Tuesday, October 15, 2013

2013 BBC Wildlife Photographer of the Year – Animals in Their Environment


Polar Bear lurking beneath melting sea ice on Hudson Bay, Canada. Photographed July 11, 2012 using a Canon 7D camera, 10-22mm lens and at the end of a six-foot camera boom. Exposure 1/320 second at f/4.
I had been making noise for years about going to Hudson Bay to photograph polar bears. The town of Churchill, Manitoba is world-famous for its polar bear viewing in the fall, but who wants to spend a fortune to ride around in a Tundra Buggy with a couple dozen other photographers and tourists?
Wouldn’t it be way more fun to do a BYOB thing? Bring your own boat?
I drove 1800 miles from my home in Seattle to the end of the road in Thompson, Manitoba, then loaded everything onto the train that runs 600 miles north to Churchill. I carried more than 500 pounds of gear; everything I might conceivably need; an 11-foot inflatable zodiac boat, an outboard motor, cases of camera and underwater gear and all the survival equipment I might possibly require. I looked like some kind of crazy survivalist hoarder.
I didn’t know what to expect when I got there. Other than a couple local operators running summer tourists out to swim with belugas, there isn’t a lot of boating on that stretch of Hudson Bay. The coastline is flat and offers no protection at all from storms blowing in off the tundra.
There’s also a huge range of tides, as much as 30 feet from high to low water. The bay is ringed by a quagmire of mud flats when the tide goes out, and if I timed things wrong I had to carry all of my gear nearly half a mile from shore to the water’s edge. It seemed to take forever, hefting the 80-pound motor, then the 75-pound boat, then all of my equipment cases across the mud flats. For an old guy like me, it was a lot of exercise.
Rather than camp out along shore, I slept in a perfectly nice hotel in town every night. But each day I used the zodiac to travel up to 30 miles offshore. I stayed out as long as the light allowed, traveling at the edge of the melting pack ice, scanning each iceberg for the shape of a polar bear.
It was exhausting work, hour after hour staring at the ice, trying to find that white on white shape. As it turns out, it’s really, really hard to find polar bears on the ice, at least without a helicopter and a suitcase full of money.
Sea ice isn’t uniformly white. After the long winter it’s jumbled and covered in dirt and crud from the sea. Polar bears aren’t pure white either. Their coats can be anywhere from ivory to butter to golden in color. In the warm light of the setting midnight sun, pretty much everything looks like a bear. Most days I was out on the water for 12 to 14 hours a day, sometimes until two in the morning. I have never worked so hard and so long to find a subject. In all that time, I saw exactly two polar bears, one of which disappeared almost immediately into the pack ice
Maybe that’s why this this image feels so much like a gift. Having come so far and worked so hard to find this one special bear, tolerant of my presence, curious but not aggressive.
I didn’t rush in when I saw her. I kept my distance and let her grow used to the boat and to my presence. At one point, she swam under a small piece of broken sea ice, and poked her head up through the hole to watch me. I stopped the boat and struggled to mount a camera on the end of a 7-foot long boom to try shooting close in with a wide-angle lens.
But nothing was working the way it was supposed to. I’d already dunked one of my remote triggers in the salt water and wound up hand wiring another by chewing off the leads and jury-rigging the exposed copper wires. It was not pretty. I slowly maneuvered the pole closer to her, struggling to hold the camera steady and fire the shutter.  I was shooting completely blind,  pointing the camera and hoping for the best.
I thought I might have a pretty cool shot when she poked her head up less than three feet from the camera. It wasn’t until a week later, as I was riding the train from Churchill south toward Winnipeg that I finally had time to look through all of my digital files. When I saw the frame of her  lurking under the water’s surface, staring back up at me, I was completely surprised.
I promptly turned into the crazy guy who runs around showing his vacation pictures to everyone on the train.


4 comments:

Mark Gamba said...

Damn Paul! That a ton of work. This is such a classic example of making your own luck. Initially people look at a brilliant shot like this and go "wow, that guy got so lucky" The backstory tells what it's really like to be a pro. You work your ass off for days on end, push all the edges and then you get that one "lucky" shot. Excellent work man! I hope we get to meet some day. Will you be at the Crag lawcenter dinner?

Dramamamma said...

This picture on it's own would be amazing, but to hear how you got it makes it even more so. People who think that good photographers aren't really working have no clue. It's tough!! Thank you for sharing your gift with us!

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