While taking my daily walk on Friday, I met some some fellow photographers staking out the polar bear enclosure. We chatted about photography, then one offered to let me use his 300mm 2.8 with a 2x teleconverter. Heck, yeah! I used the lens with and without the teleconverter and … very lovely. (I was recently accused of giving a back-handed compliment and had to explain that I tend to be a master of understatement. This could be one of those times, as lovely is the least of a long string of adjectives I could use, but not all reading this are photographers, so I’ll leave it at that.)
Ted and Stan were visiting for the weekend specifically to photograph the bears. A male had just been brought in to meet the resident ladies and we had snow on the ground, so they thought it would be the perfect time to get acquainted with how their gear would stand up to shooting polar bears in the wild, as well as get familiar with their subjects — which is a very clever idea. They are planning on a photo adventure in Churchill this coming fall.
We gathered back in front of the polar bears again on Saturday, which turned into one of the most spectacular winter days I can remember. The snow started falling early: big, gorgeous flakes that continually drifted down all day, stopping or lightening up a few times, then resuming their gentle covering of all surfaces. Ted once again allowed me to use his gorgeous lens and I played with shooting at 600mm again.
Shooting with a fixed lens is very different from shooting with a telephoto. I’m used to this when shooting with my wider angle primes, but since I’ve been so used to my 70-300 for a telephoto, I had to keep fighting the instinct to zoom out when the bear got too close to take in much of him. I also had an issue with my camera wanting to focus on snowflakes or having to shoot via shapes seen through fog, as my glasses kept fogging up when I’d put my eye to my viewfinder. Another thing was that those big flakes were unpredictable with regards to their location at the time of the shutter click, so it was very fortunate that I was shooting at 10 fps when the bears were moving, as many shots needed to be discarded because a white blotch covered an eye or was somewhere else that didn’t work well.
Here are a few more shots of my experimenting with borrowed equipment. Ted, if you read this, thanks again for the unexpected fun!
I love the shot below, as it really maximized the benefit of having an effective focal length of 600mm, but wish that there had been an angle that didn’t show the polar bear facility in the background.
And how could I not photograph the wolves!
