The Brown Bear picture in Aftonbladet

Yesterday was a first for me as I got a Brown Bear picture published in a Swedish Newspapers web edition. The picture is presented together with 6 others and they are all from the Bear Kingdom in eastern Finland. The Newspaper is Aftonbladet and if I would compare it with a foreign paper I would say it´s the equivalent of The Sun in the UK. It´s more of a tabloid than a Newspaper as the news value is more sensational than anything else. Still they do some nice reporting and their Travel magazine is okay I must admit.

This is the picture that is shown by Aftonbladet.

I have seen the Brown Bear in captivity but this picture is from my first encounter with a wild Brown Bear. We sat there waiting when I saw how the Bear was coming slowly thru the woods. It wasn´t in a hurry and stopped a couple of times to listen and smell before it came out from the woods and that is when I took this picture.

The light was alright as you can see but the hardest part was to get some life in the picture. One of the most important aspects of wildlife photography is to get lively eyes. This is of course not always thru but most often. That makes the Brown Bear a hard subject with their massive bodies and small eyes. The eyes also blend into the brown fur of the Brown Bear so you really need the white of an eye to breathe life into the picture. I think I managed nicely with that aspect.

I choose to crop the image with the Bear to the right to give it space to look out into. That makes for a good composition that let the picture speak for itself. I must say that you really must look at the picture at full screen to judge it correctly.

If you are fluent in Swedish then you can read the story and look at the other pictures here. My picture is last in the slideshow.

There is a sad twist to the picture as the idea got copied and has been used in marketing purposes. Of course it isn´t my picture that has been used, but almost an exact copy as the person doing the marketing sat in the hide just beside mine. Still I find it sad to see someone taking my idea, several months afterwards, when they have several thousands of pictures themselves of Brown Bears to chose from. Or maybe the person is predictable as this has happened before.