The constant rising and falling of the tide, along with the freezing temperature creates a landscape of ice covered rock formations along the coastline of the Hudson Bay. These three images were taken at low tide early one morning before we went on our first hike in search of bears. As it turned out, a hike wasn’t necessary. I had to quickly grab my backpack, tripod and other gear as three adult males came walking directly toward us.
Capybaras are so common in the Pantanal of Brazil that you tend to take them for granted. Or maybe you take them for granted because they’re the world’s largest rodent. Either way, here’s  a mother with two babies.
Here’s another one of the baby white tufted ear marmosets that I photographed in northeastern Brazil. There’s nothing in this picture to give perspective of size, but these guys are very small — about the size of a squirrel.
It was very, very cold on this particular morning. Very cold. And windy. But as much as we were all doing our best to protect ourselves from the weather, the bears seemed to be enjoying it. Every time the wind whipped up, sending granules of snow flying through the air, this bear just raised his head, stuck his face into the wind and took it all in.
With all the polar bears I’ve been posting lately, it seemed a little color was in order to break up the white. This mother orangutan seemed quite content to be alive and well and raising her family in such a fine jungle. Taken in Tanjung Puting National Park in Indonesian Borneo.
With all due respect to monkeys and other creatures of the world, I’ve been told to keep the polar bears coming, so here’s yet another. Of the three bears that we saw most often, this guy was the odd man out. He was smaller than the other two and they kept chasing him off whenever he got too close. In this photo, he was standing to check on their whereabouts as they were foraging behind some nearby rocks. I also liked that I was able to capture his breath on another very cold day.
Here’s another of the rams I saw last weekend in Colorado. This guy had a particularly nice set of horns.
It was the end of the day when we spotted this polar bear taking a nap. He seemed quite content to be lying there on his back on a bed of snow.
On Friday I went to the eastern entrance to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado and was surprised to see that there wasn’t any snow on the ground. The next day I tried the western entrance and was greeted by a completely different story. Everything was covered in white, including these two little islands of pine in the middle of a cloud of mist on Lake Granby.
When I have the chance and the time, I like to experiment with these kind of slow shutter speed, motion blurred effects. I recorded this one last Saturday afternoon up in Georgetown, Colorado. The bighorn rut was in full swing, which is the best time of year to see the male rams. The rest of the year they remain in bachelor herds high on the mountain, while the ewes and babies graze at lower elevations.  It also helps that during the rut the males are so focused on the business at hand — mating, or in most cases, trying to mate — that they’re much more tolerant of a close approach. I had already gotten plenty of action freezing shots of the mating ritual that morning (usually a male chasing a female around in circles until she finally tires and succumbs, or until he finally tires and moves on to the next possible taker — but more on that in a future post). The point is, I was satisfied with what I had, so I decided to try and blur a few by slowing the shutter speed to a 1/15th of a second, placing the active focus sensor on the ram’s eye, and then steadily panning the camera with the action while releasing the shutter.