Grizzly 399 and her Cubs With Kevin Lisota

RESEARCH CONDUCTED BEFORE WILDLIFE ENCOUNTER

One of my goals for this trip to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks was to photograph bears. There are plenty of grizzly and black bears in these two parks, but I frequently photograph in this area during the winter when bears are hibernating.

Grizzly 399 is one of the most famous bears in the world. She has been extensively tracked and documented for over two decades in and around Grand Teton. She has also been the subject of bear conservation efforts. 2020 is a special year for this bear. At 24 years old, she is quite old, especially to be rearing cubs. The typical female grizzly lives 25-27 years in the wild. Even more unusual, she emerged in spring with four cubs, an extremely rare litter size for a grizzly of any age.

Her longevity and a new litter of four cubs just added to her fame. I knew I would only need to follow the crowd of wildlife watchers once I was in the park.

WILDLIFE ENCOUNTER

I spent three days following the movement of Grizzly 399 and her cubs. She did have a pattern of returning to a particular meadow area in the mornings and evenings to dig for grubs and eat sedges and grasses with her cubs. Patience was the key to see her. I camped out for a few hours each morning and evening in anticipation of their arrival. A couple of times, she appeared immediately. Other times I had to wait 3-4 hours.

Sometimes the bears would be a couple of hundred yards away in the meadow, but they approached and crossed the road right in between the crowd of cars on two occasions. Those close approaches sent the crowd scurrying away to maintain a safe distance from the bears, but it also presented some of the best photo opportunities as they neared the road.

There were several challenges with photographing this group of bears. First, trying to capture all four cubs and the mother in a single frame was quite tricky. The four cubs each have a mind of their own. Second, this early in the season, bear cubs are still quite small. The flowers and grasses of the meadow often obscured them.

Lastly, on this particular night, the light was rapidly diminishing. About 30 minutes before sunset, they decided to cross the road. The sun had already gone behind the hills, and they were in shadows. They were always moving, so I needed a shutter speed fast enough to freeze the action. Their depth was staggered, so I needed smaller apertures to maintain enough depth of field to have them all in focus. In low and diminishing light, I needed more and more ISO sensitivity to obtain proper exposure. My ISO increased from 1600 up to 10,000 as the light diminished. This picture is at ISO 4000.

TECHNICAL DETAILS:

Camera and Lens: Nikon D850, Nikon 500mm ƒ5 .6E PF

Focal Length: 500mm

Aperture: ƒ7 .1 because there were four bears at slightly varied depths at a long focal length.

Shutter Speed: 1/320th of a second, fast enough to freeze their relatively slow motion and slow enough to deal with low light.

ISO: 4000 – These bears were in shadows shortly before sunset, and a high ISO was needed for proper exposure.

Metering Mode – Matrix metering to allow the camera to meter the entire scene.

GLOBAL EDITS

  • Panoramic crop to remove extra meadow and forest and focus on the bears

  • Remove chromatic aberration

  • Enable lens profile adjustments

  • Slightly raise color temperature to neutralize blue cast during sunset hour

  • Increase vibrance to enhance yellow flowers

  • Reduce highlights to give better definition to yellow flowers and bright spots on fur

  • Sharpening mask adjusted to only sharpen edges on bears and foreground foliage

  • Noise reduction to reduce ISO noise

    LOCAL ADJUSTMENTS

• Adjustment brush selection on bears, boosting shadows in their dark fur and increasing texture to give better fur definition

CRITICAL DECISIONS IN THE MOMENT

1 Try for an emotional response – When I first reviewed the images from this shoot, the pose of the middle bear cub made me chuckle . It looks like he is a surfer. The third cub is barely visible, and her fourth cub is hidden in the grass. I have other photos where all four cubs are visible, but this one got an emotional reaction from me. When I shared the series of images on social media, almost everyone picked this one as their favorite. Photos with an emotional component will almost always have more appeal than those that are just well-composed.

Patience – The best wildlife photography moments often require time and patience. While you can track animals and anticipate their actions, they don’t operate on our schedule. If you wait things out, sometimes you’ll be rewarded and sometimes you will not. In this case, the bears crossed a nearby creek. It was easy to anticipate that they would eventually emerge from the forest next to the creek and into the meadow in front of us. However, it took well over an hour for them to make that short journey.

Elevate your perspective when needed – Normally, I try to bring my camera position to the animal’s eye level. Lowering my point of view was possible in this location and worked well for the mother bear, but not always her cubs. The cubs were too small and obscured by the grasses and flowers of the meadow. Slightly elevating my perspective helped capture better images of the cubs. During this shoot, I would stand when the cubs were hard to see and kneel when they emerged and were visible. Many photographers at this location insisted on using a tripod and could not make this change quickly. I was able to be more flexible because I was shooting handheld.

Deal with diminishing light – In periods near sunset and sunrise, low light presents many challenges. High ISO settings were needed to get the proper exposure while maintaining a small enough aperture to keep the group in focus and fast enough shutter speeds to freeze their motion. Different cameras have different abilities to use high ISO settings. Some cameras provide unacceptable results at higher ISO sensitivity settings, but some modern cameras are quite adept. Older cameras won’t even allow such high ISO settings. Understand the limits your particular camera sensor has, and push those ISO limits if needed to capture scenes in low light.