Picture of the week

Giant Sequoia bear

A black bear roaming for sugar pine cone nuts to eat.  Photographed at the Giant Forest within Sequoia National Park on the day before it was closed due to the shutdown of the park system by the federal government.  This is a mother bear, as there were also two other cubs present while I saw them gourging on pine cones, most likely going after the pine nuts toward the centers.

Now that the people are gone (at least temporarily), wildlife like these bears will have the place to themselves to roam at will. It would be interesting to see how such wildlife changes in this habit takes place, and whether they will lose their attraction for the place due to less food to scavenge from humans? Or will more wildlife come out, no longer scared by the people and their vehicles that are ordinarily so ubiquitous at national parks like this.

Due to photographing this within the shadow of the trees at sunset, I had to turn the ISO sensitivity for the camera up to 6400 in order to maintain a sufficient shutter speed (1/320 second) while handheld and the bear in motion. Due to the distance I was shooting at, it required the full 400mm reach of my 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 IS L-series lens. Given I used a Canon 5D mark III, the sensor noise performance did rather well.  This was shot raw, applying just some noise reduction in Lightroom 5.2 and about a 50% crop.

All content and images are property of Stephen Fischer Photography, copyright 2013.  Last updated: 10/06/2013   ()