Black bear, Glacier National Park

Came across this little fella at dawn while it was feasting on berries. These were ISO 2500 on the 50D. Cool bear but almost impossible light:

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You should try give them a bit of a contrast boost and maybe a little white balance adjustment to get rid of the slight blue tinge. Well thats from my monitor anyway. The photos themselves are nice though.

Perhaps something like this??

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Great shots Mike !!!

Bloody good for iso 2500. Have you done any NR on them ??
Were you using the 300 ??

I think your version look better from where I'm sitting. Colours are a lot more natural I reckon....

Matt.

Mike
Very nice shots! Understood about the lighting conditions. Thats life taking photos of wildlife in the national parks I also like your version a little better... I am also interested to know what you did for noise as I think these look pretty good

Nice shots. The originals are definitely better. That is a very brown Black Bear. I'm not used to seeing them in that colour.

Originals are fine, look good to me at 2500. I've never had to use that high of an ISO on my 50d. He kind of has a guilty look in those first 2 shots. Well done!

snowyowl13 wrote in post #8820142
Nice shots. The originals are definitely better. That is a very brown Black Bear. I'm not used to seeing them in that colour.

Thx. The Rockies black bears come in all shades it seems like: Chocolate, cinnamon, reddish ,etc.

jkrohn wrote in post #8818950
Mike
Very nice shots! Understood about the lighting conditions. Thats life taking photos of wildlife in the national parks I also like your version a little better... I am also interested to know what you did for noise as I think these look pretty good

Thx Jkrohn. For noise I had the levels up in Lightroom to about 40(Luminance and color), and then I used the noise reduction built into Photoshop Elements 5.0 after resizing and sharpening.

Mtn Breeze wrote in post #8818749
Great shots Mike !!!

Bloody good for iso 2500. Have you done any NR on them ??
Were you using the 300 ??

I think your version look better from where I'm sitting. Colours are a lot more natural I reckon....

Matt.

Thx Matt! See the post above for the noise process. I was using the 300 on these wide open of course. Itwould have been impossible for anything slower than F4. It's easy to see why people spend the $ for 2.8 telephotos. They make quick work of light conditions like these.

ajosteve wrote in post #8820212
Originals are fine, look good to me at 2500. I've never had to use that high of an ISO on my 50d.

Yes it was a real stretch. Not much you can do about it when there's a cool animal at dawn and you either get noise or nothing.
I believe I may have seen this guy with his mother last season, and now he seems to be out on his own doing well and chowing on berries. I filmed him for about 5 minutes, then let him on his way so as not to distrub his fall feeding.

very cool bear indeed

Good shots, Mike. I'm always nervous around cubs, wondering where Mama is.

Mike, this is one great subject! Good thing he was a nice light shade of brown, as a black phase would have been insanely noisy under the conditions you had to shoot in.

He's a real cutie. I agree with you in that mama is probably long gone and he's now out on his own. Grizzly sows keep their young around far longer than do Black Bear sows.

Excellent work! I especially like image #2.

Its a shame we have nothing like this in UK, No2 is the best shot.

Not all of the U.S. is like this though. Sure, there are lots of black bears in this country, but most of it doesn't have them. Then you factor in where you can actually seem them consistently without resorting to poor ethics(baiting) and that shrinks even more.