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Arctic Art

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Although I work with words and audio most of the time, I have great admiration for anyone who can take a good photograph. As discriminating baboons know, there’s a lot more to it than point-and-click. And for wildlife photographer Paul Nicklen, there’s a whole lot of physical courage involved as he steps out into Arctic weather and submerges himself in frozen oceans. Nicklen has worked at the top of his craft, producing features for National Geographic. He’s going to be speaking tonight at the University of Minnesota – part of a program by the U’s Institute on the Environment.

If you can only watch the first five minutes of this TED talk, you’ll get a sense for depth of his commitment and the quality of his work. And if you make it through the first five, you’ll feel a strong urge to watch the rest – but be warned! There are penguin innards on display. Cute!

Another measure of Nicklen’s intensity – I’d call it a day and send in my photos after swimming with one Leopard Seal. He took a dive with 30! No wonder the photos are so good.

Describe the best picture you’ve ever taken.

53 thoughts on “Arctic Art”

  1. back in the day i had the old minolta srt101 with a bag full of lens’ and i was a pretty cool photographer in my vw van cruising across the rockies and the nationa parks and forests in areas where i had had never been and had no idea of what to expect next. the vw had a roll open roof swhere the opening was about 3 feet by 3 feet and i would have someone else drive and just sit on top of the van snapping shots of stuff as it came around the corner. the rivers the mountains the trees the waterfalls the railroad tracks the wildlife the people i was traveling with the campsites the rocks in the streams and then i got home with 142 rolls of film mostly 36 exposure slide film some black and white and some kodachrome but mostly slide and i tried to figure out how t get it developed. it was going to cost a fortune. well the corner store called pik quik had a promotion one day that they would produce your slide film for free. what….. your promotion is what????? is there a number of rolls you have a limit on or anything? nope we will do your slide film free to see if you like our services…. i drove straight home and got 136 rolls of slide film and 6 rolls of black and white and kodachrome and went back with 6 monster zip lock bags full of film canisters and said ” here you go!” i got a good reaction and we laughed at my good fortune and a couple days later i started getting these slides back first 5 rolls in the little side by side boxes and then 10 more then 10 or 15 more until the whole deal was done. they were kind of apologetic about it but they said they had this promotion at 15 or 20 stores and i had given them 136 rolls of the 200 they took in total. most people had 3 or 4 rolls at most. i spent then next couple of weeks reliving the vacation and the rockies and today i do not have the slightest idea of where those slides are but when i find them again i will treasure and protect them because you cant go back like that and relive those moments of youth friends adventure and the vibrancy of your life. my art buddies tried to dismiss photography as a seconday art form but i love love love it. craig blacklock and his dad les were mentors and models for my photography chapters. thanks for bringing them back into memory today dale.

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  2. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    A photographer I will never be. When I was between 4th and 5th grade I received a brownie camera to take on a trip to California. Upon getting the pictures back I found I had several rolls of pictures of my finger in front of the lens. Although I do appreciate a good photo, I doubt that I will ever be the photographer of that photo. I just never get it all together–hands and fingers out of the way, focus properly, where’s the button?

    Dale–neither computer I used this a.m. has the TED post you refer to. However, there is a fine picture of a blizzard in its place.

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    1. I forgot to mention that I have a beautiful photo from Steve in SP which he snapped near his Lake Superior cabin. It is my office. I love that picture.

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    2. I got it no problem go to Ted search the name and watch it. It’s a good one . I am a big Ted fan and a regular viewer. It’s inspirational to get -7 minutes of passion on such a wide variety of topics

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  3. Good morning to all. I took some pictures that I used for educational work when I was the coordinator of a farmer’s network. Some of them turned out good, but I don’t have a favorite that I remember. I was told by a photographer that I should have farmers take their hats off when I take their pictures because their hats usually shade their faces preventing you from getting a good picture of their faces.

    Also, I have some pictures I took on my trips doing volunteer agricultural work and some are good, but, here again, I don’t have any single favorite one. I did just come across a picture of myself with a Bulgarian family that is a favorite, but I didn’t take this picture.

