I spent 36 hours at sea to photograph polar bears in Greenland — here's what that actually looks like [OC]

I've made two trips to the High Arctic — Svalbard in May 2017 and Scoresby Sund, East Greenland in September 2018. Both were photography-focused expeditions aboard small vessels. Here's what photographing polar bears actually looks like.

Finding them is the hardest part

We spent days in Svalbard spotting bears so far away they were a single pixel in the frame. We started calling them "1-pixel bears." A white animal against a white landscape through a long lens, hoping it moves.

Almost halfway through the expedition, we found a large male sleeping on ice near the ship. The crew anchored for the night. Around 2:15 AM I heard a knock on my cabin door — "the bear is walking, let's go." I'd been sleeping in my base layers in anticipation. The next two hours were spent in the zodiac photographing him walking the land and swimming across the fjord in full midnight sun daylight. Back after 6 AM to hot chocolate from the chef.

In Greenland it's harder. The local Inuit community hunts polar bears, so they're wary and rarely seen. On our first zodiac outing in Scoresby Sund, we found one rolling atop an iceberg in evening light. We didn't see another trace for the rest of the trip. That image later appeared on the cover of Canadian Photography (CAPA) Magazine and was featured by BBC Earth.

On the photography

The Greenland frame was shot on a Canon 70D, a crop sensor body, with a 100–400mm lens, deliberately chosen for the 1.6x crop factor giving effective 640mm. The window to get it right was short.

The midnight sun in Svalbard means full daylight at 2 AM. What it does to the quality of light is hard to describe. Patience is the main skill. You position yourself, you wait.

On getting there

Scoresby Sund required a flight to Reykjavik, a domestic flight to Akureyri in northern Iceland, and 36 hours at sea through the Denmark Strait. For Svalbard, you typically fly from the Norwegian city of Tromsø to Longyearbyen. The operator you choose matters more than any gear decision as you're dependent on their local knowledge and judgment about where to position the zodiac.

Happy to answer questions about either expedition.