In the Field

Spirit Bear Enviroscape. Great Bear Rainforest, BC, Canada. September 30, 2011.

I captured this image during a trip into the Great Bear Rainforest of British Columbia in the early autumn of 2011. This shot is a long ways from being my all-time favourite Spirit Bear photo - I recently showed it to a friend of mine (who has seen hundreds and hundreds of Spirit Bears over the years) and she said "...well I love the setting and it is a good photo, but the bear has an ugly butt!". Agreed. But it definitely is a good shot to use in discussing both some technical and compositional issues. And some would argue that any photo of this very rare bear is worth showing! One thing I like about the image is that it almost reminds me of a diorama in a museum (tho' I suppose it could be argued that an image shot of a rare animal in the wild should look like anything BUT a museum exhibit!).

First - the technical end of the discussion. This image was captured with a Nikon D7000 paired with the excellent 70-200mm f2.8 VRII lens and at ISO 2500 (and with no noise reduction beyond that "automatically" applied by my raw converter). I've been very happy with the performance of the D700 when paired with the 70-200mm lens or shorter, but less thrilled with it when used with my super-telephoto lenses. Anyway...when I shot this image I was in a very low-light situation and I had no choice but to "bump" the ISO up to a range that pushes the D7000. Yet the image came out just fine. Why? The visual impact of noise on an image isn't an absolute thing - it varies quite dramatically with the scene type. Noise shows (and impacts) on images that have large continuous areas of a single colour - things like backgrounds thrown totally out-of-focus by lenses with shallow depth-of-fields (i.e., telephoto lenses shot with apertures almost wide open). But images like this - where the bulk of the image contains a lot of detail and there are no large "zones" of a single tone or colour, tend to hide the noise quite effectively. The noise is still there, but you simply don't notice it as much. So living by a rule like "never shoot a Nikon D7000 at an ISO beyond 1600" (or 3200, or whatever) probably isn't a good idea.

On to the compositional issues. During my years of teaching wildlife photography and leading instructional photo tours I've noticed that few photographers really think about how dominant (or what proportion of their viewfinder) should be filled with their subject. There's definitely a tendency out there to think "closer is better". But when I'm in the field "working" an animal/scene I'm always actively thinking about capturing one of 3 wildlife photo types:

1. Animalscapes: In these shots the subject is normally only a very small part of the entire scene (but the subject often serves as the focal point or "anchor" of the scene). In these types of shots the principles of landscape photography become absolutely critical in making the shot work - things like capturing great light, finding a way to show depth (often through having multiple focal "layers" in one's image, etc.). In my opinion good animalscapes are very tough to pull off but tend to sell well (as prints). Here's some examples of what I think of as animalscapes (you can decide if they're good ones or not!): Misty Morning Dip, The Ethereal Great Bear Rainforest, The Sentinel, and possibly even Celebrating the Wild Life.

2. Enviroscapes: In these types of shots the subject tends to occupy more of the frame than in animalscapes (and sometimes considerably more) but the shot still conveys a lot of information about the environment/habitat in which the subject is normally found. Like with animalscapes, the "usual" compositional principles always apply (things like the "rule of thirds", effectively using leading lines, etc.) and using light effectively remains critical. Showing depth in the image is often not quite as critical as it is in animalscapes. The image above is a "classic" example of an enviroscape, and a few songbird examples would include Stellers Jay in Shade and The Essential Spotted Towhee.

3. Active Portraits: Ok - now you've moved in really close and your subject may dominate the frame (possibly so much so that much of the subject won't even fit into the frame, which is OK). What do I mean by "active portrait"? Well, just a personal thing - I find most close-up images of wildlife quite boring - even if technically excellent - unless the animal itself is doing something interesting, like boring right through you with its eyes (like this shot) or chomping down on a unfortunate victim (like in this shot) - you get the picture...

I'm obviously taking what is really a continuum (of how large a subject can be in a frame) and pushing it into three pigeon-holes. Where an animalscape ends and an enviroscape begins can't be perfectly defined. And consider this image called I'm Still Watching You! - enviroscape or active portrait? I dunno. BUT, I often see wildlife images fail simply because the photographer didn't actively think about how large their subject should be in the frame (and ended up in that real danger zone - where the subject just about fills the frame and the photographer is left with almost no creative or compositional options). Feel free to borrow my three categories (animalscapes, enviroscapes, active portraits) free of charge. Or create your own three (or four, or five). But just don't forget to think about the "how big should my subject be in my viewfinder" issue the next time you're creating wildlife photos!

NOTE: This image was captured during one of my photo tours into a region of British Columbia known as "The Great Bear Rainforest". I offer both instructional photo tours and "photo op only" photo tours into the Great Bear Rainforest each spring and autumn. If you're interested in participating in one of these trips, just check out the Photo Tours page of this website!

Behind the Camera

Spirit Bear Enviroscape. Great Bear Rainforest, BC, Canada. September 30, 2011.

Digital Capture; Compressed RAW (NEF) 14-bit format; ISO 2500.

1/160s @ f4; no compensation from matrix-metered exposure setting.

At the Computer

Spirit Bear Enviroscape. Great Bear Rainforest, BC, Canada. September 30, 2011.

RAW Conversion to 16-bit TIFF, including first-pass/capture sharpening using Phase One's Capture One Pro 6. Three exposure variants covering a 0.7 stop total range, from -1.0 stops below original capture (for foreground water and parts of the bear) to -0.3 stops below original exposure (for darkest regions of the background).

Further digital corrections on resulting 16-bit TIFF files using Adobe's Photoshop CS5 and Light Craft's Lightzone. Photoshop adjustments including compositing (layering and masking) the exposure variants using multiple luminosity masks, strong colour desaturation, selective exposure and curves (contrast) adjustment using adjustment layers, and selective sharpening for web output. Final tone tweaking performed using tonemapper/re-light in Lightzone.

Conservation

Spirit Bear Enviroscape. Great Bear Rainforest, BC, Canada. September 30, 2011.

Ten percent of the revenue generated by this image will be donated to Pacific Wild*

Species Status in Canada**: Not separately list by the Species At Risk Public Registry (lumped together with the common Black Bear)

The "Spirit" or "Kermode" Bear is a rare genetically-based colour variant of the common Black Bear (Ursus americana). It has been estimated that less than 200 Spirit Bears exist today. Because the Black Bear is not considered under threat as a species, the Spirit Bear suffers from having the same conservation designation (it should be acknowledged that in British Columbia - the jurisdiction of greatest Spirit Bear abundance - hunting of these white-coated bears is not permitted). For reasons that are not fully understood, the Spirit Bear occurs with greater frequency in a relatively small geographic area within The Great Bear Rainforest of the central and northern coast of British Columbia. In this area 10 to 30% of the bears possess white coats. Unfortunately, this globally unique habitat is under development pressure, especially from the forestry industry. If this unique environment is altered, we may lose the wonderful genetic anomaly known as the Spirit Bear.

*Pacific Wild is a non-profit conservation organization that is committed to:

1. Defending wildlife and their habitat on CanadaÕs Pacific coast by developing and implementing solution-based conservation strategies. Pacific Wild supports innovative research, public education, community outreach and awareness to achieve the goal of lasting environmental protection in the lands and waters of the Great Bear Rainforest.

2. Working with a diverse array of communities, First Nations, groups and individuals to ensure that biodiversity protection is at the forefront of land and marine use decisions.

3. Mobilizing a concerned global citizenry to achieve large-scale wildlife protection.

Natural Art Images supports the efforts of Pacific Wild and encourages you to do the same.

**as determined by COSEWIC: The Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada