This is the picture I was hoping to get during the polar bear photo tour I’m leading in Canada. Two large males sparing with each other is a remarkable thing to witness. Today the sparing was in fun; in a couple of months they will be competing for females, and then it becomes combat. I wanted a tight composition so the frame was filled with the action, but that meant it was very easy for part of the bears to be accidentally cropped out of the frame because they move surprisingly quickly. I had to constantly focus on keeping enough area around the bears as I was shooting. I took this with the Canon 100-400mm zoom plus a 1.4x teleconverter giving me 560mm of focal length. My settings were 1/1250, f/11, and the auto ISO gave me 2000. The ISO is determined by the amount of ambient light. I took this in manual exposure mode and daylight white balance. Given the white scene, I unexposed by 1/3 f/stop knowing the pictures would be slightly dark. This protects the highlights from being blown out. Some photographers disagree with this approach because, they say, most of the information in a picture is to the right of the histogram. But there just isn't enough time to consult the histogram when the action starts. And, they add, underexposure causes excess noise. The noise produced is minimal, and with noise-reducing software, this isn’t an issue. Regarding most of the data being to the right on a histogram, this may be true, but my biggest concern ever since I went digital was blowing non-recoverable highlights -- meaning areas in the image, such as the snow, becoming solid white with no detail. Since I went digital in 2005, none of my images have shown blown highlights using this technique.
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