One of the top animals on our list to photograph has been the “Ice Bear” or Polar Bear. These elusive creatures are getting harder and harder to spot in the wild but we knew we could count on Lindblad Expedition’s National Geographic Explorer and their crew to find them for us. We travelled on the National Geographic Explorer to Antarctica last year and had an amazing time. The ship, crew, staff, Nat Geo photo instructors and Antarcitca itself was one of the most amazing places we’ve been to. Many of the passengers on the ship with us in the Antarctic raved about the trip to the Arctic. Since seeing Polar Bears was on our wish list we booked the trip immediately after returning home.
Polar Bear in field of arctic flowers
Lindblad calls the trip to the arctic the Land of the Ice Bears. They market the trip as an 11 day tour of the Svalbard archipelago. In actuality, you only have 5 days on the ship searching for the elusive Ice Bear. All of the other days are travel days or embarking/disembarking from the ship. The trip was still amazing even though it was shorter than we expected. An extra 2 days at sea exploring the archipelago would have been perfect. It would have allowed extra time to search for Polar Bears, Walruses, Whales and most importantly not feel rushed when trying to get that perfect shot. Overall, the photography experience in Antarctica was far superior and I came away from that trip with much better pictures than this one. Even though it was only a 5 day trip they packed as much into every moment as they could and I did end up with a few good photos.
Over the next week or so I’ll do a few posts that describes what we did and what we saw each day we were on the ship. Similar to what I did for our expedition to Antarctica.
The photo instructors onboard the ship put together a video slideshow of the passengers best photos from the trip. Miki and I submitted some of our favorites. We tried to submit pictures that other people wouldn’t have posted so we tried to get a little creative and kept the wildlife pictures to a minimum since everyone else had lots of them.
Some of my favorites.
- Polar Bears above.
Arctic Landscape
The Ice of the Arctic
Waterfall flowing off the Austfonna ice cap. Largest ice cap by area in Europe.
Kayaking in the Arcitc. (Gopro camera attached to end of kayak paddle)
You would be surprised. Iceland doesn’t have that much ice. The landscape is green in many places as you can see from the pictures in my previous posts. However, if you come all the way to Iceland you need to find some ice so off we went to the Vatnajökull Glacier… and look… we found ice
Vatnajökull Glacier Lagoon in Jokulsarlon
The Vatnajökull Glacier is the largest glacier by volume in Europe. The second largest is in Svalbard, Norway which we also visited later during our Europe trip (more on that later).
Jökulsárlón Glacier Lagoon
The glacier lagoon in Jökulsárlón is a great photo destination. Huge pieces of the glacier calve off into this lagoon before they float out to sea and eventually melt. You can even take a cruise out into the lagoon to get up close and personal with the icebergs. The bergs weren’t as big as what we saw in Antarctica but still impressive none the less.
Climbing on the Vatnajökull Glacier
Our next stop on the ice tour in Iceland was to do some ice climbing on the Vatnajökull Glacier in Skaftafell National Park with Icelandic Mountain Guides. We were booked to do ice climbing but the eruption of Grimsvotn volcano in May, 2011 rained ash down all over the glacier. The ash made the glacier very dirty and would have gunked up the climbing gear possibly ruining it or at worst making it unsafe. So, we did the Full Day Adventure Tour instead which turned out to be a great tour.
I was initially pretty disappointed that we couldn’t go ice climbing and that the glacier was dirty. I really like taking photos of the vivid blue colors glaciers have. However, the dirty glacier had an interesting look and I got some unique pictures.
A Dirty Vatnajökull Glacier
While we didn’t get to go ice climbing we did get to use crampons and ice axes on our glacier hike which at least made us look cool.
All geared up on the Vatnajökull glacier
We also had a brief chance to rappel down into a in moulin. This may not look dangerous but moulins are holes that go straight down to the bottom of the glacier. The depth of the glacier around here is over 400 meters. Good thing the guides at Icelandic Mountain Guides know what they are doing because that is my wife on the end of the rope.
