As I mentioned in my previous Arctic Pack Ice post, we were visually hampered by a sea mist in our hunt for Polar bear and their prey. It restricted our vision even with binoculars and telephoto lenses and the low contrast turned everything into shades of light grey. Hunting for Polar bears relies on finding their prey which is then a good clue to the bear’s likely proximity but when you can’t see far the chance of success plummets.

As shown in the above unprocessed image, photographic success is also significantly compromised. All though, is not completely lost, as we can apply some contrast in processing to pull out an image closer to what our brain processes into consciousness from the signals received from our retinas.

Bearded seals are one of the Polar bear prey species and were the most frequent that we saw. The other species they hunt are Ringed seals and I managed to photograph one as it popped it’s head up in the mist to look at our passing ship.

Photos with Nikon Z9 and Nikkor Z 800 f6.3 VR S