a Cold, Blue World (Anaktuvak Pass), Arctic Circle

Posted by dj.tigersprout (New York City, United States) on 21 October 2009 in Landscape & Rural and Portfolio.

when i posted my original series of alaskan arctic circle photos last july 2008, i had only been using Picassa, and through some very minimal processing commands, i made the shots significantly lighter and warmer than what i had really experienced -- eradicating much of the universal blue tonalities in favor of more normal grays, and whites (as basically all photographs i had seen published up until that time had always been conventionally 'white balanced').

now that i have made 3 trips to the arctic circle and have spent a fair number of hours living withing those dream-like, twilight, blue realities, i am now much more comfortable presenting a truer batch of photos (previously unpublished) from that original adventure -- with a much more legitimate light spectrum, typical of the arctic's magical 6 hours of thin, ethereal 'light' as seen in mid december, the crucial point of winter solstice.

in the absence of much of the yellow light, everything took on a shade of blue -- a completely blue world, if you will. walking back and forth on my many excursions to photograph the frozen landscape surrounding the town, this was what it really felt like to live the arctic reality -- this was the cold, translucent light that i marveled, and the lonely light that the eskimo / inuit see and endure every winter for nearly 5 months... this 'pre-dawn' colorization of the air, the sky, the land -- everything.

the top of the world in a frozen slumber, in temperatures often much lower than -25F / -32C (with further windchill on top of that), the visual world became much more inaccessible, and much more physically precarious. my quick, 20 minute forays into the cold were strictly limited to the fact that if i spent any longer outside my motor control literally began to breakdown (i shivered continuously to some degree at all times, even when i was inside pressed against the heater). a five minute walk in one direction counted for 10 minutes, total, return... leaving only a small window of 10 minutes to explore, compose and take pictures.

in contrast to my 2008 autumn escapade where temperatures were much more balmy and i was able to explore for hours at a time in any direction i wanted, these initial photos only encompass those areas within the town that i was able to reach in my 10 minute return limit. i was therefore never able to leave the town limits for the great white beyond that i could see. i hope a future return in winter will award me a hunting / camping expedition complete with snowmobile visits to nearby eskimo / inuit towns -- a chance to see beyond the long narrow valley of ice i was confined to and a chance to get deeper into wild, pristine arctic wilderness.

welcome to the real arctic alaska -- a beautiful world of cold, solitary blue.

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