This is my most successful wide-angle brown bear image from my August expedition to the Katmai Coast. I spent 4 days in Kuliak Bay trying unsuccessfully to photograph brown bears fishing underwater. For most of the day, my underwater camera system was submerged on a tripod with the PocketWizard antennae barely extending about the surface, but I had to pull it out of the river at high tide. While waiting for the tide to drop on my first full day ashore, I observed the bears fishing in the creek when the salmon migrated up to the lake at high tide. The next day, I decided to preposition my camera at the bottom of the falls before high tide and the arrival of the salmon and bears. It was nerve racking positioning my camera even though there were not any bears around at the time. They could emerge from the woods at any moment, so I quickly set it up next to some rocks and returned to the relative security of my viewing platform. This beautiful young bear was the first to arrive. Over the course of an hour, I observed this bear fishing and remotely triggered my camera every time that it appeared to be in front of my camera. Right before this moment, the bear caught the salmon on the far side of the creek. It then ran directly towards my camera with the fish in its mouth when it realized that there was a mother with 2 cubs coming down the creek from above. When I retrieved my camera several hours later, I was giddy with anticipation while reviewing the images and discovered this one was on my memory card. I created this image with my Canon 5DmkII and 17-40mm f4 lens inside my Aquatech 5DmkII housing with a Aquatech wide-angle flat port which I remotely triggered with a PocketWizard in an Aquatech PocketWizard housing. This image is a single-exposure which required minimal processing using Aperture 3 and Photoshop CS5.
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nice Jon.. timing of shot is awesome… ..
I also learnt the basic photography rules from Mr. Kishore Mamillapalli who is one of the leading wildlife photographers from South Africa. He used to say that ???Beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder?. If you like what you see on your camera screen, or through the viewfinder, you will like the photograph.
There are some basic photography rules for composition. Once you know these rules, you can use them, ignore them, or break them. Follow your gut, and you will end up with spectacular, sometimes breathtaking results. Kishore is really an astonishing wild life photographer and has a great eye for details..
The above comment is a strange spam comment I have seen on over a dozen photo-related sites, repeated word for word. As far as I can tell no such photographer exists. Weird stuff.