]

Interesting image with a lovely background. I agree about space for the feet and I also think that 'eye contact' would have really improved this image

[haseeb badar]

Hi Mike -- Nice to see you posting here at wildlife forum .

A lovely and colourful backdrop. I find the frame is very tight at the foot, even though its feet might have been covered by the FG rocks / soil but still needs the space for proper balance and those virtual legs.

I find the subject soft , did you applied sharpening ?

Also watch out for the clipped highlights on its rump , looks like tricky lighting situation.

Do keep posting more. TFS !

[Rachel Hollander]

Hi Mike - Welcome to BPN and the Wildlife Forum. A very nice first post. I like the walking pose and the bg but agree with the others that you need more space below. Yes, the highlights along the back are a little hot. I do wish you had just the slightest head angle toward the sensor to see more of that eye.

It helps with the critique process if you give us some information about what you have done e.g. crop and how much, which pp program you use, whether you've cloned anything, added blur, NR, etc. Also if you have specific questions let us know that too.

Finally, the best way to get the most out of BPN is to become part of the community so that people get to know you and your photography style. We recommend posting 3-5 comments on other wildlife images each time you post one of your own. That allows us all to learn from each other. Your comments don't have to be technical, just tell us what you like or don't like about an image.

Looking forward to seeing more of your wildlife images.

TFS,
Rachel

[Mike Diersing]

Thanks for the comments, everyone. It is actually full frame (was in a boat...bear walked close!), so unfortunately no latitude for more space below the feet. Full agree that would have been better. Will take a look at the highlights as I did not adjust that in post.

I use LR for post. Here I raised the shadows +35, sharpening +75 (with masking) on subject, and slight boost to contrast and saturation.

With respect to comment appearing a bit soft, it is actually much more detailed in the raw version. As image is not cropped, in order to keep to under 600kb i had to make 1220 x 1220...is there a better way to do that when exporting from LR? I normally just manually plug the pixel dimension to get desired file size.

[John Mack]

Nice colors throughout this frame. The crop of the bear is a little odd. Would like to see whole body or just a head shot.