Photographing wild animals in their natural environment is very rewarding and one of the most beautiful experiences that a nature photographer can live. Actually, that most photographers could live. Being face to face with a polar bear with nothing but a camera in between is both extraordinarily breathtaking and scary. Wild nature photographer Joshua Holko, filmmaker Abraham Joffe, and cinematographer Dom West went to the Arctic and documented this experience so that we could try to relive it with them.
Finding a polar bear is no easy task as there aren’t many still alive and the conditions they live in aren’t the same we are used to in our comfortable cities. The three visual artists trekked for three days by -20°F trying to find traces of polar bears such as foot prints or blood from the food they ate.
The images they brought back from this journey are absolutely stunning! Even more so when you imagine how painful it must have been to shoot in such conditions with hardware failure, batteries draining faster than ever, and surviving with freeze-dried food. But Joffe sums it up by saying it was one of the most rewarding shoots they have all been involved in, in spite of the conditions.
To see more of Joffe's and West's cinematography visit Untitled Film Works website, and for more of Holko's photography, head over to his wild nature photo site.
