Bearizona Wildlife Park, Williams, Arizona
The Bear in Black and White
At Bearizona in Williams, a brown bear walking through a jumble of fallen logs beneath a wall of rock.
Colour can be a distraction with animals. With this bear, taking it away revealed the shape of the scene.
The bear walks in from the right, heading left, head low, mid-stride. Its coat is thick and textured, rendered in shades of grey from near-black to soft silver, with lighter tips catching the light along its back and shoulders. It's moving past a tangle of logs: long, pale trunks stripped of bark, crossed and stacked at angles across the left half of the frame, some propped on others, one standing upright like a post.
Behind the bear, a rock wall rises across the entire frame, dark and fissured, with deep shadowed folds and a few lighter faces where the light falls. A tall tree trunk stands in front of the wall near the centre. At the right, a few pale boulders sit at the base of the rock. The ground is bare earth scattered with twigs and debris. In the foreground, out of focus, more fallen logs lie across the bottom of the frame, and a dark bird perches on one of them.
This is a wildlife park, and the bear lives in a managed habitat. I don't want to dress the picture up as something it isn't. But even in a park, a bear moving through its space has a weight and a presence that are worth photographing honestly.
Black and white suited it. In colour, the scene was a mix of browns and tans: brown bear, brown earth, brown logs, brown-grey rock. Converted to monochrome, the textures come forward instead: the shaggy fur, the smooth, pale logs, the craggy rock. The logs become a pattern of light lines against dark ground, and the bear's dark body stands out against them.
The composition is about contrast between order and chaos. The logs on the left are a jumble of diagonals. The bear on the right is a single, solid shape moving through it. Your eye goes to the bear's head, then back across the logs, then up to the rock wall.
From the bag
Nikon D7000 · Nikon 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 · 105mm · 1/320s · f/8 · ISO 640
This is the one photograph in my portfolio made on the Nikon D7000, with the 18-105mm kit lens at its longest. On the D7000's crop sensor, 105mm frames roughly like a 157mm lens on full frame, enough to fill the picture with the bear and its surroundings from a distance. f/8 is the sweet spot for sharpness on that lens, and it holds the logs, the bear and the rock wall in focus together. ISO 640 brought the shutter speed up to 1/320s, fast enough to freeze the bear's walk. In black and white, the slight grain of the older sensor suits the textures.