Bull caribou in the midnight sun
A bull caribou grazes in the midnight sun on Alaska’s arctic north slope at 1:12AM. Canon 5D Mark III, 500mm f/4L IS, 1/640 sec @ f/4, ISO 400.
Photographing in Alaska’s high arctic in the summer is both wonderful and brutal. The infusion of light is energizing on the one hand, but the schedule it forces can be brutally tiring as well. Golden light is restricted to the midnight hour, give or take a few. So, especially on clear days, I switch over to shooting from 10pm to 5am. I find recapturing sleep difficult. I took this frame a little after 1:00am, and the ocean fog moving in from the coast offered a good contrast to the streaming light painting the tundra foreground.
Remnants of snowfall show how at just one week away from the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, the ubiquitous sun has not yet relinquished all of winter’s remains. I really thought this scene would work well as a panorama so I shot 4 consecutive frames. However, I made the error of not overlapping quite enough, and the 500mm has some pretty strong corner vignetting at f/4. I tried to remove it in Lightroom, but it just did not quite look right. I do know better, that the overlap should be about 50% of the frame when shooting the 500 at f/4, but sometimes one forgets!
