Banff's Young Photographers Step Up for our Grizzlies

The past week has been a whirlwind of activity after the unfortunate death of the female grizzly bear in Banff.  I've gotten a lot of media interest from my blog post and felt it was time to deflect a bit of that attention to a few of Banff and Canmore's young photographers that have stepped up their conservation efforts in recent weeks and who really embody what young wildlife photographers should be about.

First and foremost, I need to mention Cai Priestley, a young British photographer that I introduced back in May 2010 in my first Remember this Name feature.  It was Cai's idea to start our Facebook Cause page to help Save Banff's Wildlife and he got the ball rolling on the campaign with a blog post over on his own wildlife photography blog on his website, www.toothandclawphotography.com.

Cai recently returned to his cherished adopted home in the Canadian Rockies to spend another year with us photographing bears and everything else that he can find, and in the first month back has come photographing with me a number of times.  In fact, on one of our first forays of the spring, we encountered the largest grizzly I've ever seen in the Rockies.

A giant grizzly pulling a lamb fetus from a bighorn sheep carcass in the Canadian Rockies.  Image (c) Cai Priestley

Cai is an extremely ethical young photographer, much like his friend and colleague, Brandon T. Brown.  Brandon is also a talented new wildlife photographer that has begun to blog occasionally about conservation issues in the national parks.

Together with these two, and other new and old photographers that are beginning to step to the environmental causes forefront, I'm hoping that we'll really be able to start bringing a lot of additional attention to the issues threatening our mountain park wildlife. Stay tuned for big things from these guys in the near future!

Happy shooting.

John

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