Again, the bear was 75 feet away from me, slant range. I was on a 30-foot high fire lookout tower, with the heavy trap door locked, using a 70-200mm (at 200mm) telephoto lens on a Sony A7-R4 camera body. The Sony's 61MP full-frame CMOS sensor allows for some heavy-handed cropping in post processing, which is what I did with this image. Additionally, the Topaz plug-in for Photoshop gets incredible results enlarging images.
I have a new version of this bear portrait that I am working up to print for a gallery that takes a tightly cropped 10"x10" image to 30"x30". Posted below is the raw image directly out of the camera .. and this is with a 200mm telephoto! The bear is looking at me because I had just chased him from directly below the lookout tower with blasts from a police whistle. As soon as I snapped a couple of photos in this pose, I gave him a few blasts of a marine air horn that I always have handy.
Also, on a technical note, notice the extremely distracting background .. lots of dead and down subalpine fir .. and exposures slightly on the right side of the histogram. That's why I corrected the exposure and lighting, and blackened the background.
That said, if the gallery patron with a platinum American Expre$$ card thinks that I braved a face-to-face, breath-to-breath, extremely dangerous close encounter with Brother Bear of the Bitterroot Range, then so be it.
The "bear portrait" image of my original post is cropped from this RAW file, directly from the camera.
©2024 Bo Zarts Studio
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