Download - Arri

2 6 C a m e r a
At first it was important to feel, sense and
get acquainted with this landscape that I
had never seen before. As I did so, I repeatedly
wondered if it was in fact the
right decision to take this technical equipment
into the far north – into this white
emptiness! Our ship passed a barren,
fjord-dominated landscape, littered with
glacier tongues. The bow appeared almost
to carve the water that lay beneath
and in front of us - water that seemed
likely to freeze to ice at any moment, given
the perilously low temperatures. Daniel
unpacked the D-21 and photographed the
first test shots, using the ship’s electrical
network for a power supply. The SRW-1
was well packed in a polystyrene-insulated
aluminum box, to guarantee utmost
protection against all kinds of weather
conditions.
We mounted the D-21 to the bow of the
ship - not an easy job, I had to admit.
Maneuvering the weight of the camera
and Master Zoom across the wet steel
deck of the swaying ship all by myself
was a real challenge. Once mounted,
the weight of the camera combined with
the widely-spread tripod legs resulted in
a balancing effect with regard to the
ship’s vibrations – vibrations we could
not have anticipated. The first images
followed.
The adventures of the following days far
exceeded our imaginations and our
wildest dreams. The ship was groping its
way north and leaving the 81st parallel
behind; a distance of less than 1,000km
now separated us from the North Pole –
1,000km of fog, snow and ice! We observed
atmospheric lighting displays of
incredible intensity - compositions of light
that made us forget time and space. But
we also witnessed an incident that, most
likely, has not been documented in such
a way before – cannibalism among
polar bears.
On a huge ice floe, we discovered an
adult, male polar bear that had just
killed another animal of the same species
and was starting to devour it – a tragic
sight that demonstrated the hopelessness
of the polar bears and the shortage of
their food. It was exactly what we were
there to document.
The captain rammed the ship through ice
almost a meter thick and managed to get
us within 200m of the cadaver. The killer
polar bear escaped to a safe distance
and observed us while we, in turn, did
the same! In the meantime, a white fox
and the very rarely seen ivory seagull
were busy with the cadaver. At daybreak,
the starving polar bear returned
and we successfully captured incredible
images.
Further south we found a dead finback
in a fjord – for polar bears, the equivalent
of a well-stocked fridge! There, we met
colleagues from the BBC who were visiting
this spot to document the dead finback.
Our BBC colleagues were more than a
little astonished to see a D-21 in use up
there in the far north. After ten surreal
days in the Arctic we returned to our own
world, with images and impressions we
had never expected.