Rappelling into a Moulin
After a hard day of seeking out ice in Iceland a visit to the famous Blue Lagoon was a welcomed treat. It’s a little pricey to get in but it’s one of things you must do if you visit iceland. Don’t forget to smear the silica mud on your face. It’s suppose to have healing powers for various skin ailments… even if you don’t have a skin problem it still feels pretty good and looks even funnier.
Blue Lagoon Iceland
Rule #1 of portrait photography. Don't use a wide angle lens up close to your subject. Sorry Miki
Lastly, need to give a shout out to our trusty little Toyota Yaris that got us around in our search for Icelandic ice in style… well… maybe not in style but at least it got us around.
It took me almost 6 months but I finally got through all the pictures and video from our trip to Antarctica. We did take over 10,000 photos and several hours of video. It takes a while to parse that down into a 9 minute video slideshow. Enjoy…
Don’t forget to check out the previous posts from our Antarctica Expedition.
Doing the Polar Plunge in front of the National Geographic Explorer
We liked our trip to Antarctica on the National Geographic Explorer so much we booked another trip on the same ship to the Arctic this summer. In preparation of the trip to Arctic, they had National Geographic photographer Ralph Lee Hopkins give a webinar on the Top 10 Essentials For Making Better Travel Photos. These tips don’t just apply to trips to the arctic. They are very useful tips that will help you take better travel photos wherever you go. Click on the link here to watch the webinar.
Here are the top 10 tips that Ralph covers in his presentation.
I did a lot of research on what to pack for this trip since you can’t really run out to the nearest store to pick up something you left at home. Here are just a few of the links that I found helpful in preparing for the trip.
They go over the basics like bring layers, a warm hat, extra batteries, etc. All good advice which we followed and were very comfortable for our trip. I won’t go duplicate the good work they did but I will go over a couple of items that we found indispensable.
One of our favorite pieces of gear were our muck boots. This advice was courtesy of the The Traveling Richters blog. The Arctic Sport Hi-cut by Muck Boots are the ones I would recommend. They are very warm, comfortable and are great for hiking around antarctica. They are pretty big and are difficult to pack but it’s worth finding a way.
Another must have items is a nice pair of clothes. I had one pair of ice climbing gloves that were supposed to be made to handle cold and wet environments. They didn’t work well at all and were stuffed back in the bag after the first day. The best gloves (especially for photographers) are the OR Meteor Mitts. They come with a removeable fleece liner with flaps that can be pulled down so you fingers are free to work a camera.
Next most important thing is to keep your head and face warm. The Loki Liner Hat did the trick for us. The big red parka is the other piece of gear that we grew fond of. It is supplied by Lindblad is one of the warmest winter jackets we’ve ever worn. We will be keeping them for quite some time.
Onto the camera gear. Apologies for bad iphone photo but all my other cameras were all laid out trying to find their way into one camera bag.
Gear list:
Canon 5D mark II
Canon 7D
Canon 30D (converted to infrared)
Canon G11
24-105 F4
70-200 F4
TS-E (tilt shift) 24mm
100-400mm
Sigma 10-22
1.4x extender
580 EXII flash with ST-E2 transmitter
Remote camera triggers
Gitzo 2524 tripod
Really Right Stuff ballhead
Nikon MONARCH X 10.5×45 Binoculars
Nikon MONARCH 10×56 Binoculars
Hyperdrive Colorspace UDMA backup drives X2
Blower, battery charges, cleaning cloths, misc camera stuff
All packed into a Gura Gear Kiboko backpack (best camera bag ever)
Large Cabela’s Boundary Waters dry bag backpack. I bought this based on a recommendation from www.hoothollow.com because he used this bag in Antarctica to put his Kiboko in when doing landings on the Zodiac. From my experience, the dry bag is not necessary. The Kiboko can easily repel whatever little amount of water may get splashed over the side. The Cabela is a nice bag but its overkill for this trip.
Yes, it all fit… barely. The Kiboko can really hold a lot of gear.
If I were to go back to Antarctica I would only do a few things different from a camera gear perspective.
