Finland Wild Brown Bear Center Finland

This is a commercial wildlife photography location (bear centre. fi) where you see the animals from a photography hide during the night. And what a night it was. I spent 14 hours in a photography hide (5 pm - 7 am) and I saw 8 different bears, a wolverine and 2 foxes. Distances were between 5 to 30 meters. It's said that a bear moves silently and that's very true. The first bear was about 6 meters from me when I saw it and I still couldn't hear it walking. From May to August it's great for this kind of night photography in Northern Finland since the sun is up about 18-20 hours a day.

Longer lenses are needed because sometimes the animals walk across the swamp in a distance but even a 50-70mm lens might come in handy because the bears sometimes come as close as 2-5 meters from the hides (this happened to me). My primary lens was Nikon 200-500mm f5.6 (Nikon D810) and I had a backup body (Nikon D600) with Nikon 24-70mm f2.8 and Nikon 28-300mm f3.5-6.3 lenses and these worked just fine for me.

You need a car to get here.