    My wife takes most of our family pictures and the ones that come to mind as favorites are pictures of the family gathered around the table for a holiday meal. I’m sure there are a few of those pictures of the family around the table that I took to allow my wife to be in the picture. In recent
    years we can all be in these pictures because we can set up the camera to work on a timer and we can all be in front of the camera when it takes the picture.

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    1. I have only ever known one farmer who would even want a good picture of his/her face and that was my father. Good luck to that photographer. He does not understand that those farmers’ hats are part of the deal. You betcha.

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  4. OT. I saw the comments about leeks from yesterday. Leeks are not very hard to grow if you buy plants to set out. A number of different seed companies sell bundles of leek plants for about $10 for a bundle of 50 or more. They are very tough plants and even the one that look almost dead will grow. They should be planted early and can be harvested very late, any time before the ground freezes hard. Our favorite way to use them is in potato leek soup which is easy to make, very tastey, and can serve as the main dish for a dinner.

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        1. I wish I had more space for growing things. If I had more yard, I would be in on this. But if any of you find you have too big a harvest, I’ll be glad to take some off your hands!

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        3. I went to get a Goethe quote and realized I don’t know his work , but I love it! Check out the Goethe quotes ” a clever man makes no small mistakes” is the one I’m applying here

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  5. In 1986, the DECC bought and set up the S/S William A. Irvin as a tour museum ship. I’d already been working in the building for 3 years and my boss ‘drafted’ me to give tours. I started working with some ‘boat nerds’ that lived for taking boat pictures. By 1987, after having to talk about ore boats for 8 hours a day for two summers, I felt that I’d either have to get interested in ore boats or start bouncing off a bulkhead. So, I borrowed my parents’ little Canon point & shoot and set off to join the boat nerd picture crowd. I quickly discovered that adverse weather and doing foolhardy things makes for good photos. In September of 1987, Duluth got hit by a freezing rain/ice storm. And what did I do? Went down to the canal to see if any boats were coming or going. Of course, there was no way anyone was going to ‘thread the needle’ through the canal in winds that actually blew me off of my feet. So, there I am, trying to walk around Canal Park, slipping sliding as people are lined up along the windows of the Marine Museum pointing at me and shaking their heads in disbelief. As I’m headed back to my car, I happen to see one of the old style lampposts that’s half covered in a thick layer of ice and half wet (the wind had frozen the lake spray to just the lake side). I thought it was mildly interesting, so I snapped it. When I got the film back, I was shocked to find that some of that lake spray had frozen to the lens. The image is covered with sparkles that refracted the light. It was a once in a liftime photo that I got almost on my first roll of film.

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  6. The photographer who told me to have farmers take off their hats was putting together a large collection of pictures from farms involved in sustainable farming. It is good to get a better look at the faces of some of the farmers we worked with because they were very interesting people with interesting faces. I didn’t always ask farmers to take off their hats because, as Jacque said, the hats are often part of the deal.

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  7. Let’s not forget Jim Brandenburg. He’s from Luverne and has a gallery there. We have several framed prints and giclees of his, and whenever I miss the long grass prairie of home i just have to look at those prints. I was impressed with his Chasing the Light series, when he allowed himself one shot a day for three months. That would be really hard.

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    1. Love Brandenburg
      Have many photos and a couple books the one you mention and a wolf book among them. One of my kids collects his stuff since we met him 10 or 15 years ago.

      I was a 14 or 15 year old kid when I started using bookstores as the rendezvous point for meeting someone and in one of those early waits for a friend I happened upon an ansel adams 20×20 photography book. I had never seen anythingike it before. I couldn’t believe the power of the images. I was hooked didital photography make it feel like cheating you can screw around and Tru all the odd stuff that enters your brain and just file it away. A tig of memory is 100 bucks today. It will hold 7 million photos and all the music ever recorded and fit in your lunch bag next to your peanut butter sandwich. My kids are marvelous photographers. My oldest son just said before he leaves on his life sojourn off to California in a month or two he wants a good camera. I think it’s great that picassa and photoshop make it so easy to do really good high quality stuff within the realm of most peoples comfort zone
      Love it.

