A Song of (No) Fire and (All) Ice – Halfway through my First Antarctic Season
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All work is performed under NMFS Permit No. 23095 with the Biotelemetry and Behavioral Ecology Lab at UC Santa Cruz (and all images taken in accordance with that permit). Please do not share images without explicit permission.
HEY WORLD.
I’m halfway through my first Antarctic field season.
Words have been elusive to me lately. So I’m going to let the pictures speak for themselves. Photography has always been fun for me, and I’ve enjoyed playing around with light, angles, subjects. But it’s taken on a new meaning for me during the last several weeks. It has become intensely therapeutic. It’s a simple goal I can set for myself each day: get outside and shoot. It doesn’t matter what the outcome is, just get out and shoot.
It’s like a little piece of me makes it into an image, a representation of something I saw that I wanted to capture on film.
I’m so thankful I took the plunge a couple of years ago and bought my Sony A7R3 from my friend Greg (please go check out his wildlife photography). I’m also grateful to Rob Owen – the OG humpback whale photographer extraordinaire – who so patiently went through the basics of Lightroom and photo editing with me back then! I still have much to learn, but I have the tools in hand now.
Needless to say, I am immensely enjoying looking at the world through my lens. It’s almost like I can filter out the negative thoughts and instead focus on creating something beautiful.
So enjoy the pictures, for now. Descriptions of my research experiences will follow. Here’s a quick summary:
Flying drones, capturing imagery, and measuring whale body condition is one of my favorite things to do in the entire world
Never say never – there are often whales where you least expect it
Experiments are way harder than just doing observational science
I have horrible circulation, and being cold for hours makes you exhausted
This is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been
I can biopsy a whale!
Please recognize that all of this research is performed in accordance with our permit; drones are not permitted to be flown in the Antarctic per IAATO regulations.
Love from the bottom of the world!
Loz
