A black wolf on white snow

This picture I took in 2001 remains one of my all-time favorite wildlife shots. It's the eyes, of course, that make this such a compelling image. The timber wolf (black phase) was one of the animals in a wildlife workshop I conducted, and I was shooting film at this time. I can't tell you how difficult it was to capture sharp, well-composed images of animals -- even in captivity -- with a medium format film camera. Nothing was automatic. The entire camera was manual, all the lenses were fixed focal length, and I had to advance the film and cock the shutter by manually rotating a lever. I'd get 20 shots on a roll of 220 transparency film. I determined the settings in this very tricky exposure situation with a Sekonic handheld light meter. I used a 350mm lens (comparable to about a 200mm in the 35mm digital format we now use), the lens aperture was f/5.6, and the shutter was 1/400 (the fastest shutter speed on the camera). I used a tripod for this picture.