Nobody ever sees this part of the photograph.

The rotting salmon at my feet. The flies swarming around my face. The damp rocks I've been sitting on for hours, my trousers wet through and a chill slowly settling somewhere deep in my bones.

There is very little glamour in the pursuit of extraordinary wildlife encounters.

The moments themselves are often breathtaking, but the hours leading up to them are considerably less romantic.

Today, it's the smell that's getting to me.

The sun has been warming the salmon carcasses scattered around us, left by the wolves who know to only eat the heads leaving mostly big fleshy bodies behind. The flies are having an absolute field day, the buzzing is relentless. I find myself laughing at the absurdity of being someone who wages war on a handful of fruit flies at home, yet will happily sit for ten hours in the middle of this.

All for the possibility of seeing a bear.

Not just any bear, of course. Somewhere in this ancient rainforest lives one of the rarest and most extraordinary creatures I have ever hoped to encounter.

And so I wait.

I think about how much of the story exists outside the frame of a photograph. The aching muscles, the cold that creeps in when you stop moving, the hours of watching a seemingly empty forest, wondering whether anything will appear.

Nobody looking at the finished image will feel these rocks beneath them, smell the salmon or hear the endless buzzing.

They will see the bear. One that is part of an elite few , less than 100 we think.

And perhaps that's exactly as it should be.

But before the shutter opens the encounters are rarely effortless. They ask for patience, discomfort, trust, and an enormous willingness to wait for something that might never happen. Really, often Nothing….

Why do I do it?

Thats a no brainer, or the privilege of seeing what I've seen, of standing quietly in the presence of a creature so rare, so entirely at home in its own world, I would sit on these wet rocks a thousand times over.

Although I wouldn't complain if the flies took the occasional afternoon off.