Anyone Wanna Wrastle???

[yakfisher]

With the approaching storm and the fresh snow from yesterday, I thought I might be able to catch some active animals this morning at the zoo. Boy, were the bears ever active. These too males went at it for quite awhile. It was fun to catch them playing like this. C&C is definitely welcome. Between the snow and having to eliminate the effects of the glass, the post process took some work. Hopefully the images are fairly consistent.

#1

#2

#3

[Steve Foss]

Yak, you captured some really great moments here. As I was looking at the first two I was wanting a tighter composition to emphasize the drama of the conflict, and when I scrolled down to No. 3 I got it!

Really nice work!

I'm interested to find out if the snow was blown out at capture or if using contrast in PP blew it out. If it was blown at capture and you shot RAW, if it's not blown too badly you can recapture the highlights in the RAW converter, usually.

One of the hardest exposure challenges out there is to capture images of dark subjects against snow, because the meter either seems to underexpose the whole image (if the subject is small against a larger background), or overexpose the background (if the subject is large and the background small).

These images look like the lighting was consistent. If so, manual exposure would be a great option. I'd take a test shot filling the frame with the snow and change settings while checking the histogram until the snow itself was just short of blowing out (or if shooting RAW was just a tiny bit past blowing out knowing you could recapture it in the RAW converter).

That way the bears would be exposed as brightly as possible while the snow still had some data in it.

You could use exposure compensation, but when lighting is consistent, manual exposure is a great way to go because there's no meter to get skewed by changing backgrounds.

Now, please don't feel I'm taking away from these images. They are excellent captures and compositions.

[MN Shutterbug]

Weren't you a little tempted to join them? That would have been fun to watch. Nice shooting.

[mmeyer]

Wrastle!! I haven't heard someone say "wrastle" since my Grandpa. They look like they were having some fun. Great pics.

[Dbl]

Fun stuff Yak! The snow issues look to be from shooting through the barriers?

[yakfisher]

Thanks guys.

Steve, these were all shot in raw and no of them were blown out. I did it in the PP, which is good and bad. Here are a couple of more that it took extra care not to blow out the whites in the post precessing. Thanks for the comments and the pointers.

#4

#5

[Steve Foss]

Cool that the captures were well exposed, yak. Good job there. That's the important part.

In order to build contrast without impacting the highlights, I use the levels slider and pull mid-range levels to the left (brightening) until it looks washed out a bit, then pull shadow range levels to the right (darkening). Works pretty good as long as I don't go overboard, and the highlights never get touched.

[Yeti]

Nice job....I would never have known that they were shot through glass.

Do zoo bears hibernate??

[yakfisher]

I think they get fed all winter long so they don't have a need to hibernate.