My last couple of blogs were a look at the overall experience of travelling to Churchill on the trip but I also wanted to put some more detail specifically about photographing bears and what you should be aware of (or what I should remember if I’m going back and reading this in future!)
Photography:
Primarily I was photographing on this trip with a Nikon D5 with 180-400mm (and a built-in 1.4x teleconverter). This was an excellent range and could easily have served as my only setup. Others used 500mm lenses and frequently put a 1.4x converter on those too. You will want longer when you find a fox or owl and sometimes even with that length you still need to crop for composition with a bear. When the bears get close you are best off doing tight headshots rather than trying to pop on a wide-angle lens. The ground near the tundra buggy will generally be far from pristine and wide shots won’t look great.
On the tundra buggy all you really need is a bean bag. A tripod feels like it would be a major hinderance. You could theoretically do it but I doubt you’d be glad you did. There are around 10-12 rows and 2 seats per row either side of a wide aisle. We roughly got a row each. Each seat is next to a window that can quickly be slid down once you get used to doing it. The windows are ideal for people around 150-170cm tall I’d say. I’m 186cm (6’2”) and I had to stoop a lot. Depending on the angle there can also be a lot of twisting involved too. Most people seemed to get on fine but I found that my back was pretty unhappy after a couple of days of that. Whilst others could easily wait for the right moment for a photo, I had to manage my back pain in some positions.
The back deck is an option for photography too. The sides are roughly the same heigh that a window drops to but you have great visibility on 3 sides. It just happens to be much colder because it’s outside. Moving around on the back deck or anywhere in the vehicle would make it bounce to a certain extent so it’s something to be aware of. It’s really unavoidable though.
The photography wasn’t terribly complicated. The bears generally don’t move too fast and they’re not as white as you think so unless it is snowing you’ll probably focus just fine. There was also quite a bit of available light so ISO was generally 100-2000 except for at the end of the day. I varied shutter speed between around 1/500th to 1/2000th when the light was good. Higher for action and lower to keep the ISO down during the more static shots. Aperture was left wide open for almost the entire trip. Exposure compensation tended to vary between +1 and +2. It would be +1 if there were a reasonable amount of dark willows in the scene) and +2 if the scene was a bear on ice or snow. I’ve often ended up raising exposures by around half a stop during my editing even having used +2 in camera. A good starting place for colour termperature is +5700 on Nikon or +6000 on Canon and it’s worth setting this in camera for the trip just to make image review more useful whilst photographing.
Editing:
Compared to some other trips I’ve found my editing relatively simple from this trip. Composition is easily the most important factor along with getting the exposure right. You need to be brave and avoid grey snow by keeping it high. I did have to put some effort into cleaning up some of the scenes because we didn’t have deep snow. I generally did this in lightroom by raising shadows in specific places and using the dust removal tool as a rudimentary cloning tool. None of it was complicated enough to need to go to photoshop.
Clothing:
You need to be prepared for some pretty serious weather in Churchill. It can get to -40 and then have added windchill. We dealt with about -5 to -20 during our trip. The first couple of days on the tundra buggy I didn’t even have a jacket and gloves on but for the rest of the trip I generally did as it got colder. Photographing outside in the wind on one of the 4x4 days really made my hands very cold so serious gloves and heat packs came out then.
For the trip I used:
Jacket: Rab Resolution Jacket
Glove liners: Merino liners from theheatcompany.com
Glove shells: Shell from theheatcompany.com
Boots: Sorel Caribou Winter Boots
For Ice: Yaktrax Ice Grips (they attach to your boots and really help walking on ice in town)
I also used normal stuff like fleeces, merino base layers, thick wool socks and winter-lined trousers. Everything listed above worked great. The glove combo really is fantastic for cold weather photography and the jacket is tremendously warm.
Accommodation:
We stayed at the Tundra Inn. Usually the trip completely books out a smaller lodge but due to COVID this wasn’t the case on our trip. This meant we shared the common areas with other travellers. Danny lost some Coffee and there was one night where some others stayed up pretty late talking and kept some of our group awake. We were right down the far end of the hall and didn’t notice. Rooms were clean and acceptable. They weren’t big and they weren’t fancy but they were absolutely fine for this kind of trip in a remote place.
Food:
Breakfasts were at the Tundra Inn pub just over the road from the accommodation. Breakfasts were a buffet and generally consisted of scrambled eggs, sausages, fried potatoes and bacon. There was toast, yoghurts, pancakes and some fruit and a few other things. Plenty to keep you going during the day.
Lunch was way better than I’d expected. It was a packed lunch prepared by the tundra inn and consisted of various sandwiches (enough to usually have 2 if you wanted), soup and cookies. The soups were great and the sandwiches were also really nice with lovely home-made bread. On more than one occasion I think I had half a sandwich stuffed in my mouth whilst photographing a bear because you never know when things might happen.
Dinner was a mostly disappointing affair. Due to the late final prep of the trip due to COVID we ended up booked into the Seaport Restaurant for 4 nights in a row rather than ending up in the Tundra Inn pub more. The menu was very repetitive and the food was pretty basic too. The Tundra Inn pub was much better when we were there though. We just wished it had been more often. This was a little more problematic for the guests who were veggie or vegan as they had even less choice for dinner. Thankfully the amount of food we were having each day wasn’t really leaving anyone hungry and I certainly gained more weight than I expected on the trip.
Overall the food exceeded my expectations in Churchill and I didn’t really need the little sack of flapjacks that I had in my luggage.