I photographed brown bears in Alaska as they fished for salmon in the 90's. I was using film at that time, and my medium format camera, the Mamiya RZ 67, was manual focus, manual exposure, and manual film advance. That made it especially challenging to capture action, and I did miss a lot of shots. Here, a female bear had just caught a fish. She was the most successful bear at the river; she out competed all the males. In fact, the males gave deference to her because a mother with four mouths to feed is, by necessity, tremendously aggressive. The other bears gave her wide berth. All of the shots I took at the river were taken with 1/400th of a second because that was the fastest shutter speed on the camera. I used Fujichrome Provia 100 transparency film because that was one stop faster than Velvia 50. By manually advancing the film, I could shoot about one frame per second, and I got 20 frames per 220 roll before I had to change film. By today's standards, this technology was primitive.
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