BEHIND THE SCENE

Polar bears are at the top of the Arctic food chain, and are the only truly carnivorous bears. Seals make up 90 percent of their diet. They need fear no other species — except humans.
Polar bear lives are broken into two seasons. The first is winter, the feasting season, when bears hunt seals while roaming on the pack ice. And then there is summer, the fasting season, when the absence of ice pushes the bears onto land, with scarce food sources.
During this time, their diet is poor and consists mainly of birds’ eggs and kelp. Occasionally they will find a whale carcass on the beach.

I captured this image in late November, in Manitoba’s Wapusk National Park. The bear is waiting patiently for the pack ice to form. Once the ice is strong enough to support his weight over long distances, he will venture over distant horizons, looking for seals.
I was shooting using my heavy 600mm lens mounted on a Nikon half-frame camera body. I prefer a beanbag to a tripod when working from a vehicle like the Tundra Buggy, especially when I’m able to use the window rim for support.
Despite shooting from the high elevation of a vehicle with 5.5 foot (1.7m) tires, the long 600m lens helped compress the angle-of-view quite a bit. It makes it look as if the image was shot from ground-level. Perspective is everything in shots like this.