How to Photograph Bears in Different Locations
Over the last few years I have been very fortunate to be able to travel to many different locations to photograph Grizzly Bears in North America. Alaska, one of my favorite locations has a lot of wide open space with beautiful tree lines and mountain ranges far behind our subjects, the grizzly bears. The bears are photographed on the beach, in meadows filled with sedge grass and on the edge of beautiful meandering riverbanks. In places like northern British Columbia they are more often photographed in tighter quarters in river valleys and in the rivers fishing for salmon. This can present a very wide range of exposure and technical challenges for even experienced nature photographers.
Let’s look at a couple of image examples and discuss the aspects of each one.
1/500th F5.6 ISO 800 -2/3 Exposure Compensation
In this image of a charging grizzly bear the lighting was coming from the left side of the bear. It was early morning and the sun was very low and the sky behind the bear was cloudy. In order to maximize shutter speed to help ensure at least one sharp image from the burst I opened up my aperture to the lowest the lens would allow, f4. I also increased ISO to 1000. I was shooting in aperture priority to allow the camera to choose the shutter speed for me. Since there was not time to meter or set the camera up for a manual reading of the brightest part of the subject, this minimized my chances of an improper exposure. In Av the camera uses matrix metering which takes an average of the entire scene and then tries to make everything neutral grey. The camera will pay closest attention to whatever tones make up the vast majority of the scene it is capturing. In this case it saw a lot of dark background and therefore tried to brighten that to grey. This in turn would overexpose the sunlit area on the bear coming from the left side. Solution? Just dial in minus exposure compensation to make sure the bear does not get blown out highlights.
Let’s take a look at a less complicated exposure in this next image.
1/1000th F8 ISO 400
In this image we can see that there is very little contrast difference between the subject and the surrounding area. The sun was low in the sky in the early morning so there are less chance of high contrast causing blown out highlights. The lighting is nice and even. This was again shot in aperture priority ISO 400 at f8. When we have lots of available light we can afford a higher f stop to maximize depth of field as well as hitting the “sweet spot” on a lot of lenses. No exposure compensation was required in this image.
Now let’s look at shooting in a more challenging situation in a river valley.
1/800th @f5.6 ISO 1000 -1 Full stop Exposure Compensation
In this scene there is a very dark area behind the bear which, when shot in AV the camera will brighten to neutral grey, this in turn could blow out the water and the bright areas of the bear’s fur. Solution? Dial in a stop of minus exposure compensation to stop this from happening. This will ensure that the camera does not blow out the fur on the bear because of the very dark background. To sum it up, some shooting situations will have lighting that is easier to work with and expose properly than other situations where the light can be very challenging to expose your subject without over exposing. Before starting to shoot, think about your lighting. Where are you in relation to the direction of the sun? What is your background? Is it lighter or darker than your subject? Is there a lot of tonal contrast in the scene or very little? These are all factors that you should be asking yourself when you are in the field shooting.
