Brown bears in Alaska

I photographed these brown bears in Katmai National Park in Alaska in 1993. I was using the Mamiya RZ 67 medium format film camera, and my lens was a 500mm f/6 telephoto which was equivalent to a 280 to 300mm lens in the full frame digital format. The female had just caught a fish and was returning to the bank to share it with her cubs. Out of necessity, she was the most aggressive and successful bear at the falls. The fastest shutter speed on the Mamiya was 1/400th of a second, so that's what I used if I had enough light. For all of my wildlife shooting back then, I used Fujichrome Provia 100 because it was one f/stop faster than Fujichrome Velvia, which was 50 ISO. Using such a slow speed film by today's standards is ridiculous, but that's what we had back then. I used a tripod, and my lens aperture was probably wide open at f/6 to let in as much light as possible for the fast shutter. The cubs were constantly in motion, and to get one frame where all four of the heads were essentially in the direction of the camera took, literally, four days. The Mamiya had an automatic frame advance, but it was slow -- one frame every .8 seconds. I never used it because I could crank the film advance faster than that.