Life Lessons

Image Critiques Wildlife Critiques
1

life lessons.jpg
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Critique Style Requested: Initial Reaction

Please share your immediate response to the image before reading the photographer’s intent (obscured text below) or other comments. The photographer seeks a genuinely unbiased first impression.

Questions to guide your feedback

Does this look bleak?

Other Information

Please leave your feedback before viewing the blurred information below, once you have replied, click to reveal the text and see if your assessment aligns with the photographer. Remember, this if for their benefit to learn what your unbiased reaction is.

Image Description

A polar bear sow (Ursus maritimus) teaches her cub how to forage for food in the kelp along the shoreline of Hudson Bay, near Churchill, Manitoba, Canada .

Technical Details

Canon EOS 10D; Canon EF 70-200mm +2x @ 400mm; f/8 @ 1/750 sec, -1 EV, ISO 100; helicopter

Specific Feedback

Whatever you think, positive or otherwise

2

Yup, pretty much bleak to me Bob and I like that you’ve captured some meaningful behavior here, how a parent guides a young one in the craft of survival, where there doesn’t appear to be any food around. A really nice capture and glad the chopper didn’t scare them away.

3

Thank you @Jim_Lockhart for your comments. Casual observers of wildlife have little understanding how the adults in most species are involved in the care, feeding and teaching of survival techniques to the young. It varies, of course, but almost universal.
The chopper was low but at a good distance from the bears, allowing me to make this long-lens image. The bears are also somewhat habituated to the choppers in the Churchill region. They fly out daily, often multiple times per day.