This is a very interesting image shot under interesting conditions. Last month I went on a Shoot the Light workshop and Charles Glatzer to a special place in Northern Minnesota called the Vince Shute Wildlife Sanctuary. It's special because the Black Bears are extremely cooperative for photographers. I won't get into the where fors and how's the situation is like it is. Just note the animals there allow photographers to get close-up images without getting aggetated and running away. In this case, I wanted to take a close-up, face shot of one of their bears that was interesting.

First a couple of challenges. I didn't bring a long lens on this trip except for my 300mm f/2.8 AF-S. While this lens is aweseome being extremely contrasty and sharp, it wasn't the longest I owned. My vision needed me to be as close as possible. Since even with these bears, there were limits to how close you could approach I was left with using my TC-20e matched tele-converter. Sure the image quality is less than my 600mm f/4 but it's much better than trying to crop the image after the fact.

Next the challenge was the exposure. The black bear threw off my matrix metering. In fact, this whole trip I rarely referred to my meter. Instead, I used my incident meter a lot and "chimped" off the LCD on my camera. Looking at the histogram, I set the exposure to keep detail in the blacks without blowing out the apple.

Finally the contrast range wasn't sufficient to keep detail in the blacks and keep the apple at the right brightness/tone. This meant I needed to make a composite image merging several different exposed images together into one product--one the bear, the second his face, the third the apple. Since I was working with only a single file and wanted to keep the digital quality as high as possible, I created three separate files by starting with the original RAW file and processing it three different ways for the three different exposure situations. Each of those files were brought together into one image by using Layers in Photoshop. The dynamic range of the image is much better than any single file I could've made. The best part is you can't tell I used three separate layers to make this final image.

Cheers

Tom Hill