Kaktovik Sunrise Abstract 1

I got to travel with my client-friend Bryn Forbes in Alaska and Tonga this summer. Though the purpose of the trips were to photograph humpback whales, Bryn spent a lot of time shooting motion blur abstracts. We all gave him a hard time about it, but he motivated me to try shooting some myself during my later adventures.

I created this image while co-leading my Polar Bear Photography Tour with Steve Kazlowski in October. We drove our clients out to the bone-bile to photograph the polar bears at sunrise, but there was only one and it was not doing much, so we took advantage of this amazing light to shoot landscape images instead. I forgot to bring my tripod, so I decided to experiment and shoot a bunch of motion blur abstracts over the Arctic Ocean. I think everyone thought that I was just as crazy (as we all thought Bryn was on my earlier trips) until they saw my results. I created this images with my Canon 5DmkIII and 300mm f2.8 IS II lens and processed the RAW file using Aperture 3 and Photoshop CS6.