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  8. This reply should go in another place, but I can’t put it there. It is a good thing to plant leek plants as deep as possible to cover as much of the stem as possible because that will give you more white area on the stem to use in cooking. You don’t necessarily need a trench. Just push the plants as deep into soil as possible and then mound soil up around them as they get bigger.

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  9. I have caught a couple of good shots of Daughter – a recent one has her wearing her new roller skates, striped socks, a polka-dot skirt, brightly colored knee pads and elbow pads that are different bright colors than the helmet, and fairy wings…she is skating away but looking back over her shoulder. Also have one on my computer desktop of just her face sticking up out of the leaves grinning a sly “I’m up to something” grin.

    For landscape pictures, I think by far my favorite is one I took in Norway on the farm that had been my great-great-grandfather’s. A cousin who lives in Drammen has gotten to know the current owners, so we were able to stop for a picnic there after visiting the family church (18th century, but not a Stave church)…lovely view of the rye fields and then the mountains in the distance that my great-great and great-grandfather (and his brothers) climbed over by foot with their hand cart of belongings to get to the fjord to come to America. When you’re just looking at that photo, you don’t see the paved roads or any of the more modern stuff that is there now – just the fields and the wildflowers and the mountains and the clear blue sky. Such a sense of history standing in that spot – and seeing the photo brings me right back there.

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  10. I took a photo at a lake in Glacier Park at sunset. We were there with daughters ages 6 & 10 in 1990. The youngest was doing the butterfly up and down the lake, while the oldest was rearranging the boulders int the stream to make dams . I shot this picture with a very diffused sunset looking west with a Kodak instamatic, remember Kodak? later,like 20 years later, in the Chicago Art Institue walking through the Ansel Adams exhibit, there was my picture but inBlack and white! same perspective! I still have the negatives and hope to reprint one of these days.

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  11. Everyone’s pictures sound lovely. It’s too bad we have to be limited to the proverbial 1000 words.

    I’ve never been a photographer, I’d rather be enjoying whatever-it-is than be behind a camera, preserving it for the future. I’m lucky that #1 son got a camera and liked using it or there’d be almost no pictures of them after toddler days when wasband was in charge of pictures.

    #1 son took a few minutes (seconds?) of video out the window as he was riding in a cab in NYC. He has used some software to change to B&W, invert, mirror and other cool things to get the most wonderful, kaleidoscopic images. I told him that he could make a fabric out of some of them. He hopes to edit them and add music

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  12. My best picture, which I have framed on my living room wall, is a photo of falls on the Presque Isle River on the UP, in the Porcupines. It so happens that Steve took exactly the same picture in almost exactly the same place with exactly the same light. They are almost interchangeable. Mine is my best. In Steve’s portfolio, it is about average. He has such amazing pix!

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  13. i Am currently turning some of my mother’s photos into sketches to match moments and scemes from my novel. Kind of fun.

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        1. CD or emailed in parts, whatever is easier for you. About the blog name, I was automatic pilot when I signed in and didn’t notice what WordPress guessed came after the P. I sent you an email some time ago, perhaps you had no idea who I was, or maybe I have the wrong email address?

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        3. sorry to hear about the tragedy. it happens but that doesnt make it easy. hope the resolution comes quickly and serves well

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  14. Ansel Adams was of course a genius with a large format Camera and B & W film. But unless you studied darkroom, you are not likely to be aware of his great genius with an enlarger. The difference between his photos right out of the camera and off of the enlarger is huge. He developed a whole theory of zones and manipulated exposure under the enlarger. A sure eye and hand but most of all long patience in the darkroom as well as in the mountains.

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    1. That’s why I get frustrated with digital point and shoot. I haven’t turned on my enlarger in 5 years. Amstel was amazing. When I started eyeing his work I looked at buying his prints for about 500 a piece what an investment that would have been

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  16. I’m still working on it. Taking a good picture, that is.

    “Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.” – Henri Cartier-Bresson

    I think I have about 8500 to go.

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  17. fantastic TED video/talk. lots of pictures that I think are great but probably for memories and/or sentimental reasons. Not extraordinary in the grand scheme

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    1. my grand scheme is made up of a lot more ordinary snippits that i refer back to than the exraordinary ones that inspire based on their singular contact. but those are memorable too when you run into them.

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