Tag Archives: portrait

Resilient: Inuit Women Out Hunting

CANADA, Nunavut –  Inuit women out hunting

Inuit people are really quite amazing, and for sure they are resourceful and resilient – and their elders are no exception! I made this portrait of two elderly Inuit women while they were out hunting caribou for subsistence on a quad. I mean, hats off to these strong women who, despite their age, ride for hours a four-wheeled bike on bumpy dirt roads looking for caribou for dinner! And when they find one, they pull out their rifle, kill the animal and then pull it up whole on their quad to take it back home for cooking. Wow, talk about driving down to the grocery store… 😉

As mentioned on an earlier post, Inuit are one of the three groups of Aboriginal people who live in the Canadian Arctic (the other two groups being First Nations and Métis): Inuit speak a language called Inuktitut (Inuit is an Inuktitut word which means “the people“) and some of them also speak English (not these two ladies, though!)

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E=mc2 – Snow Monkey Portrait

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This is one more image from my trip to Japan, a portrait of a snow monkey (Macaca fuscata) that I took on Japan’s big island, at Jigokudani Yaenkoen National Park. Should you be interested in knowing more about these animals and the place they live in, you can check out my previous snow monkey post that contains information in that regard.

As to the title of this post, I don’t know if it is just me, but whenever I look at this portrait, it vividly reminds me of Albert Einstein! 😉

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Wolverine Image Supports Conservation Efforts

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This image that I made of a wolverine (Gulo gulo) has recently been utilized by not-for-profit organization Conservation Northwest in a video presentation that has been shown to supporters in the context of their annual fundraiser auction, “Hope for a Wild Future“.

Conservation Northwest is a nonprofit that has been protecting and connecting old-growth forests and other wild areas from the Washington State Coast to the BC Rockies since 1989. In this timeframe, they have been ensuring such region remains wild enough to support wildife, from wolves to grizzly bears to mountain caribou, and they have been working with local communities on forest restoration and wilderness protection projects. Conservation Northwest is supported by around 5,000 families and hundreds of volunteers who together provide 70 percent of their funding.

For more information about Conservation Northwest and their projects, as well as how to get involved or make a tax-deductible donation, please check out their Website.

Wolverines are the largest terrestrial members of the weasel family (mustelids). Wolverines are shy of humans and therefore very hard to encounter in the wild (the image above is of a captive animal). Although technically omnivores, wolverines have a strong preference for meat, which makes them strong, aggressive and fearless hunters, known to fight for their food even against wolves or bears,

Wolverines are both scavengers and active predators, able to take down prey over five times their size! These solitary animals may travel 15 miles (24 km) in a day in search of food. Nowadays, they mostly live in Northern Europe and Russia, in Canada, Alaska, and in remote wilderness regions in the northern and western mountainous States of the US. Wolverines are threatened not only by habitat loss but by climate change, trapping, and highways: this has seen their numbers drop considerably in the United States, so much so that today they are thought to number just 300 in the lower 48 States. Wolverines have been recently recommended for protection under the Endangered Species Act by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Sources: National Geographic; BBC Nature; Conservation Northwest; Defenders of Wildlife

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When Less Is More: Close-Up of a Bison

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Sometimes – actually often times in photography, less is more.

By simplifying an image to its core elements, by eliminating distractions, by focusing on bare essentials such as color, lines, textures, contrast, the photographer may come up with a more powerful image, one that grabs the viewer’s attention, even if it portrays a well known subject.

Sometimes, even revealing only part of a well known subject may be an effective technique to resort to in order to engage the viewers by making them mentally process the partial information they see and linking it to the complete mental image they have of the subject.

In this photograph of a Bison (Bison bison) in Yellowstone National Park‘s Hayden Valley, I zeroed in on the bison’s face, isolating its most distinctive features – the horn and the expressive eye, by placing them in opposite power points in the frame. Using a telephoto lens added the extra benefit of compressing the scene, thus emphasizing the color contrast and blurring the background, which contributes to simplifying the image.

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As per my copyright notice, please respect my work and do not download, reproduce or use the image above without first seeking my consent. Thank you