The farthest place you can go

Look don’t get me wrong, the penguins were cute. Unbelievably, irrepressibly cute. 

But I wasn’t there to photograph them. 

I was there to photograph glaciers. Ice falls. Million year old formations that continually shift and creak, but just might be gone altogether in five more years. I had been inspired by the work of John Paul Caponigro and hoped to capture some of the beauty he had found. 

As it turns out, once you do make the extraordinary effort to get down there, the beauty is not hard to find and it’s not hard to photograph. It’s surrounds you. It engulfs you. The light itself is purer, undisturbed. No architect could possible come up with the twisted, melted, re-frozen structures to be seen everywhere. 

And the only way to re-create and share even a fraction of its grandeur and glory is to print it on as large a canvas as possible.

I’m not a bucket list kind of guy. If there’s something worth seeing in my lifetime, I’ll probably want to go back again and find/explore more than I found the first time. So hopefully I’ll get the chance to go back and find more than I witnessed the first time.

If/when I do, I still won’t be taking pictures of the penguins. There’s lots of penguin pictures out there. Try Thomas Mangelson, for one. If I’m going to show you a penguin picture, it’ll be because I was lucky enough to see them doing something no one else has ever been able to capture before.

OK. Fine. One penguin picture.