1) I would bring a laptop. Normally, I don’t travel with a laptop because I’d rather enjoy the destination rather than spending time at a computer editing photos. However, for a trip like this it’s worth it because you can get critics from the photo experts on board. They also had a photo gallery at the end of the trip were you could show off your work. Basically, everyone just setup their laptop in the lounge and put their photos in slideshow mode for people to look at.
2) I would bring a Canon 500mm F4 lens. The 100-400mm lens I brought is a fantastic lens but there were times when the light was low and the wildlife was far off. The extra 100mm and 1 more stop of light would have helped me a get a few shots I couldn’t have got otherwise. The 500mm is massive lens but it wouldn’t be to much of a hassle because it would be most useful when shooting from the ship.
3) I would have used my tripod more often for creating panoramas. I did many hand held panorama shots and a lot of them turned out well but I would have got more keepers if I took the time to setup on a tripod and do a proper pano.
I thought it would be pretty cool to record our tracks with a GPS for our trip to Antarctica. I’ve tried to record GPS tracks before on other trips using my Garmin but it was always battery hog and it was very inconvenient to keep it charged and turned on all the time. For this trip I thought it would be worth it so I searched for a Garmin map of Antarctica. After a bit of searching I found there wasn’t one made by garmin but I did find a free one here http://rwsmaps.griffel.se/ After a couple of hours of messing around trying to get it loaded onto my Garmin I found out that all the Garmin GPS devices don’t support maps above or below 60 degrees. This rules out Antarctica completely. The GPS will be able to give you the coordinates but it won’t show on the map. Pretty stupid design Garmin!!
Then I found this cool little gadget call the “Travel Recorder XT” by Qstar. It’s a simple little thing that just records your tracks. No display. 1 on/off switch. Nothing fancy. Just records where you’ve been and the battery life is much better than any Garmin GPS. Of course this one turned out not to be perfect either. I kept it on most of the trip but didn’t realized until I got home (no display to check if it was working) that it didn’t record very accurately that far south. The tracks were all over the place. Didn’t record anything at all in other places. Really not very usable.
In the end, the pictures of the charts with the route drawn in with a marker proved to be the easiest to use and most accurate way to show where we’ve been.
Chart of our Antarctica voyage
Chart of our Antarctica voyage
I used these to update my travel map at the top of my blog. Not exactly what I had in mind but when technology fails you can always do things old school with a pen and paper.
Hope you enjoyed the brief break about Antarctica with a couple posts about our long weekend in Tibet. Now back to finishing up the trip report to Antarctica…
NatGeo Explorer crashes through waves
The journey back through the Drake passage was A LOT more exciting this time. We had some pretty large swells as you can see from the pictures above. There weren’t nearly as many people walking around the ship for the 2 day trip back to Ushuaia, Argentina. I guessing a lot of them were in the cabin hugging the toilet
I was doing fine so I spent some more time photographing the sea birds following the ship.
Albatross following the NatGeo explorer
Sea birds following the NatGeo explorer
We then had the pleasure of hearing another talk by Peter Hillary. This time he talked about the krisis on K2. I’m surprised he is able to talk about this event because of the tragic nature of the trip. He was the sole survivor of the group of 8 climbers that tried to summit K2 in 1995. I’m glad he has the courage to tell this gripping and painful story.
Peter Hillary slide show about the K2 krisis in 1995
We also had some time to chat with Peter and get him to sign a copy of his new book. In the Ghost Country: A Lifetime Spent on the Edge. I haven’t read it yet (sorry Peter) but I will get to it soon. I read most books on my Ipad now but one of the problems with that is you can’t really get authors to sign a digital version.
Picture with Peter Hillary
There was also a talk by Ira Block on his assignment to photograph Naomi Uemuera’s solo expedition by dog sled to the North Pole. Ira is a great speaker and teacher. I will definitely try to meet up with him again for one of his workshops or maybe even another Lindblad Expedition he is on.
Photo with Ira Block. (all good photographers are bald
and then before you know it the port captain from Ushuaia borded our ship to take her into port…
Taking a brief break from the Antarctica posts to share our trip to Tibet and Chengdu, China over Chinese New Year last weekend. I’ll finish up the Antartica posts after I finish this brief trip review from Tibet and Chengdu.
