Tag Archives: Grizzly Bears

Grizzly Bear and Fall Colors

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Grizzly bear and fall color, standing in warm afternoon light on the edge of a salmon stream. Ursus arctos, brown bear, Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska.

Grizzly bear and fall color, standing in warm afternoon light on the edge of a salmon stream. Ursus arctos, brown bear, Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Please click the image to view a larger version of the photo.

Hey Folks,

As I mentioned in a post a few days back, I am pretty excited about some of the grizzly bear photos I took on this most recent trip to Katmai National Park. Over the years I’ve spent so many weeks there, shooting and re-shooting photos of grizzly bears, that it can be difficult to really bring home some new images. This photo is one I was super happy with.

I took, of course, countless images of bears eating salmon, chasing salmon, catching salmon, standing around, sitting down, sleeping, fighting, playing, etc. But what I really wanted to capture was some dramatic images in dynamic weather or dynamic lighting situations. We were fortunate to have an abundance of both, Continue reading →

Grizzly bear photo

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Grizzly bear adult, fall, Katmai National Park, Alaska.

A grizzly bear (brown bear, Ursus arctos), stands on the edge of a salmon stream in Katmai National Park and Preserve. Grizzly bears can range in color from dark brown and black, as this one is, to a blond, almost white color. Fall foliage, Grizzly bear, Katmai National Park, Alaska. Please click on the image to view a larger version of the photo.

Hey Folks,

Here’s a photo from the first morning out on my recent trip to Katmai. The weather was absolutely gorgeous, and I was able to get out and shoot before returning to camp to meet the folks coming out for the first week’s photo tour. I’d also walked and photographed the river the previous evening, and it gave me a great opportunity to scout around a bit and get a head’s up on things like the river level (which fluctuates greatly year to year, even week to week), which bears were hanging where, where the best fall colors were, etc, etc.

The bear population this year was even higher than last year, with over 70 bears in the area. I recognized many from previous trips I’ve made here, but this beautiful dark bear was one I hadn’t seen before. Continue reading →

Internet Radio Interview

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Male grizzly bear, brown bear photo, Katmai National Park, Alaska.

Male grizzly bear, brown bear photo, (Ursus arctos) Katmai National Park, Alaska. Please click on the thumbnail to view a larger version of the photo.

Hey Folks,

Just a quick note here to say if you can, check out this online radio interview (GONE) Tuesday, May 4, 2010, at 9pm EST. I’ll be talking with photographers Greg Downing and E.J. Peiker, of Naturescapes.net, and  host Dave Warner, from Lensflarelive. It should be a lot of fun to do, and hopefully interesting and useful as well. I know I’m excited about it, Greg and EJ are great photographers whom I’ve admired for a long time, and it’ll be nice to talk with them.

Well be talking about wilderness photography, backpacking and hiking and photographing, as well as some environmental/conservation topics that might be relevant to nature photography. Greg also had the idea of present a few images online and we can discuss those and present a little more context about the work. I’m not really sure all of what we’ll talk about yet, but the show is open to call in, and it’d be great to hear from you on air. Hopefully the conversation will be interesting.

The broadcast can be heard live here. If you miss the show, it will be edited and available as a podcast soon after – I’ll add a link to this post when that becomes available.

I hope you enjoy the show,

Cheers

Carl

Brown bear, Katmai National Park, Alaska.

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Grizzly bear walking in a salmon River, Katmai National Park, Alaska.

A young brown bear (Ursus arctos) walks through a stream hunting for spawning Sockeye Salmon. Grizzly bear, or coastal brown bear, Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Please click the image for a larger version of the photo.

Hey folks

5-6 more weeks and the bears are running around the woods again!!!

I’ll be in the woods for the coming week, but I thought I’d post a brown bear photo, and schedule a couple of other blog posts for while I’m gone.

Catching this young blonde colored brown bear in some nice light was quite a treat. That’s the benefit of spending time in the field. Most wildlife photography, it seems, is done in places where the subject is pretty much a given; places like Homer for bald eagles, Yellowstone for elk, Churchill for polar bears, and Katmai National Park and Preserve for grizzly bears, or brown bears. So what makes the differernce? Light. Continue reading →

Grizzly Bear Photo – Ursus arctos

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A grizzly bear (Ursus arctos) headshot, Katmai National park and Preserve, Alaska.

A grizzly bear (Ursus arctos), close and personal, Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Click the image for larger version.

