Just in from photographing bears on the Katmai coast on a tour organized by Photo Quest Adventures. We had incredible weather, 25 bears at a time right near us, and lots of cubs. Every year these giant coastal brown bears pack into the streams to eat spawning salmon. This year there was an incredible return of pink and dog salmon, so the bears packed in to feast.
From a technical standpoint, photographing bears is pretty straightforward. Matrix metering generally nails the exposure, so it is more about anticipating the bears behavior and being ready for the shot. Because these bears walk by so close, say 7-10 feet away at times, you have to be careful about your choice of aperture. An image shot at F4 at 400mm on a bears face may result in the nose being sharp and the eyes going soft. The other technique we used frequently was using continuous focus modes with multipoint autofocus patterns to capture bears running through the creek chasing fish. We also used this technique to track bald eagles flying over head.
We decided to take the boat back to Kodiak (we flew over by floatplane to start) from the Katmai coast in hopes of photographing whales and sea otters. Once again we had great luck finding both otters and orcas.
It’s great to see abundant wildlife in these wild places. Alaska never disappoints. Tech: all images shot with a Nikon D3 and 200-400mm F4 lens, some with a 1.4x converter. attached.
Just returned from a family vacation to the florida keys, nice after being on the road for more than a month. I promised myself I wouldn’t turn this family vacation into a ‘family stock shoot’, and I’m happy to say that was the case. That doesn’t mean I didn’t spend some time doing a little shooting. I brought the Elinchrom Quadra with me (why not, I put this little thing in my shoulder bag with head and cords, room to spare…it is just to easy to carry this pack everywhere you go). I wanted to shoot an image of my son playing in the surf, which he did for 7 days straight. Nothing like a little sand, salt, 100 percent humidity and flying water to give your camera gear a work out.
I kept the Quadra in my Lowepro shoulder bag, which got fairly soaked during the process. My wife volunteered to be grip, and we all waded out into the surf to get hammered. As with fresh water, as long as you cover up your flash gear, you can do a lot in the water with no adverse effects on gear. What’s more, we had this pack and heads out in the 95 degree salty humid heat for 7 days with no problems. The skyport is critical for this ‘enclosed pack shooting’, since you can control the output from your skyport on the camera, and not have to open the bag to access the pack and potentially get it wet. Tech; Nikon D200, 18-135mm lens, ISO 100, F11 at 1/250. Elinchrom Quadra shot at around 300 watts through a 27″ square Rotalux softbox.
Somehow I seem to be shooting in or near the water for a lot of images…oceans, lakes and rivers…just can’t get enough time in the water. Naturally electronics (think flash and cameras) don’t like water, so I have come up with some techniques to keep my flash equipment dry should it go into the drink.