Panda Base
Through a comical series of flight cancelations by Air China (an unbelievably disorganized airline) we had an unexpected free afternoon in Chengdu. A quick google search turned up the Panda Base. We’ve never seen Panda’s before so I figured it was worth a visit. I also found that you could get your picture taken with a Panda which I thought would be very unique experience.
Baby Panda at the Chengdu Panda Base
Once we arrived at the Panda Base we quickly went to the Nursery where they kept the baby Pandas. This was also the location where you could take photos with the baby pandas. I knew you had to pay extra to take a picture with them but was a little surprised when they asked for a $150 USD “donation”. I thought that was pretty steep… especially for China. I knew Miki would like it so I went ahead and paid the donation fee.
Our time soon came up to take a photo with the baby Panda but I got stopped at the door and they said you only paid for one. I explained that I didn’t want to hold the Panda. I just wanted to take the pictures of Miki holding it. My negotiation skills failed. I had to hand over my camera to one of the staff so he could take the pictures. I would have gone in with Miki but I was out of money and the nearest ATM was a 30 minute drive away. I didn’t care much about holding a Panda but I didn’t want to hand over my Canon 5d Mark II with 24-105 L lens. I’m pretty controlling over who touches my camera… basically nobody
I did eventually hand over the camera and the pictures were very funny. The baby Panda was a girl named Ya Yun. She was born on September 9th, 2010.
Baby Panda "Ya Yun" at the Chengdu Panda Base
The Panda seemed to be pretty hungry because it kept trying to take a bite out of Miki.
The first attack…
Panda nibble #1
The staff had to step in to help remove the panda from her cheek.
Panda nursery staff saving Miki from a panda attack
Maybe Miki didn’t learn to keep her face away from the Panda’s mouth? Maybe the Panda was very hungry? Maybe Miki smelled like Bamboo? I don’t know but the Panda went in for another nibble and had to be removed again. She got a good hold of Miki this time.
Panda nursery staff saving Miki from a panda attack... again.
Obviously the panda couldn’t fit Miki’s whole cheek in her mouth so next she went after something a little more bit sized… her nose.
Baby panda taking a bit of Miki's nose
and she had to be rescued again.
Panda nursery staff saving Miki from a Panda attack... AGAIN
The Panda wanted to show Miki there were no hard feelings so she gave Miki a nice goodbye kiss. A kiss from a panda with some crazy little beady eyes and a few teeth are showing too… we can just say it was a nice goodbye kiss
Ya Yun's goodbye kiss
The “attacks” look worse than they were. The panda was only playing and none of the bites were hard. Even though the main destination of our weekend away was Tibet, this was the highlight of the trip. The Panda Base is a nice little zoo (if you can even call it a zoo since they only have pandas). If you happen to be in Chengdu you should definitely visit.
On the way out of the Panda Base there was a very pathetic looking man selling Panda junk souvenirs. I really hope he lost a bet with his friends or he’s on some candid camera show. Really… what grown man would even wear that stuff.
A very pathetic looking guy selling panda stuff. I bet his parents are proud.
Here are a few more pics from around the Chengdu Panda Base.
We visited Port Lockroy in the morning. Port Lockroy was a British base in Antarctica from 1944 to the mid 60s. It was then abandoned and fell into disrepair until the British Antarctic Heritage Trust stepped in to restore the base. It is restored very well and shows how some of the early scientists lived in Antarctica. It’s only staffed during the summer months. It’s pretty isolated but the 4 girls on the island get plenty of ships coming in to visit. They also have a couple thousand penguins and beautiful landscapes to keep them occupied.
Port Lockroy Landscape
It also serves as a post office and has a nice little gift shop. Yep, there is a even a gift shop in Antarctica where you can buy crappy souvenirs that your wife will save for years.
After Miki mailed her postcard we were off to Cuverville Island. This island had some amazing landscapes and I went a little crazy with the panoramic shots.
