Bear Gills
I’m a wildlife photographer, and this is one in an occasional series of posts about my favourite photographs. I’ll tell you how I took them and break down the shot into the idea, the location, the equipment, the settings, the technique and any post-processing.
The idea
Thirty years ago, I was staying with my best friend Mark in Golders Green and found myself chatting with his mother. She was in her seventies and had just been on holiday, so I politely asked if she’d been anywhere nice.
“Yes,” she said, “I’ve just come back from watching the bears catching salmon in Alaska.”
That’ll teach me…!
Ever since that conversation, I’ve wanted to go to Brooks Falls, and I finally made it in July 2015.
I had to go in July because that’s when a million salmon make their way up the Brooks River to their spawning grounds.
It happens every year, and every year the bears are there to meet them!
The shot I was looking for was based on the famous one taken by Thomas D Mangelsen in the 1980s called Catch of the Day. It shows a bear standing on top of Brooks Falls with its mouth wide open, about to swallow a salmon that’s leaping the waterfall.
There were two important elements to this composition:
The bear had to have its mouth open.
The salmon had to be in mid-air.
The location
Brooks Falls in Alaska, USA, in July 2015.
The equipment
Nikon D800 DSLR camera
Nikon AF-S Nikkor 28-300mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR lens
Manfrotto 190XPROB tripod
Hähnel remote shutter release
The Nikon D850 and the Nikon 800mm prime are now my go-to combination for wildlife photography, but when I took this shot, I was still using my very first DSLR camera, the Nikon D800, and the very first lens I bought for it, the Nikon 28-300mm.
The 28-300mm is a good all-purpose lens, and the zoom at least gave me the flexibility I needed when framing my shot.
I also had a Tamron SP 150-600mm f/5-6.3 Di VC USD lens, but I’d paired that with my newer D810 camera body for close-ups, and I preferred the better quality glass of the 28-300 if I was only shooting at 300mm.
However, the D800 had a problem, and that was the fact that its frame rate was only 4fps. I’ll explain later how that limitation almost sank my hopes of getting the shot I wanted…
The settings
Auto ISO 400
f/9
1/1600 of a second
300mm
Cloudy white balance
3D continuous auto-focus [ie AI Servo if you’re a Canon user]
I had the camera in Manual mode with the ISO on Auto, which I normally do when I’m not taking any slow pan shots.
I chose f/9 for my aperture as I wanted to make sure the whole bear was in focus, but I also wanted the depth of field to be more than a few inches as I obviously didn’t know exactly where the fish would end up being caught!
As a result, the water in the background is probably a bit sharper than I’d want it to be in an ideal world, but I’m not too bothered about it.
The shutter speed was very important as the salmon was going to be moving pretty fast, and I also wanted the bear’s reaction to be frozen, so I dialled in 1/1600 of a second.
The light wasn’t great - this was cloudy and rainy Alaska, after all! - but there was enough of it to allow me to get away with ISO 400, so noise wasn’t an issue.
The technique
Short of trying to capture a 70mph cheetah kill, photographing bears catching salmon is one of the most difficult tasks I’ve ever taken on in photography.
The first problem was that there weren’t that many salmon trying to jump the waterfall, and that was because I was probably a week too late.
The staff at Brooks Falls were helpful enough, but it was very difficult to find out the best time to go as there weren’t any data on the number of fish or the number of bears by time of year.
In addition, the resort is tremendously popular during the salmon run, and it was hard to get accommodation for the penultimate week in July, which was when I worked out was probably the best time to go.
As a result, the opportunities to get the shot I wanted were few and far between.
Even when a bear did catch a leaping salmon, I was often either chatting to the person next to me or busy changing my settings or focusing on something else!
Another issue was timing.
When I’d framed the bear in the viewfinder, I’d watch the bear and press the shutter (or use the remote shutter release) as soon as I saw a salmon entering a frame.
However, my reactions just weren’t good enough: by the time I pressed the shutter, the fish had usually jumped up the falls and disappeared out of the frame!
As a result, I tried focusing my attention on the surface of the water: as soon as I saw a ripple or the head of a fish, I’d press the shutter and take a burst of images.
That was slightly better, but there were obviously a lot of false alarms when I thought a fish was about to jump, but it didn’t.
The final problem was the frame rate of the D800, which, as I mentioned, was only 4fps.
I must admit, the frame rate hadn’t been among the things I’d been considering when I’d bought the D800, but it suddenly took on huge importance.
Even if my reactions were good enough to get a shot with the salmon in the middle of the frame, it was moving so fast that it almost always managed to make it up the waterfall (or end up caught by the bear) before the camera could take another one.
After all, a leaping salmon can go a long way in a quarter of a second…!
Anyway, I eventually realised that I had to manage my time a bit better and focus on the ‘money shot’ rather than get distracted by other subjects such as the four bear cubs climbing a tree right next to me.
Fortunately, my efforts paid off in the end, and this is probably the best shot I’ve ever taken.
However, it’s one of only two photos I managed to take during the whole week in which the bear has its mouth open and the fish is in mid-air.
Tricky, very tricky…
The post-processing
I do all my post-processing in Lightroom these days, but the current version of the image you see here was actually produced using Photoshop by Paul Hurren at Genesis Imaging.
I wanted to have a few ‘signature’ works to show off at exhibitions, and I had a bit of cash at the time, so I placed an order with Genesis for three 53 x 38” (135 x 97cm) prints and a 45 x 36” (114 x 91cm) aluminium print.
I was so pleased with this picture that I added it to the print queue, together with shots of an elephant giving itself a dust bath, a pig poking its head out from behind a wall in India and a black and white headshot of a Chilean flamingo.
The choice wasn’t easy, and I almost chose the other shot of the bear catching salmon, which was a close-up, but in the end my friend Andy tipped the balance in favour of the full-length version - and I’m glad he did!
The main problem with the original picture was the gash on the back of the bear.
Paul took that out (at my request) and also improved the white balance and sharpened the image.
He did such a good job, in fact, that it’s almost unrecognisable from the original image (see below), and it’s now hanging above my sofa as I write this piece.
The conclusion
It’s rare that I go on a trip with a particular shot in mind, and it’s even rarer for me to pull it off, so I’m very pleased with this image.
It’s also done very well in competition, winning a whole host of awards including the weekly title in the Sunday Times/Audley Travel Big Shot. You can see the full list on the product page, but I was particularly happy when it was chosen by National Geographic as the Shot of the Day and won more than 25,000 likes!
National Geographic published the shot under the title Catch of the Day (sigh), but I prefer The Sun’s headline: Bear Gills…!
If you’d like to order a framed print of one of my wildlife photographs, please visit the Prints page.
If you’d like to book a lesson or order an online photography course, please visit my Lessons and Courses pages.