My experience photographing grizzly bears in Denali National park has been mixed over the years. I’ve observed lots of interesting behaviour, and had many fortunate opportunities to make some great photos. On my recent trip into the park, following a rainy night and misty morning, the wet tundra grasses glowed under the bright overcast skies.…
The lime green tundra and newly budding leafs of a poplar tree along the Denali Park road are tell-tale signs of spring. This young grizzly bear takes a break from foraging on the new grass shoots and vegetation along the roadside by scratching its back on the bark of a balsam poplar tree on a…
Polar bear cub, late evening light. While it can be easily argued that most of the best photos have defined and dramatic light, the new high ISO performance of today’s digital SLR’s have produced a whole new genre of low-light images that simply could not be captured previously. Certainly not in the same quality league.…
Polar bear symmetry While her cubs were off playing, this female polar bear curled up on the snow and dozed off occasionally. The posture makes a beautiful, symmetrical pose. It is a cropped version of an image taken with a Canon 1D Mark IV, 500mm + 1.4x extender, which translates into a focal length of…
Brown bear (ursus arctos) and red salmon (oncorhynchus nerka) I watched this female brown bear capture many red salmon in the Brooks river of Katmai national park, in southwest Alaska. She had one cub of the year to feed, who watched from the river bank keeping alert for other bears. This picture was taken at…
I’ve been digging through some files from that latter part of 2011, doing some clean up work and getting folders in a completed state. Occasionally I will shoot a series of images which are to be stitched into a larger file in post production. I do this for panoramas, and sometimes to increase the overall…
With high water in the rivers in Katmai this year, brown bears did a lot of swimming and snorkeling for fish. This resulted in a lot of shaking off the water once emerging from dives. Backlighting offers some interesting contrast in these situations. This shows what a shutter speed of 1/800 does for that kind…
As a 700mm equivalent lens on the 1D Mark IV, I was a little tight for these bears with the 500mm, but I needed the frame rate of that camera to capture the sequential action. In order to increase resolution on this image, I merged a handful of photos that I took just seconds apart.…
A calm day this time of year along Alaska’s typically windy arctic coast is a treat. Such was the case yesterday, at least for a short while. During a photo session with the polar bears, one walked over to the edge of the water and lowered its face to reveal a beautiful reflection. I happened…
I just returned from a trip to photograph the brown bears in Katmai National Park and a rapid change of gears has me headed for Arctic Alaska, in pursuit of polar bears, aurora borealis and Arctic wildlife. I’m co-guiding a group of photographers, who are very excited for what lies ahead in the next 10…