BEHIND THE SCENE

When on assignment, everything we do is determined by the light conditions.
Twenty-four hours of daylight at the height of the Antarctic summer in January means the best light for photography happens in the middle of the night, leaving only a couple hours to rest between sunset and sunrise. Being in the right place at the right time is a balancing act between prior knowledge and advance planning.

On this particular occasion, as soon as we boarded our small charter yacht we studied the forecasts and planned our itinerary accordingly. The “F” word in Antarctica is “flexibility.” One needs to be prepared to change plans at a moment’s notice based on new opportunities and/or weather changes.
After several days of monitoring advance forecasts, we realized we would have a window of only a couple of days to get good light at the “iceberg graveyard” in Pleneau Bay.
We were lucky, however, and we nailed it! Cruising among the icebergs in perfect light was simply amazing.

A strong foreground is essential to any successful landscape photograph. We look at things three-dimensionally with our own eyes in real life, but what we see through photography is flattened into a two-dimensional image. One needs a strong foreground to lead the viewer’s eye into the image, to enhance depth perception and give the illusion of three-dimensional space.

In this particular instance, I chose to use an iceberg as foreground. I took advantage of the iceberg’s complementary colours, to lead the eye into the beautiful sunrise reflection with the ice field in the background.

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