I have made at least six trips to Svalbard. Svalbard is a territory of Norway in the polar circle. We normally board a ship there and spend at least ten days exploring the area. Part of the mission on the trip is to photograph polar bears. This is one Polar Bear we tracked for a while. You can search this site for Polar Bear and find more photographs of thse magnificent creatures.
Iceland is where photographers go when they die. It’s a beautiful landscape and light never stops giving. Sunsets and sunrises are special every day. as a photographer, you don’t get much sleep in Iceland because there is so much to see. This sunset with the moon was made one evening after a hike up a mountain. The whispy clouds, sunset color, and moon make it simply work.
These are two penguin photos I made on my last trip to Antarctica in February 2020. They were photographed with the Sony a7r iv and have a ton of detail. I processed these in Capture One 20 and used shadow recovery to bring out details in the black feathers and needed to highlight recovery in the white area of the penguin. I shot a lot of penguin photos and I always look for something different.
The top image was made from our ship as we passed an iceberg and the penguins were jumping onto an iceberg.
The image below was made onshore and it is a young penguin who is molting and trying to groom itself.
Dramatic Iceberg. One thing I like to do is play with my iceberg images and find new ways to create a different view of an iceberg. I will be doing an article on photoPXL.com where I show this iceberg in more than a dozen different ways. Look for that soon. These giant icebergs always give me new ways of seeing. These are unique images. Unlike many landscape photos these photos are dynamic. Within a few days, this iceberg will take on a whole different look. It may break apart and it may flip over. Either way, these icebergs define what Antarctica is all about – A dynamic Landscape.
Planaeu Bay, Antarctica, the iceberg graveyard. This is a great place to visit and one place that I have done some of my best iceberg photos. This bay is full of grounded icebergs and once they get grounded they begin to erode and naturally make beautiful sculptured giant pieces of ice. This was made with a Sony a7r iv and 100-400mm lens. I’ll be sharing some close-ups of the ice in some future photos.
Rust, rust, rust . . I love rust and especially the rust of Antarctica. This photo was made on Deception Island in Antarctica. I have been working on a whole series of rust in Antarctica and it will be part of an upcoming article where I share my different rust images. I liked this one with the ladder and graffiti. Funny to see graffiti even in Antarctica. Photographed with a Sony a75iv and 100-400mm zoom lens.
This will is the first of a lot of iceberg photos. I recently returned from Antarctica and shot thousands of images. This image was processed normally then I took it into Luminar 4 where I have some presets to bring out color and detail that I like for iceberg shots. I’ll do a tutorial on this on photoPXL.com in the near future.
I have a terrific Sony lens that is my favorite. It’s a 100-400mm gm master lens and it can focus close. It allows me to get what I call the picture in the picture. Thus when I do wildlife I get the full animal and then using the zoomed-in feature I look for the unusual and what is more unusual than the feet of a penguin.
I just completed an Antarctica Expedition with 30 clients. It was a super trip and I have come home with a ton of photos. These photographs were made while we were traveling from one location to another. We were having dinner and saw this iceberg with penguins go by. The Captain immediately turns the ship around and we approached this iceberg. The penguins were jumping onto it and it was fin to watch as many took several tries to get up. It was dusk and very dark and I was fortunate to be shooting with a Sony a7r4 which has terrific high ISO capability. These are two of my favorites that I hope to make large prints of next week. I’ll also have more photos, an article or two and videos that will appear on photopxl.com in the near future.
I am always looking for the picture in the picture. This is a photo of an old beached boat on a beach in Svalbard. What I like to od is shoot the picture of the larger subject (the boat) itself then go in close and start to look for new compositions. Sometimes I use a long lens like the 100-400nn lens. In this shot, I saw the bow of the ship as it’s own abstract photo. I moved back a bit and zoomed in with the telephoto lens to compress the image a bit. Then I shot it. At first, if you see the images you might not know what it is. This forces the viewer to stop for a minute to figure it out. Some people may not even figure it out. I like this subject as it has a lot of things I like, such as rust and peeling paint. Enjoy.