A polar bear is caught mid-leap between ice floes, its legs still tucked beneath it, doubled perfectly in the still water below. The whole frame reads as a single graphic shape before it registers as an animal at all. It's in color, and it needs to be, because the cold blue of that water is doing half the work.
That choice points to something interesting about the press shots from Midnight Sun, the debut book from Sue Flood OBE and Ian Dawson.
Look through the images on this page and you'll find Adélie penguins, Scott's hut at Cape Evans and a pair of emperor penguins dwarfed by an ice shelf, all rendered in black-and-white. Meanwhile, the bear, the crabeater seals and the portraits of the photographers themselves arrive in full color.
That's not an accident or a printing quirk: it's a deliberate editorial decision. And it's the sort of decision every photographer should pay attention to.
Color is a decision, not a default
In these images, color earns its place in each case because it's doing something, whether that's the pale blue of Antarctic ice against dark water or the warmth of a human moment. Strip color away from that seal image, for instance, and the pale blue ice would flatten into just another grey shape.
Compare that with the images below of an Adélie penguin walking alone across the ice, and a blizzard scouring Captain Scott's hut. Those images are about form, contrast and weather – not hue – and color would only clutter them.
It's a reminder that monochrome conversion isn't a fallback for a disappointing sky; it's a creative tool that suits texture-heavy, high-contrast scenes far better than a flat color palette ever could.
The importance of access
The exhibition also makes a point about access. A hunter with a rifle slung across a denim jacket in Kinngait, three crabeater seals hauled out on a single ice floe, a bear guard doing his actual job rather than posing for one.
These aren't images grabbed on a passing cruise. They're the product of years of return visits, local relationships and enough patience to wait for a moment rather than manufacture one.
For anyone planning their own trip north or south with a camera bag, the takeaway is clear. Good glass helps, but it's the third or fourth expedition, not the first, that tends to produce the picture worth printing at gallery scale.
Midnight Sun goes on show at the Royal Geographical Society gallery in London, England, from October 06-30 – 10:00-17:00 on weekdays, free to view with no booking required. They're drawn from the 132 images in the book itself.
The launch night on October 06, hosted by Sir Michael Palin in the Ondaatje Theatre, gives Flood and Dawson a proper stage to explain their thinking. Tickets for the launch talk start at £15 (about $20 / $AU29), rising to £295 ($393 / AU$563) for a collector's edition of the book with signed prints included.
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