Continuing with Coastal Brown Bears from my workshop, a mother and cub returning from fishing.
Canon 1D Mark III
840mm
1/800 sec, f/8
Mode: Manual
Metering: Evaluative
ISO: 1600
No correction for noise.
Coastal Brown Bear - Lake Clark National Park No. 5
Continuing with Coastal Brown Bears from my workshop, a mother and cub returning from fishing.
Canon 1D Mark III
840mm
1/800 sec, f/8
Mode: Manual
Metering: Evaluative
ISO: 1600
No correction for noise.
This is such a powerful image Robert, looks great for 1600 ISO!
Robert,
I like the low angle. Gives a feel of the bears towering over you. It is not easy composing with two animals in the frame. I like the eye contact with junior. I would be tempted to use ISO 800 but ISO 1600 seems to work fine here.
Cheers,
Sabyasachi
Robert,
This is a very nice image - great angle and the fact that you have both of them heads up and looking at you is tremendous good fortune - especially like the way the youngster is looking from behind...
I am amazed at the even lighting on the animals - I would have anticipated there being darker shadow areas on the chest of the mother bear, for example, albeit there is going to be some light reflected from the wet sand. Are you achieving this in post production with something like the reflector filters that Fabs has mentioned on the Avian board, or some other technique?
Thanks ,
Gerald
Robert
you might soon earn the reputation of '' The bear man'' love your series on bears.... very tempted to leave deepest darkest Africa and join you guys next year!!
peter
Gerald,Originally Posted by Gerald Kelberg
Sun is already down behind the mountains though it is still rather bright out the bears are in shade. ISO 1600 is being used as just prior to this we were photographing action so I wanted my shutter speed at least at 1/800. I try to stop down a bit as well to get a bit more DOF.
My routine with the bears is to push exposure as far right as possible to open up the shadows in the original capture since they are so dark to begin with; and the reason noise is so low in this image at ISO 1600.
In post processing I run a bit of shadows correction using Shadows/Highlights which is built into a series of actions I use as Smart Filters. This set of actions creates different layers that I apply my tweaks to open up shadows, tame highlights (remember that I mentioned I am pushing shadows up so highlights are clipping in at least one channel) and even out tonalities. Once that is done, I get into levels, curves and other stuff.
Since they are essentially in shade here, only the water is bright so no highlights to worry about in this image.
Sabyasachi, See my comment above on why I have my settings this way.
Cracking shot Robert! Strong and that cub and it's look is priceless. Very well done sir!
Exceptional image Robert. The eye contact and the cub staying safe behind mom is priceless.
Like the peek from behind of the little one. I also like the colors of the BG/surroundings. Sharpness looks good. I think this one could use a bit of NR (mostly on the big bear). Was there a reason you chose not to?
I may need a bit but I chose not too. THis is a demonstration of a technique I was trying with the bears of pushing the shadows up the histogram scale as much as possible even letting highlights clip. So I can photograph at ISO 1600 when I needed to and not have to do aggressive NR and lose sharpness. Last time I was there, I exposed for the highlights and shadows were too dark and when corrected yielded too much noise.
I was normally using ISO 800 and no NR needed there. Also demos how well the noise is controlled up to ISO 1600 in the Mark III cameras.
I am using the image as part of a learning tool I am developing for this workshop next year and hope to present some of that in the ezine here at a later date.
Thanks for the question.
Lovely composition and great eye contact with both bears as well as excellent detail. Very nice work Robert !!
Thanks for the explanation Robert.
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