Leap of Faith

The image seen here is the second in the four-image animated sequence seen on our home page. It was the first of July and we had been cruising the Arctic Ocean off the coast of the Svalbard Islands aboard the Professor Molchanov. The Svalbard Islands are a territory of Norway and are located approximately 400 miles north of the mainland of Norway in the Arctic Ocean and 600 miles from the North Pole.

Every day in the late afternoon, usually around 5:00 p.m., we were treated with a bear sighting. This happened with such regularity, that by the end of the two-week trip, every afternoon we anticipated the 5 o'clock bear sighting with our "big glass" mounted on tripods on the top deck ready for action. Each afternoon it was a different bear. One afternoon it was a mother teaching her three cubs how to hunt seals and on another afternoon we watched as a bear dined on a recent seal kill. Sometimes the bears were close enough to provide frame filling telephoto images. Other times they were too far for decent photographs so we had to be satisfied observing them through binoculars.

As the captain and crew guided the boat through the pack ice, they would "glass" the ice floes for bears and other wildlife. One afternoon, while photographing arctic scenery from the main deck of the Professor Molchanov, the crew from the bridge announced that they saw the 5 o'clock polar bear in the distance approaching the boat. We watched as he came closer. Once I was sure that he would approach us, I quickly mounted a 1.4x teleconverter on my 500mm lens in anticipation of yet another afternoon of polar bear photography. I wanted to get a few environmental photographs showing the bear on the desolate pack ice before he approached too close to the boat. As the afternoon progressed we were able to get full frame images using an 80-200mm zoom. At one point, the bear came up to the boat and pushed on the hull with his front paws and actually moved the boat in the water!

After two hours of some of the best photography I have ever experienced, the bear decided that the "show" was over and began to walk toward the pack ice. I noticed that he was walking toward an ice floe exactly in front of my position on the top deck of the boat. If he maintained his path he would need to jump across the ice floe. With my 500mm lens mounted on camera and tripod, I took a meter reading and made sure that I had sufficient shutter speed to freeze the action. With a fresh roll of film in the camera and the motor drive set to advance at 8 fps, I was ready. All that I needed was the bear to jump across the ice floe. Sure enough, the bear walked up to the edge and proceeded to jump across the water. I was lucky enough to the record four images seen in the sequence. As a bonus, the bear was reflected in the water as he jumped. In all the excitement, I didn't see his reflection in the water until I returned home and started editing my images. It was Christmas in July!