Cuverville Island Panoramic
Cuverville Island Panoramic
We spent most of the time on Cuverville just sitting on the beach watching the penguins coming in and out of the water. We’ve spent so much of the trip running from one side of an island to the other but just sitting there on the beach was one of the best experiences. It also provided some of the best chances to photograph even more penguins.
Gentoo Penguin - water beads
Gentoo Penguin
Gentoo Penguin running out of the water
There was also a large group of male Skuas about that were making a lot of noise. Lots of fighting, flapping of wings and just general chaos. The penguins didn’t seem so bothered by this group probably because they focused on showing off to the other skuas rather that eating penguins.
Skua
Miki bought these penguin socks and for the whole trip she kept telling me she wanted to get a photo of her socks next to the penguins. After realizing she wasn’t joking I got a couple shots for her.
Penguin Socks
This was our last day on the Antarctic continent so we wanted to squeeze every last second we could out of our time on the island. I was able to get a few last landscapes in before the final Zodiac left.
B&W Cuverville Island Landscape
B&W Cuverville Island Landscape
iceberg landscape
The final panoramic shot was taken with my infrared converted 30D.
Infrared Cuverville Panoramic
Daily Expedition Report and more pics after the break
This was a pretty spectacular christmas day. We woke up when the expedition leader announced on the loudspeaker that we had a pod of killer whales off our bow. Better than waking up to an alarm clock…
Entering the Lemaire Channel
We then headed into the Lemaire Channel. The captain had heard earlier reports that it was too packed with ice and we couldn’t make it through. When we approached the Lemaire Channel another ship, the Ushuaia, had already turned around. We hadn’t seen another ship until now and we all were pretty disappointed because it seemed like we couldn’t make it through.
The Ushuaia turning back from the Lemaire Channel
However, the captain was determined to get through and through some skillful maneuvering and crashing through even more ice…
Captain maneuvering through the Lemaire Channel
We did eventually make it through the Lemaire Channel. To bad for the guests on the Ushuaia. This is one of the many reasons to choose the NatGeo Explorer over the other ships that travels to Antarctica. This ship has proven it can go were others can not.
Lemaire Channel
The Lemaire Channel had a lot of wildlife. I felt a little bad sometimes when a seal would be taking a nap on an iceberg but was in our way. The captain would try to maneuver around the seal but sometimes it just wasn’t possible. This seal eventually slid off the iceberg and went to find a quieter place to take a nap.
Seal trying to take a nap in the sun
Miki taking a picture of me taking the above picture.
Miki taking a picture of me taking a picture of the Lemaire Channel
After making it through the Lemaire Channel we made it to Booth Island. We had the most spectacular light with the most dramatic cloud cover. We had some amazing penguin and seal spottings while out on the Zodiacs. I shot over a 1000 pictures in one afternoon. Don’t worry… I wont post them all.
The wildlife taken from a zodiac near Booth Island.
Yawning Seal
The 3 Penguins
Headless Penguin
Jumping Penguins
and for the dramatic iceberg shots of the day.
Antarctic Iceberg Landscape
Antarctic Iceberg Landscape
When we got back to ship a couple of people were referring to our boat as the big lens zodiac. The shortest lens on our zodiac was a 400mm. Antarctica tends to bring a well travelled crowd and most of the photographers on board have already been on safari (some several times) which requires some big glass. Antarctica is no different. The bigger and faster lens you can afford to bring down the better.
Big lens boat
While I was on the zodiac cruise with the Ira Block (the NatGeo photographer on board) and the other big lens crew, Miki went on a hike to the top of Booth Island.
Penguin Highway
Hiking on Booth Island
I also took a few pictures with my infrared converted 30D when we were travelling back through the Lemaire Channel. My infrared camera spent most of the time in the camera bag because I’ve had limited success with it. Even with the stunning landscape of Antarctica, I’m still not satisfied with the results. Maybe I’m doing something wrong but I think simple black and white photos are much more appealing.
Antarctica in Infrared
Antarctica in Infrared
The daily expedition report and a few more photos after the break.
Twitter
Facebook
Youtube
RSS
Picasa
Flickr