Accent Alaska photographer Paul Souders spent the summer of 2008 photographing the bears of Katmai National Park. Using wide-angle lenses, remote cameras and underwater housings, Paul captured unique and intimate images never before seen. Paul's patience over two months in remote Hallo Bay was rewarded with outstanding images of wild bears in their stunning natural habitat.

Here's what Paul had to say about his experience with the bears of Katmai:

"For more than 15 years, Katmai National Park has held a special grip on my imagination. I'd thought about exploring that coastline for years, and finally worked up the nerve last summer to make the long crossing from Kodiak Island across Shelikof Strait in my 22-foot C-Dory. Setting out on a sunny late June day, I spent a long time staring out across 35 miles of open ocean at the distant line of jagged peaks. I really had no idea what I might be getting myself into. Even with the GPS, charts and satellite phone, it felt a little like sailing off the edge of the world.

I settled into Hallo Bay for three weeks, photographing dozens of brown bears gorging on the spring sedge grass. Hauling my small inflatable up on shore and hiking out into the meadows felt like an enormous leap of faith. I've spent a great deal of time with wildlife in Alaska and Africa, but walking alone, spending hours with these bears was a vastly different and far more intimate experience. After my first nervous day or two, I settled into a routine. Wake up early, head for shore and spend each day walking the meadows watching bears as they ate, slept, fought, played and mated and not returning to my boat until around midnight when the sun finally slipped behind the mountains. After some initial curiosity, the bears studiously ignored me. I had to keep reminding myself that they were, in fact, bears. Not large dogs or small buffalo.

Still, every day Katmai found a new way to scare the crap out of me.

The storms blowing in off the Aleutians were a big wild card. Hallo Bay offers precious little in the way of shelter, and I spent three memorably awful days pinned down, my boat pitching and rolling like a bathtub toy. Sleep would have been nice, but I kept busy praying that my anchor would hold.

I returned to Katmai in late August and spent another month with the bears, exploring more of the coastline as the late summer salmon runs arrived. That is when the bears are in their element, fishing the coastal rivers and gorging themselves. Again, I slept and lived on my small boat, setting out each morning to hike along the river banks and watch the bears at work. In early September, the first autumn storms roared through, bringing 50 knot winds. I hunkered down for days on end, listening to the rain spattering horizontally against the boat and using the down time to catch up on sleep, reading and editing. Between storms, I ventured back to shore and tried using my underwater camera to capture the spawning salmon. The bears were nice enough to ignore me, and they didn't even laugh when the current swept up my camera in its underwater housing, sending it tumbling down more than a mile of river.

By late September, storms howled in off the Aleutians every two or three days, whipping up impossible seas for my small boat. During a short calm spell, I reluctantly pulled up stakes and raced back across the Strait. Looking back, another wall of clouds was already closing in over the coast."

View the complete gallery of images from Paul's summer with the bears of Katmai.
Let Paul's dynamic images drive your next Alaskan campaign.