Expeditions
atacama expedition-2013
These production shots will give you an idea of life during the expedition in the relentlessly hostile environment of the Atacama Desert. Night-time temperatures often drop below -20°c in the 4,500 - 5,000m altitudes of this vast plateau, second in size only to the Tibetan plateau. During the winter months in which I travelled through the Atacama, the wind shrieked ceaselessly. Very early on in the expedition my team and I were caught in a major snowstorm; we discovered later that it was the largest the region had seen since 1947 . We were forced to take shelter in a stone ‘refugio’ for eight days, and via satellite telephone the local police warned us not to leave the area till conditions improved. Venturing out daily from the refugio I was able to document a unique desert landscape under a thick blanket of snow. A brutal but sublime experience.
expedition through the beagle channel and around cape horn-2013
Reaching Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of the South American continent, we managed to persuade a fishing boat crew to allow us to join them on their next trip out to sea. Their prey was the legendary ‘Centolla’ king crab of these frigid and extremely isolated waters. For eight days we travelled through the Beagle Channel, then further south, eventually rounding Cape Horn, the southernmost landmass before the Antarctic. Camping myself and my equipment on the stern of the small vessel, battling heaving seas, snow blizzards, relentless wind, horizontal rain and sea-spray, an absolutely magnificent display of the most desolate and bleak islands I had ever seen rolled continuously past my cameras. All the photography had to be handheld, an extremely difficult task considering that each finished image was created with up to twenty or thirty individually shot frames that needed to be assembled together. In a region with apparently more shipwrecks than any other in the world, one could only admire the crew who worked these waters six months of the year.
Wyoming light of the Grand Tetons-2015
A private commission brought me to the magnificent Grand Tetons mountain range in Wyoming USA. Based out of Jackson, I walked, snowshoed and cross-country skied into the breathtaking emptiness and quietness of this magical region through the entire month of January 2015. Temperatures drop to a sobering -20°c even in the daylight hours, and many a time my eyelashes froze to the camera eyepiece! I later returned in September of the same year for another month, the white frozen mountain slopes replaced by the magnificent colours of the Tetons Fall.
