Midnight over Antarctica

Midnight over Antarctica

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been posting infrared images taken from a trip I took recently to the Antarctic Penisula. This small body of work was loosely called the ‘Taking me Home” series. In this body of work I have been trying to share how I felt to be there and what it meant to me and how I felt about finding my self there. The Infrared images and the titles of them refer in some way to a completion of a journey but it occures to me that if I don’t post the images from the point of were my fascination/obsession with this magical land of light and ice began then I can’t really expect people to really come to a point of understanding my own connectedness with the place.

So I’m going to go back nine years to where it all began.

In 1999 I had just completed my first masters degree in photo-media and was feeling pretty chuffed. As a reward my favourite uncle gifted me with a flight over Antarctica. Qantas do these wonderful New Years Eve luxury flights and he invited me to be his guest. Now lets be straight…. he’s not rich and neither am I. But he is a fantastic jazz muso who’s trio had the gig of providing the entertainment onboard and who all got to take a guest as part payment….. He’d done this a few years running and had taken his wife and the following year his daughter and then finally it was my turn… Woopee….. I flew cargo class with the band over Antarctica…. wonderful stuff and it was really a great adventure..

I, however had now idea how this trip was to impact on my future direction.

I’ve been working with Infrared film for many years and truly love it so when I knew for sure I was going I gathered up a whole gaggle of cameras to take with me including my special infrared only SLR.

This image I have posted is pretty much what I expected from my flight…. its shot around midnight high up in the sky from the window of the plane and shows the striated layers of the atmosphere and the tops of mighty mountain ranges coming up through the heavy cloud cover that was obsuring a clear view of the continent…..because of this heavy cloud the pilots of the plane kept turning and arcing around in the skys to find a good spot for us to view from….but we passengers were having a great time and the bar was open and flowing so we didn’t really think about it…. and remember this is what I imagined I shoot…. nothing more and nothing less.

The next image I will post however has haunted and facinated me ever since that time and it is the peculiar and inexplicable nature of this one particular image that has led to my specific and unrelenting quest to find out what ever I can about the nature of light at the Poles…. Antarctica in particular…. it has shaped and determined my journey through life since I shot it all those years ago…I still haven’t worked it out and it still facinates me….

But that’s the next photograph and it will be the beginning of the journey back to the magical mysterious land of ice and light that tempers my very being. That journey will include a number of landscape and the light images also taken with Infrared film that I call the ‘The Neverland Collection”

So bear with me this little trip will take a week or so to come to the point but today right now I’m going to start with this reasonably unremarkable image of the continent of Antarctica taken a mile up in sky at midnight on a New Years Eve nine years ago…. it’s the begin of a remarkable journey inward that I have taken and that I feel I would like share with you all…....

Midnight over Antarctica belongs to the following groups:

***♂♥♥QUORN♥♥♀, Fabulous Flowers, Film Photography, Infrared Photography, Kairos - Capturing the Decisive Moment and Landscape Photography