Anne's Photoblog
HOW STUPID CAN A PHOTOGRAPHER BE?
Posted by Anne (White Rock, Canada) on 29 October 2007 in Animal & Insect.
I know this is probably the worst photo of a bear in the photo world!!! But to me it was one of the first triumphs of shooting wildlife!
We were driving down the Jasper-Banff Highway on our trip home from a visit to Jasper National Park when the traffic all stopped. I soon saw why! This bear was being observed by a mile of traffic in front of us. I got out, I had to get a photograph of this bear! Trouble was he was quite a bit down the road from us and I was armed with a camera borrowed from my boss and friend. A beautiful camera with Zeiss lenses, but this was the early 70's - it had a viewfinder and not much else, except for manual controls on the lens mount. No Exposure Meter! Also only a fixed 49 mm lens. (Who had heard of owning a camera with a zoom then!) Once I got a bit closer I kept my eye to the viewfinder and just kept moving forward until I had a good view of him (turned out to be a her!) I glanced up at that point and to my horror I had walked to within3 feet of the bear on the grass. Anyway, I had adjusted the exposure to the best of my ability for the light conditions so I fired. Well! She started coming closer to me and I was walking backwards all the way back to the highway. Then I turned around and saw two baby bear cubs who had appeared from behind a rise in the ground. I was terrified!! I made it back to our car with the female grizzly walking steadily behind me. I dare not run! When I got back into the car safely the bear proceeded to stand on hind legs and her paws on the roof. My husband started screaming about the paintwork - and what an idiot I was to bring her back to the car! It was a brand new Station Waggon (Ford, Country Sedan). One of the rear windows was down, next to my eldest son,who was sitting eating some fruit pie out of our cooler! I ended up grabbing the pie and throwing it out of the window, which got the bear off our car. She enjoyed the pie immensely! My excuse for the poor quality of the picture is that it was originally on a Kodachrome transparency film, and a great picture. Unfortunately, I scanned this soon after I first bought a cheapy scanner (without a slide adapter in 2000). Then, I knew nothing about saving photos in a large file format and it has stayed email size in my computers since I first had one in 2000, and got backed up and put into two subsequent computers. I have searched for the original slide to no avail. It just did not get filed back in sequence in my slide collection after scanning! So I post this photo with apologies for its shortcomings - because it is one of my favourites of all time.
It would be even more a favourite if I could find the darned slide and scan it again properly!
Thank you everyone for your visits and comments on my last photo - I love aminus3 - but like I said before, I just cannot get around everybody here at the present time!
Well! I am back and missed being away so long due to ill health. It was a bit of a struggle to find energy to stay on my computer and post. My daughter Lesley and her husband Robin, gave me this wonderful gift of a cruise to Alaska and Lesley and I had a whale of a time! I could just live on that ship - absolutely wanted for nothing! Hope to hear from you all! Don't know how much I can get around posting comments - so will probably have to keep them brief - but will try to get around as much as I can! Thanks to all my friends for their good wishes!
Please go ahead and give me constructive criticism where needed! I am a bit out of practice at both taking and editing decent photographs - so help me if you can!
If you like my photos, please rank me on VFXY and/or vote for me in the [url=http://www.co
