This moment was the highlight of a recent trip to British Columbia. Up until this point, our experience of wildlife was limited to a few sightings of birds along our passages. These were great but too fleeting. There were not any extended sessions with any animals until the pack of wolves, of which this individual was a member. We had seen wolves on this beach the previous night at the previous low tide but I couldn’t make any reasonable images. We all figured if we were lucky, this small pack would return the next morning to do exactly the same thing they were doing in the evening, searching for food left by the low tide. Sure enough, that’s what happened.
Since our home and means of transportation for this trip was a sailboat, we viewed wildlife via a Zodiac. While very maneuverable, it wasn’t inconspicuous in the least. You can see here that the animal clearly knew we were there, which likely only meant it didn’t think we were worth more than a few glances. I think if we weren’t practicing wildlife viewing best practices — i.e. staying quiet, not moving much — we probably wouldn’t have had this encounter.
How we got to this point was by boarding the Zodiac 30 minutes before dawn. Then, we slowly and quietly approached the shore were we saw the wolves the previous evening. Once there, we just waited. Not long after arriving, being quiet and still was rewarded with this wolf’s small pack of five individuals arriving from the woods to explore the shore
Everything about this shooting session was difficult from a photography point of view. The light was very dark. The weather was deeply overcast making it very dim. Also, this shore was at the bottom of two large mountains, which further restricted light. Yes, it was dark. You can tell by looking at the shooting data I have listed below.
The other aspect that made this shoot difficult was distance. This particular subject approached us very closely compared to the other pack members. This frame is uncropped — i.e. full-framed. I had to use the reach of my 800mm lens with a 1.4x teleconverter to make this composition. That’s 1120mm’s of focal-length, shooting from a less than stable zodiac. As it is, I’m moderately surprised everything about this animal is sharp since I was only using 1/320sec shutter speed.
After this encounter, our trip was punctuated with many more opportunities with many great subjects that all happened after this first amazing experience.
Cheers
Tom
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Nikon Z9, Nikkor 800mm f/6.3 + TC14
ISO 6400, f/9, 1/320sec
