 |
| Big berg! |
What a day that was! We got to start a bit later [yea!] and we picked our way through icebergs. They were spectacular. I spent quite a bit of time out on the deck taking photos. The sky was blue; the sun was blazing; and we got quite close to some of the bergs.
 |
| Smaller bergs |
I’m finding that Lumix camera really handy, not only for the good zoom, but for the ease of use of the exposure compensation. Micheal, the photographer on this trip, says to under expose by a stop when shooting ice. Scott says to over expose by a stop so the ice looks white instead of grey.
 |
| Bergs close to the ship |
I favour the under exposure because it doesn’t blow out the sky or the ice and it shows the blue in the ice better. I think if you’re going to overexpose you need to do more work in post to balance things out. I sort of listened to a presentation by Pierre Richard on whales and how to distinguish the different types. I was standing at the back and a couple of times I felt the need to go out onto the deck and take more ice photos.
 |
| Big berg, bigger mountain |
After lunch we headed out on the moderate hike.
 |
| Coming up to the saddle |
Mike Beedel was our leader and he was great. He kept a steady pace and what I really liked was he pointed out good spots for photos as we went along. We landed on a rock so we didn’t have to get our feet wet and then hiked up the hill and over a saddle to a lake.
 |
| Lake from the top of the saddle |
The lake was still and the reflections were great. I like reflections anyway and these were stellar. Mike pointed out that from one spot on the shore you could see the rocks on the bottom and also the reflection of the mountains in the lake at the same time.
 |
| Rocks and reflections |
After we hung around there for a while, we walked up to the next saddle. As we got higher we could see ice bergs in the distance beyond the lake. At the top we looked down on the beach where we landed and on the zodiac operations. Then we turned around and retraced our route to get back to the boats. I took a video of the ride to the shore because I ended up in the bow of the zodiac so I wasn’t really too concerned about trying to get photos on the way back; however when the zodiac ran out of gas and Franco had to switch tanks we drifted for a bit and I had a perfect angle on one of the medium sized bergs. This time I was in the stern of the zodiac. A woman we had supper with tonight calls zodiacs rubber ducks. Seems obvious but I hadn’t thought of that before and I found it quite amusing.
Once we got back to the ship we attended a talk by Aleqa Hammond.
 |
| Aleqa Hammond, former Prime Minister of Greenland |
She’s a very good speaker and she has a great sense of humour. There are only about 57,000 people in the whole of Greenland and they are moving toward becoming an independent country. She is the head of the Social Democratic Party and she says she’ll run again for prime minister in two years. 80% of the people who graduate from high school in Greenland are women. The same holds true for post secondary. She says that most of the mayors are women and they are trying to get men more involved in politics. There’s a bunch of other interesting stuff that she said about Greenland but my pen ran out of ink so I didn’t take any notes other than on the first few minutes. I hope i can recall some of that info and fill it in later because I’m pretty wiped out tonight. Great hike but tiring. [Sorry, I don’t recall much of anything else.]
After supper there was a group game where you had to match a statement with one of the expedition team members. We were with Aleqa and Nivi and one of Alana’s daughters. We didn’t to terribly well but it was quite a lot of fun. One of the people on the AC team was doing a practicum in social work within the prison system. Part of her job was to look at letters from inmates who wanted day parole. She said it was kind of like you agreed to vouch for them. One day a letter from Paul Bernardo came across her desk. The statement we had to match with the person was, “I received a letter from Paul Bernardo.” I don’t remember if any group got that right. Yikes.
I’m headed off to bed. We board the zodiacs at 10:00 tomorrow and we’ll be on another moderate hike so I’d better get some zzzzzz’s.
 |
| One of my favourite photos of the trip |
No comments:
Post a Comment