Coastal Brown Bears of Alaska Photo Tour

Coastal brown bear running along beach in Lake Clark National Park
Canon 50D, EF100-400mm, 1/320 @ F6.3

I'll once again be leading an exciting photo tour to Lake Clark National Park this summer to photograph the magnificent Alaskan Brown Bear. Tour dates are July 3-9th. Our base of operations will be the wonderful Silver Salmon Creek Lodge on the shore of Cook inlet about a hundred miles southwest of Anchorage. The rugged Aleutian Range rises up from sea level to over 10,000' making for some spectacular scenery. The volcanoes Mt Redoubt, Mt Illiamna and Mt. St. Augustine can be seen from the lodge. A large number of brown bears gather at the mouth of Silver Salmon Creek during the summer to breed, and feed on the lush grass, clams, and abundant salmon.

Brown bear sow and cub

The lodge has great accommodations and wonderful food. Our hosts Joanne and David go out of their way to make sure everything is just perfect during our stay. Our bear guides Drew and Jenny are very knowledgeable and provide us with outstanding photo opportunities. We fly into the Lodge from Anchorage in a small plane landing on the beach. It's an exciting way to start the trip. During last summers tour, for the entire 6 days, we literally had bears in front of us to photograph for all but an hour or two. With few or no other people around it makes for the ultimate wilderness bear viewing/photography experience. To see more information about the tour or to sign up go here

Curious brown bear cub

Yellowstone in Winter

Canon 5DmkII, EF24-105mmL, 3 image HDR

I've just returned from my "Winter Wolves of Yellowstone Tour". We had a full compliment of participants and came away with some great images. In this image of the Yellowstone River just above the Upper Falls I decided that due to the contrast range I would need either to use a graduated neutral density filter to hold detail in the sky or to process the image as an HDR file. I used the program Photomatix which is excellent. I bracketed 3 images with my exposure compensation set at -2, 0 and +2 while carefully checking my histogram to see if I captured detail in both the highlight and shadow areas of the image. The result seems very true to what my eyes saw.

Canon Eos7D, EF500mmF4IS

The raven image was captured handheld with the 5oomm F4IS. The raven landed on a snowcoach and allowed us to approach very close. I decided that portraits were my best option. My new Canon Eos 7D captured very good detail and the IS of the 500mm allowed me to capture a sharp image at 1/125 while handholding a heavy lens.

Canon Eos 7D, EF300mmF2.8L

I love snow covered and frosty bison. We located a herd of young bulls near Lava Creek. Using my excellent EF 300mm F2.8L on my 7d I was able to capture this wintry scene. When photographing a dark subject in the snow you must be careful with exposure so you don't overexpose your highlights while maintaining detail in a dark subject. With the size of the subject having a dramatic affect on your camera's metering in the automatic modes I decided to expose manually. I just metered a section of snow and opened up 2 stops giving me good results.