As mentioned in the previous post, the coming weeks there will be a report of our Scandinavian summer holiday in three parts. Today the first part about the brown bears at the Wild Brown Bear lodge in Finland (http://www.wildbrownbear.fi/). After a relaxing boat trip from Rostock to Helsinki and an 8 hours drive to Vartius, 60 km North of Kuhmo, we arrived at the Wild Brown Bear lodge. This comfortable lodge, with excellent food and comfortable rooms, is owned by Ari Saaski. It is situated next to a lake in the middle of the enormous Finnish taiga forest. It is about 2 km from the Russian border and every night the brown bears are crossing the border in search of food. Ari is taking good care of 'his' bears and they like to come back. The hides are situated around a lake in a swamp area surrounded by taiga forest. There are plenty of opportunities for bear photography from forest, swamp, or pool hides. A nice feature is the recently installed bearcam on one of the hides. You want to have a look at the bears in real live .......... www.wildbrownbear.fi/bearcam/. Unfortunately , the bearcam is not active every night.
When we visited the lodge last July for 5 days, the weather was pretty bad. Every night there were at least 6-10 bears active. As I like to take pictures of bears in there natural surrounding the grey overcast skies gave me limitations. However, in post processing I realized that the black and white transformation gave me the feel on the photos that I liked. The cotton grass was flowering abundantly in the swamp areas, which gave some nice white details in the black and white pictures. Here are some examples.
Next week more to come ............. the landscapes and birds of Varanger peninsula Norway.
Have fun,
Dirk-Jan
