How to Photograph Bears with Bright Backgrounds
How to Photograph Bears on a Beach with Bright backgrounds
For many photographers and videographers there is nothing more spectacular than being within 30 feet from a wild grizzly bear. Photographing a mother bear with her young cubs certainly pulls at your heart strings. When you are challenged with overcast or rainy skies and poor light you have some options with your settings. Having water as the background is challenging and you will have to blow out the water to capture your main subject with proper light.
Move your Aperture or F-stop to as low as possible on your lens to allow in more light, therefore, allowing for a maximum shutter speed to help freeze motion.
If you are shooting in Av mode, set your exposure compensation to +2/3, or higher, to make sure that the camera does not darken the bear too much when reading the brightly lit water and or sky in the background.
Check your histogram and if you still need more light then as a last resort increase your ISO to 800. For most DSLR camera’s more than an ISO of 1000 will result in more noise on your photograph.
In this image photographed with a Canon EOS 7D, was photographed on Av mode. Aperture F5.6, Shutter Speed 1/320 sec and ISO 800. I added more light using Photoshop.
With Adobe Photoshop you can also select the background and darken it while retaining the bears fur a natural color.
It is better to keep a lower ISO and lighten your image with software than to have to move beyond ISO 1200.
Join us for the Alaska Grizzly Bears or the BC Grizzly Bears tours and learn how to take amazing bear photographs.
