Photo Essay: Resolute Bay

[compilerbitch]

Ad Astra





ATVs





Awaiting Snow





Bear Dog





Bear Dog 2





Bear Dog 3





Bones





Co-op





Courtesy Service





Curves





Inuit RV





Manifold Destiny





Patched





Playtime





Puppy Food





Rectilinear




Satellite Dishes





Slant





Snow Man





Snowflakes





Star





Storage





Tank and Pipes





Tank






All photos (C) Sarah Thompson, 2008, All Rights Reserved

Comments

[shutt3rg33k.livejournal.com]

Wow.

And. Snow dog!

More wow. What a fascinating place! Your eye for framing is awesome, too.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :-)

Resolute is a weird, weird place. It's an Inuit whaling village, way up in the high arctic, which would be largely unheard of if it wasn't for it being the headquarters of the Polar Continental Shelf Project, where most polar expeditions start out from. I was stuck there for a week on the way home from Devon Island.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Why does the container at the bottom right of the first photo appear to be riddled with bullet holes?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

They are knots in cheap plywood.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

That's almost a shame: I was developing a lovely mental image of what NASA moon scientists did to while away the empty hours... ;^)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I did spend a reasonable amount of time in the arctic armed with a shotgun, but I can't say I spent much time taking pot shots at buildings... :-)

[blue-mai.livejournal.com]

ooh i really really like these. i'd love to see them printed and at decent resolution. with all the great little sets you've done, i can see a collection of small folios or boxes. hmm. wouldn't it be nice when people came over they could browse?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a great idea... I shall have to try to find some nice 11x14 boxes... that would be a good size to print these images... hmm...

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

*stunned* You've captured the atmosphere really well, it really comes alive (as much as a desolate wasteland can come alive).
Did you take any portraits of people?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

*stunned* You've captured the atmosphere really well, it really comes alive (as much as a desolate wasteland can come alive).

Thanks. It's pretty much what I was trying to get across -- it's desolate, there is much decay and human environmental damage, but, it's a living community with people doing things their own way. The Inuit aren't the idyllic ethnic tribe that for some reason people seem to assume -- they lead a gritty existence, coupling their own traditional issues with imported difficulties from more mainstream civilisation. Many people live on welfare. Many hunt whales and polar bears. Many are hooked on drink and drugs.

Did you take any portraits of people?

I didn't do much of that in Resolute, mostly I think because it wasn't what was in my head so it didn't really fit somehow. Also, I didn't really want to intrude on people. I do have a few portraits of Inuit working at HMP however, so they will probably show up later when I process that material.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

*nods*I know that the Innuit world is far from idyllic. I guess the Innuit are in a similar position to many natives/ethnic minorities who've had to come to terms with modern society while trying to keep their traditions alive.

I know what you mean about not wanting to intrude and I'm also really bad at asking strangers for portraits but I imagine you could find some really interesting characters there.

Oh, and a technical question if you don't mind. The grain, especially in the first shot looks very much like analogue grain than digital noise. Was that processing in photoshop?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

As I mentioned elsewhere, I didn't do anything special to create the grain. I did the B&W conversion in ACR, and pushed the controls pretty hard to get the look I wanted, which typically involved pulling more information from the blue and/or red channels than green, so there is a tendency toward resolution loss and greater noise. But, for me, B&W grain often looks better than a grain free image (at least to the aesthetic I go for, which was cast years ago in the mould of shooting push-processed Tri-X and printing the results on very hard paper). I also pushed the contrast with a levels and a curves layer (several curves layers with hand-painted masks for some of the images) -- doing that also tends to make the grain seem more in your face.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

Lovely. Very spare. Not convinced by composition of Bear dog 2, somehow. (Can't really articulate what's nagging me, I'm afraid.) Particularly fond of Tank and Pipes :)

Very nice images :)

[pplfichi.livejournal.com]

That looks so desolate, and yet strangely not. Odd odd odd.

Re: Very nice images :)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Great, that means I got across what I was feeling. Res is a very strange place.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

With respect to Bear Dog 2, you can probably tell that I spent a fair bit of time staring at Mondrian paintings on Saturday. It's a deliberately out of balance composition, but I kept it rectilinear, mostly to put some tension into it.

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

For some reason, Slant especially leaps to mind now you've mentioned Mondrian ;)

[hilarityallen.livejournal.com]

And just on a general level, the ATVs look as though they've been crashed lots and lots of times... Bit Edward Scissorhands feel here for some reason.

Actually, I get a bit of a Tim Burton feel from several of your pictures - reality shading into non-reality. Partly of course because Arctic way of life is rather different from ours.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

My photographic style is quite realist in some ways, particularly in terms of sharpness, I like to show what is actually there. Though, I do manipulate contrast and tonality a *lot* to get the feel that I want, and in that, though what I'm showing was really there when I took the photo, it becomes more of a personal view than an objective image. So, yes, there is the aspect of realism there that comes from my near total avoidance of selective or soft focus techniques, but my B&W processing does deliberately push some unreality buttons, unashamedly.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Bones. Definitely.

