Day 4: Rechercherfjorden and Vårsolbukta

Glaciers, walrus, and a miserable success

For day 4, we headed back north. Our intention was to make one more stop for activities before heading straight for the High Arctic. On our last day in this southern part of Svalbard, to our luck, conditions became much more interesting. Cloud cover varied between partly and mostly cloudy, with the sunlight lighting up both the landscapes and the sky in interesting ways. The two images I captured at Rechercherfjorden are great examples of the Arctic conditions we set out to find: Low clouds with soft sunlight breaking through.

While exploring the ice around the glacier, we heard a call on the radio for walruses, our first sighting of many on this expedition. Our guides drove the zodiacs about 10 minutes away from the glacier toward a rocky beach where the herd was resting for the day. We were lucky enough to have very interesting conditions for photographing the walruses as they relaxed on the beach and climbed in and out of the water.

In a lecture later in the day, we learned every walrus that we would encounter on Svalbard is guaranteed to be male. During the summer, females can only be found in Franz Josef Land and other parts of the Russian Arctic. Mating happens under the ocean during the winter, and as a result marine biologists know little about walrus mating behavior.

At this point in the trip, however, I was still figuring out how to do wildlife photography. Though I like the composition and exposure of many of the photos I took of the walruses, a lot of them were either motion blurred or out of focus. It’s been a few years since I’ve had a technical problem that has impacted my photography, so this result was a bit disappointing. I later learned how to do a better job configuring custom modes to more easily switch between landscape and wildlife settings in my camera.

Regardless, I came away with two good ones of this particular group of walruses which I quite like.

One outing with both walruses and a glacier was special on its own, but the afternoon held its own kind of adventure. After lunch, we headed out for a zodiac landing at a place called Vårsolbukta. The cloud cover and rain moved in, and the conditions were absolutely miserable. Our camera gear got absolutely drenched in snow and rain. Everyone was struggling to take photos in this location. Apart from a reindeer with decent-sized antlers, there really wasn’t much to shoot. While approaching the reindeer, I even fell in the mud and soaked my glove. For the rest of the day, I had to wear my backup mitten. And even the mitten wasn’t enough - My hands were so wet and cold they felt numb for almost the entire outing. Again, I cannot stress enough the importance of waterproofing your clothing.

Toward the end of the outing, I joined back up with Tom. I started to notice a few things about our photography guides and started to refine my strategy for interacting with them, as weird as that sounds. On our first few outings on the trip, I didn’t want to seem clingy or hogging their time, so I generally tried to spend half the outings with the guides and half on my own or with others. At this point on day 4, though, I noticed many people just didn’t care very much about hanging out with the guides! So, my strategy evolved to spend as high as 80% of my time with the guides and 20% on my own. With this strategy, I felt like I was able to learn so much more and build relationships with them.

In this particular situation, I asked Tom about how he was feeling in a location like this, and no surprise he found it just as miserable as I did.

Toward the end of this outing, though, we spotted something very special and fleeting - lasting maybe 60 seconds - as the cloud cover on the rock faces parted slightly and let in some soft light to the peaks. As the birds circled, we captured some dramatic photographs in this otherwise miserable location. Tom, another guest named Omar, and I got this shot - Most others on the trip didn’t. Tom and Omar’s shots are better than mine, but it’s still cool to know that only a few of us managed to get it.