Bird Cliffs Alight

Coburg island, Canadian Arctic These steep cliffs are completely inaccessible for any person on foot and out of reach for any land dwelling animals. For this reason these cliffs make the perfect place for a bird to build a home. Free from the prying eyes and jaws of Arctic fox, Polar bears and anything that could take home an egg as a prize, birds have been nesting in places like this for millions of years. Hundreds of thousands of birds swarm the cliffs, changing the colour of the rock with their guano and filling the air with their calls.

Photographic Details: Waiting for a glimpse of sun to come out of the clouds I wanted the cliffs to be highlighted by the light. The rare sight of fog on the cliffs adds enormous amounts of texture and depth to the already dramatic scene. Look closely at the image you will see white dots peppering the image, as the sun lit birds show up against the darker shadowy cliffs.

1/250s f/6.3 ISO50 135mm

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Explorer's silhouette

Svalbard, Norwegian ArcticFrom the photo of the day at http://www.kylefoto.com

Exploring the arctic tundra is somewhat of a contemplative activity. Mostly bare rocks will seem uneventful to the inattentive eye, but if you take your time you will become aware of the subtle flora that populates the land. As guides, we establish a perimeter where it’s safe for us to explore, investigating the land for polar bears and keeping armed guides within view of everyone and everything just in case. This group was looking out into the horizon to our expedition vessel, the Akadamik Sergey Vavilov.

Click for larger image

Photographic details: I noticed how at this moment everything seemed to just fit together. I often use the “rule of thirds” to line my subjects up and this is a great example. I split the image into thirds and my subjects are placed in the intersections of these divisions. The silhouette of the group and the ship are both important parts of the image but they are both 1 third of the way into the image. In addition the sky takes up the top third, the ocean the middle third and the land on the bottom third. The eye has a lot of paths to follow, from one subject to the other. The centre of the image has nothing in it, it forces the viewer to look around and linger a little longer on the photograph.

The original full colour photograph was interesting but I wanted more drama, it had a lot more details and I could even see the faces of the silhouettes. In lightroom I shifted to black and white and increased the blacks, this gave me the the contrasty look I wanted.

1/400s f/8.0 ISO100 100mm

Original colour version: Click for larger image

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Arctic Wake

West coast of Greenland, 77° North Under way along the calm seas of the arctic, the fractal resonance of the ship’s wake created this beautiful pattern as we made a turn. As an artist would say, this image has “movement”. Your eyes have a lot to do in this image as they start at the bottom left of the image then curve around to the right and up towards the poignant icebergs floating merrily on the surreal horizon off the calm shores of Greenland.

Photographic details: I used an aperture of f7 to have a higher depth of field. But I still needed a shutter speed of 1/250 of a second in order to prevent the water from being blurred in too much motion, as I wanted to preserve the texture of the waves.

Canon 5D 1/250s f/7.1 ISO50 170mm

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Ghosts of South Georgia

Gold Harbour, South Georgia, Antarctica The edge of the harbour that is home to 25,000 breeding pairs of king penguins. The sea is the key to life here, where penguins can bring krill and fish back to the mouths of their hungry chicks. This place was called “Gold Harbour” by whalers given it is full of large elephant seals and numerous king penguins. They were easy to capture and kill to be boiled for their blubber and oil, which was worth a lot of money in this last haven for whalers. In addition a lot of pyrite or “fools gold” had been found by Filchner’s German Antarctic Expedition in 1911.

Photographic details: I wanted to create a ghostly image with a lot of mood and drama, the long exposure technique works very well for this. With the extreme brightness of the mid day sun filtering through the overcast sun the longest exposure I could get was four seconds. In order to get the long exposure I wanted I had to mash 20 four second exposure images together to create a total of 80 seconds.

ISO50, f18, with a 5 stop ND filter, 20 4 second exposures combined into 80 seconds If you like this, do me a favour and please share!