Well, and Satellite Dishes; took me a moment to notice the several in the background.

Lots of grain enhancement, at least sometimes? With some of the materials and detail levels it's awfully hard to tell, the more I look the more alternate theories become tempting.

Since the three "bear dogs" are clearly of different breeds, I take that as a job description. Which leaves me worried about the third one, who's staked out on a lead.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

They were all shot with my D200. In retrospect, I slightly regret not putting up with the difficulty and shooting with the Bronica, but I accept that I'd not have got some of these images if I'd done that. I could get away with hand holding the D200, but I'd have had to lug a big tripod around with the medium format really.

I processed the images in Ps CS3 ACR, and did the B&W conversions in there. The grain comes from pushing the conversion to the edge somewhat, so I was seeing reduced resolution due to concentrating more on red or blue than green data. I alseo pushed the contrast really hard, which also increased the grain. I don't mind that, actually -- if anything, this is a bit of a return to the style of shooting I had when I was doing 35mm film -- I'd push-process 400ASA film to 1600, then print it on really hard paper.

Since the three "bear dogs" are clearly of different breeds, I take that as a job description. Which leaves me worried about the third one, who's staked out on a lead.

It is a job description. The Inuit raise dogs as puppies eating polar bear meat, so that when they are fully grown they regard bears as food. They are left chained up outside pretty much every inhabited dwelling in Resolute, partly as a deterrent, but mostly to act as an early warning. Bear attacks in summer are relatively rare, because the bears are more likely to be much further north. In the winter, though, having bears wander through town, particularly around the garbage dump, is extremely common and a significant hazard.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

So not deliberate enhancement, but a process that lead to emphasizing what was there, and a decision to just go with that. In my own life I seem to be an anti-grain warrior, but I mostly don't try to push it on other people. I was just slightly startled to see that much in something I was sure was done with modern digital gear (I guessed the D200; which is what I'm shooting myself). (I don't mean I thought I recognized it as the D200 just from the images, only that I knew what you had with you and that seemed the most likely one for these results.)

These do have very much the look of pushed film, now that I think about it. I associate that with low-light indoor shots, and this was outside with snow, so I didn't make the connection immediately. Does punch up the harshness nicely.

Ah, so the dogs are somewhat expendable; so I was roughly right to worry for them a bit. Mind you, if I lived in polar bear country myself I might very well do the same thing. Everything I know about polar bears sounds like I wouldn't really like them as close neighbors.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

I'm OK with grain, I actually often like the look of it, but mostly for B&W images. The Bronica/Megavision doesn't significantly do grain, mostly because if I'm using a contrast filter, it doesn't lose any resolution. I find the D200 relatively gritty in comparison, but gritty is often good, and it suits my style.

The light levels were actually relatively low. It was heavily overcast, and was very much past the end of arctic summer at that point, so whilst it wasn't really dark, it wasn't exactly brilliant sunshine either.

Re the dogs, I believe a typical life expectancy to be about 4 years. It made me feel a little uncomfortable.

[woodenfriend.livejournal.com]

Very impressive! What about pictures in colour?

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

I rarely do colour for personal work. I will be submitting a portfolio to National Geographic which will be (mostly) colour, but it's not what I do artistically.

[tenacious-snail.livejournal.com]

Wow.

I'm glad I don't have to choose favorites, but Star, Manifold Destiny, and Puppy Food are high on my list.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

It's interesting how people have all gone for different images in the set. I liked puppy food myself, though the impact of the image is more significant if you know the underlying meaning, of course.

(For anyone reading who doesn't, this is a polar bear skull that is from an animal that has been used to feed the bear dogs -- I found it just lying in the street)

[cyan-blue.livejournal.com]

I like ATVs and Inuit RV... but they all are wonderfully eerie, like a snow-dusted ghost town.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks.

Res really feels like that, for me anyway.

[darcydodo]

Amazing. So are these going to be in National Geographic, then? :)

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Probably not, at least in this form, because they seem to prefer colour. Maybe Lenswork?

[rfrench.livejournal.com]

Truly stunning. You have a wonderful eye for images.

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :-)

[lysana.livejournal.com]

Manifold Destiny? *grooooooan*

[compilerbitch.livejournal.com]

Yeah well, the image was so *serious*...

[sunflowerinrain.livejournal.com]

I love Tank and Pipes; beautiful patterns.

[yvesilena.livejournal.com]

But - but one of those bear dogs is a -

*remembers what Jack Russells are actually LIKE*

Okay, that one will probably survive the longest, taking bears down with its leash Hoth-style.