Red Deer wildlife photographer Rick Price has been charged at by elk and howled at by an angry mother coyote.
But he’s had no close encounters of the scary kind with bears, even though the apex predators are his favourite subjects — and some look as if they’re staring him in the eye in the photos.
“I have no good bear stories to tell you, and I don’t want to have any good bear stories,” he admitted with a chuckle.
Price, who travels 200 to 250 days a year from Arizona to Alaska, always makes a point of standing at least 100-feet away from grizzlies and black bears, and zooming in on them with a 200 mm-500 mm telephoto lens.
He’s also generally right beside his small RV when he takes his pictures. “As much as it looks like I’m in the wild, I’m actually either sitting in, or standing by my vehicle.”
He was once more cavalier while shooting a picture of an elk during rutting season and got chased across a highway. “That scares the heck out of you.”
If there are any tricks to Price’s trade, it’s knowing where and when the wildlife is most likely to be — and then waiting, sometimes for hours, for photo opportunities to arise. It’s always a chancy business, he admitted.
One day Price lucked out and took hundreds of pictures of coyote pups at play before their mother caught on to his presence. The next day, when he returned to take more pictures, the mother coyote began howling at him and her pups didn’t even peek from their den.
Aside from sharing his wildlife locations with his close circle of photographer friends, Price said he keeps them secret, for fear they would soon be trampled by the general public armed with iPhones. “If I told you, 200 people would soon converge at that very spot and all the animals would run away in terror.”
Price, who’s single and semi-retired, moves with the seasons. He travels with his Nikon camera through Wyoming and down to Arizona in March and April while the woods are still snow-packed at home. He might then sneak over to Nebraska, where they have the larges confluence of sandhill cranes in the world, or over to California’s red wood forests or the Oregon Coast.
Alberta is also a favourite location, particularly Banff and Jasper in June, just before tourist season, and the picturesque wild horses herds southwest of Caroline.
For the best bear photos he will travel up to Alaska and the northern B.C. in August and September. The pay-off can be stunning.
Price’s catalogue of bear pictures includes shots of a grizzly splashing through a stream after spawning salmon, a mischievous cub balancing a-top a pine tree, and a world-weary bruiser with a ripped ear. “He looked like Mike Tyson, after a fight,” said the 60-something photographer, who gets an adrenaline rush from capturing such spectacular images.
He’s also taken hundreds of haunting photos of bucking wild stallions in the misty foothills, or rutting big horned sheep in the snow, and of mountain goats, wolves, lynx, owls, deer and moose.
The collection could grace the walls of a Banff art gallery. But Price, who ran his own wedding and portrait photography studio in Red Deer for 35 years, believes he’s more a creative type than a marketer. Anyway, he thinks there are too many great wildlife photos out there, thanks to digital cameras, which can turn anybody into a competent photographer.
A CBC staffer, however, saw something special in Price’s pictures and he has become a regular submitter to Canada’s national broadcaster.
For more information, please visit Flickr: Rick Price Photos (Red Deer), or email rickprice123@gmail.com.
lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com
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