If a man hunting a bear walks one mile south, then one mile east and then one mile north and ends up exactly where he started, what colour is the bear…?
Polar bear
I went on an Exodus photographic trip to Spitsbergen in summer 2014 with Paul Goldstein, and I saw around a dozen polar bears.
Here are a few of the lessons I learned from that experience.
Equipment
‘Environmental portraits’ seem to be all the rage these days, and it’s great to be able to capture an animal in its home environment from close range with a wide angle lens.
Personally, I know I’m a little too much in love with close-ups, so I have to force myself to pack my 18-35mm lens and then to mount it on one of my two Nikon camera bodies at the expense of my darling 80-400 and 800mm lenses!
I can certainly see the benefit in terms of getting a different sort of photograph with enhanced perspective and a real sense of getting up close and personal with a wild predator.
However, sometimes the animals just won’t cooperate, and that was certainly the case in Spitsbergen.
The polar bears put on a great show for us at times, but they were still quite far away (over 100 yards), and that was a bit of a challenge for my equipment.
Photography is an expensive hobby, and I didn’t have much in the way of savings at the time, so I was using a cheap and cheerful Sigma 50-500mm f/4.5-6.3 APO DG OS HSM lens.
And that was a mistake.
The pictures I was getting were far too soft, and I remember one day walking back to my cabin, reviewing all my images and deleting every single one!
After complaining to one of the other photographers, he allowed me to borrow his lens for a few shots during our next sighting, and he also advised me to get my lens’s autofocus fine-tuned.
Polar bear
That was good advice, but I decided then and there to stop messing around with Sigma and Tamron and buy myself a proper Nikon lens.
In the end, I ended up with a Nikon 800mm f5.6E FL ED VR lens - for £15,000!
That’s a lot of money, and the only reason I could afford it was because I’d saved up to buy a flat, but the vendor died and probate took too long, so my mortgage offer expired.
Finding myself with around a hundred grand in cash, I decided to blow it all on photography trips and a new lens!
Now, I’m not saying that everyone should make the same mistakes as I did, but the quality of your glass is a crucial input to the quality of the pictures you take.
If you’re planning on visiting the Arctic to see polar bears, you’ll need a long lens that will get the job done without leaving you with any regrets.
That might mean borrowing one or renting one from Lenses For Hire, but in the long run if you’re serious about your photography, then there’s no substitute for buying your own.
Lenses retain their value quite well, anyway, so you can always sell it if you really need to.
In the meantime, get yourself to Spitsbergen, Churchill or Barter Island…!
Polar bear
Exposure Compensation
The most important setting to remember when photographing polar bears is exposure compensation.
You can read my complete guide to exposure compensation here, but the idea is to get the ‘right’ exposure when the camera is being ‘fooled’ by both the subject and the background being much brighter than normal.
If you don’t use exposure compensation, the bears and the ice in your shots will turn a murky grey, and that’s not what you want.
However, if you use one or two stops of positive exposure compensation, everything should turn out all right.
Cameras don’t ‘know’ what’s in front of them, so they don’t ‘know’ what exposure settings to use. As a result, the manufacturers program them to expect the world to reflect 18% of the light from the sun.
This is in fact halfway between white and black (don’t ask me why!), and it does roughly represent the amount of light that’s reflected by the world in general.
That means that the in-camera exposure meters will accurately predict the required exposure if they’re faced with something that actually does reflect 18% of the light.
However, there are always exceptions - including polar bears!
If the scene contains elements that are very bright, such as a polar bear on an ice floe, then the camera will overcompensate and darken it too much. “Ah, I know this is really an 18% tone,” thinks the camera, “but I’m getting a reading of 80%, so I’m going to have to underexpose it until it’s 18% again.”
So what should you do?
There are two possibilities, depending on what effect you’re trying to achieve:
Dial in exposure compensation to find the ‘right’ exposure.
Dial in positive exposure compensation to get an overexposed ‘high key’ image.
How do I get the right exposure?
Assuming you just want to get a correctly exposed image, all you need to do is to analyse the scene, work out how much the camera is likely to overexpose the image and then set the matching amount of positive exposure compensation.
For example, all the pictures in this article were taken with +2/3 of a stop of exposure compensation, but I had to increase the exposure in Lightroom quite a bit, so I think I’d have been better off using two stops.
Exposure compensation works for Aperture or Shutter Priority mode, Program mode or even Manual mode with Auto ISO.
Just make sure you don’t spin the dial the wrong way and use negative exposure compensation by mistake!
How do I get a high key image?
‘High key’ shots can work just as well as low key shots, especially if you’re taking shots of polar bears. All you have to do is add a couple more stops of positive exposure compensation.
By overexposing the image of a polar bear on ice, it’s possible to remove the background entirely so that you can focus on the darker details such as the face and paws of the bear.
In fact, you could overexpose your shot so much that even the pale fur of the bear disappears!
There’s no right and wrong answer here - it’s entirely up to you…
Polar bear
Other tips
Here are a few more ideas for you when it comes to shooting polar bears:
Try using a wide-angle lens. I like taking close-up shots using the ‘big dog’, but why not mix it up with shots that show the whole scene? So-called ‘environmental portraits’ are very fashionable at the moment, and the natural architecture of the ice offers a great opportunity to place the polar bear in context.
Time your shots of walking bears. With any quadruped such as a polar bear, you’ll get a better shot if you time it so that you press the shutter when the bear’s far front leg is extended forward. You can see what I mean if you look at the image at the top of this article: because of the timing, the chest of the animal is turned towards the camera, which means you can see more of it.
Take a tripod. If you do go on a cruise around Spitsbergen, it’s very important to take a tripod with you. Based on my own experience, you’ll spend a long time standing on the foredeck with a bunch of other photographers, and you can’t possibly hold your camera that long without a tripod!
“Eat when you can, sleep when you can.” This part is a bit like being a soldier: you never know when you might get a polar bear sighting on board ship, so just make sure you’re as well fed and rested as you can be because you’re more than likely going to have to get up and three in the morning to take advantage of the midnight sun…
Wrap up warm. Yes, this hardly needs saying, but, as Alfred Wainwright once wrote, “There's no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing…”
And finally, if you book a trip to Antarctica expecting to see polar bears, then you’d better be prepared for a BIG disappointment…!
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