Hey Folks,

In honor of the recent decision (last week) by Judge Molloy of Montana to continue to have the grizzly bears listed under the Endangered Species Act (in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem), here’s a grizzly bear photo, from my recent trip to Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. In September the Court ruling was for the US Fish and Wildlife Service to relist the bears, but the F&WS requested the judge to reconsider. He reconsidered, and turned down their appeal, so the bears remain, for now, on the ESA. I’ll write a lengthy post about it later; for now I’m going to bed.

I think September was a good month for the bears – Continue reading →

Grizzly Bear at Sunset and Grizzly Bear Fall Photo Tour

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A Grizzly bear rests at Sunset

Hey Folks,

NB: I’ve now added this trip to the main section of guiding website, Expeditions Alaska. By all means, browse this page, but please also visit the trip page here.

I’m excited to announce a Grizzly Bears in the Fall photo Tour for 2010. Details are posted on my Expeditions Alaska website but I’ll copy it here as well:

This coming year, 2010, I’m running a new phototour to Katmai National Park and Preserve; we’ll be basecamping in remote southwest Alaska, photographing grizzly bears, dawn til dusk, for a week. Katmai National Park is home to some of the largest grizzly bears (or “brown bears” as they’re often called in that region) in the world. Feeding largely on salmon from some of the richest salmon runs in Alaska, the bears are magnificent creatures and there’s no better time to photograph them than in the fall. This trip offers an unsurpassed opportunity to photograph wild grizzly bears in a remote and brilliantly wild setting and promises some simply incredible photographic possibilities.

Schedule:

– Trip #1: Sept 19-25, 2010.

– Trip #2: Sept 26-Oct 2, 2010

Continue reading →

Grizzly bear and fall color

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A grizzly bear stands poised beside Brooks River, vibrant fall colors in the background, as he fishes for Sockeye Salmon. Katmai National park and Preserve, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

As I said in a recent post, on my recent trip to Katmai National Park and Preserve I really hoped to make some images that featured not only the great grizzly bears, but also the awesome fall colors of the boreal forest . The Black Cottonwoods of the area provide the perfect background for photographing grizzly bears, but rarely do photographers seem to combine the 2. Most folks come up to Alaska and shoot the bears in the summer, and I think they’re missing out. The classic shot of a grizzly bear fishing for salmon at Brooks Falls is nice, and only generally possible mid-summer, of course, but there are a lot of other opportunities around in the fall that can be equally exciting. Great fall colors make stunning backdrops, and can really bring a vibrancy to the image. Stepping back, zooming out, and letting the scene dictate the photos is often the key.

In this photo I enjoy the sense of relationship between subject and environment – the dichotomy is largely only a function of our thought processing. The idea that the “environment” is something other than everything is a little peculiar; the subject IS the environment, as equally as the environment is the subject. There is really no difference between the bear and his habitat. Continue reading →

Grizzly Bear Chasing Salmon

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A slow shutter speed blurs the speed of a grizzly bear chasing a Sockeye Salmon in Brooks River, Katmai National Park, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

One of the photos I wanted this year was some slower shutter speed blurs of grizzly bears chasing spawning Sockeye Salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) up the river. This kind of image is difficult to do with grizzly bears; well, not difficult to do, but difficult to manage a photo that works. More so, I think, than with most other animals. The result of this is that it seems to take about 5 times as many attempts to get a decent ‘panblur’ of a grizzly bear than it might, for example, of a caribou or wolf. What I’m calling a ‘panblur’, for those of you who aren’t certain, is a technique of slowing down the shutter speed when shooting movement, so that the subject becomes blurred, rather than crisp and sharp. You can see in the image above the spashing water and the legs of the bear are not to sharp at all. By panning the camera along with the bear as it races through the water, Continue reading →

Nikon Capture NX2 and Adobe CS4.

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A grizzly bear walking towards the camera, Katmai national park, Alaska.

Photo above extracted via Nikon Capture NX2.2.2 Continue reading →

Grizzly bear cub twins

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2 grizzly bear cubs, twins, cubs of the year, Katmai National Park, Alaska.

Hey Folks,

Even though they might only be little, grizzly bear cubs are pretty bold – bold enough to climb on a stick and poke their tongue out at my camera. They know full well, of course, that their mother outweighs me by several hundred pounds, is a coupla yards quicker than my aged legs can carry me :), is quite a bit stronger, has bigger, pointier teeth, sharper, longer claws, and is a little more willing to get in a tussle than I am. Hence, they’re pretty bold.

These cubs were actually not doing so well – only days earlier there had been 3 of them. Continue reading →