Black bear, G9 + Tamron AD-2 180/2.5 63B…
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Nice one, would like to see one in the wild someday. Looks huge.
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That’s a big bear! well captured!
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Very nice. Heading to Canada this spring, hope we get to see these.
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Time to break the string of bear photos.
Panny G9 + Tamron AD-2 400/4 65B. I’m impressed that sharpness with the 400/4 was decent wide-open on the m4/3 sensor.
Also impressed with the G9’s ISO performance. This coyote was shot in the evening at ISO 3200 and then pushed a stop in PP. There was certainly quite a bit of imaging noise, but the G9 hung onto a lot of detail, which helps the DXO DeepPRIME differentiate between noise and detail.
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I say that it’s too early to break the chain of bear photos - after all there’s more than just black and brown bears in our world! 
Here’s a male sloth bear who I photographed in Satpura tiger reserve in central India in 2019 on a very hot afternoon. Taken with my 50-200mm SWD and E-M1 (mark 1). Sloth bears are specialist termite feeders - the Indian equivalent of aardvarks, and like North American black bears are adept tree climbers. Their snouts work like vacuum hoses and they use their strong claws to rip apart termite hills, which are as strong as concrete! Their fur is a lot shaggier and thicker of their N.American counterparts, which is less than ideal for central India’s brutal summers. But they’re an excellent adaptation for protection from honeybee stings.
Sharing the forest with far more capable predators such as tigers, sloth bears make up for their physical limitations with unpredictability and aggression. They kill a large number of people each year in what are mostly accidental encounters after sunset (from a distance, they look like the basalt rocks that are common in the area), but in my experience they mostly have a gentle and intelligent demeanor. I say this as someone who has been charged at by a mother sloth bear. 
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I recall reading a few months ago about a sloth bear killed a married couple who were walking the woods.
Like you I find bears to generally be gentle, and you can almost see the gears and levers working inside their skulls as they assess a challenge 
It’s too easy to let your guard down, given how cuddly and sometimes comical they can be 
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I especially love this one. Such a lovely expression - you can see the bear thinking. It gives off “Girl with a Pearl Earring” vibes.
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Yes, that is exactly what I had in mind when I composed the shot!*
Absolutely!
For sure!
- I only wish I were so good…
Beautiful and majestic! What a treat to look at your wonderful photo.
Thanks very much. Glad you liked it.
MDOlson
Thank you … much appreciated.
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The bear photos are really good. Over the last 50+ years I’ve had about 250 encounters with black bears in eastern North America, only twice have the bears given me any cause for concern – one of the bears had been regularly fed at a hunting camp, in the other case I’d accidentally gotten within the bear’s personal space and it reacted as I would under similar circumstances.
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That’s a stunning photo, MDOlson 
Thank you Columbusrat, much appreciated
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