In the international photo competition Global Arctic Awards, Carsten Egevang is awarded the "Gold Medal" category "Jury's Choice" with a picture of an Arctic fox. The competition focuses on wildlife, nature, culture in the Arctic and this year winners have just been announced.
The winning image of the arctic fox is taken north of Ittoqqortoormiit (Scoresbysund) in 2011. Despite the date says 22 May, the landscape is still snowy, blizzards occur regularly, and spring seems yet to have arrived.
Photography in underpants
I am taken to the hunting cabin at Cape Hoegh hoping to meet some wildlife with my old "photo-buddy" Eskild Lund Sorensen. Strong winds and blowing snow has meant that most of our 4-day visit will be spent in the hut by ship oven. Already on arrival at the chalet so I arctic fox from afar. Fox also saw me, and even though the distance was 2-3 km it turned around and ran in the opposite direction. This individual did not seem like an obvious "photo-opportunity". And it was the first on the fourth day, the fox decided to get as close to the hut that photography was possible: The stove in the hut drove at full strength, and the temperature was approaching tropical dimensions, so I was only dressed in long underwear and a thin sweater, as fox suddenly appeared outside the hut. I grabbed my 800 mm lens that was ready, and sat out in the cabin porch where I could shoot the first images of the fox. On the camera display could, however, I quickly realized that my position sheltered from the wind does not really work, purely photographic. There was nothing for it: I had to be out in the blizzard to come down in line with the fox, to get the right angle, so that the images could feel snow drift around the fox. In about 20 minutes I was sitting in the "forest-shitter-position" and photographed the fox, with the result that I literally had frost in his behind afterwards
Deleted prize winner from the hard drive
2011 was a busy year for me, and shortly after my visit to Scoresby I had to Thule area to carry out biological fieldwork. My normal procedure is that in the field always copy my memory card to a portable hard drive, which then copied to a larger hard drive on your home address. For one reason or another, this operation has not been followed and that existed in other words not backed up images. When I Thule lacked space on my laptop and external hard drive, I decided to delete my entire photo series from Scoresby (!) - Including images of the arctic fox and a great fishing trip by dogsled. When gaffe occurred to me, I went a very heavy and black week in the meeting, a "data recovery software" work around the clock to restore my deleted photo files. They managed to save about half of my pictures from the trip to Scoresbysund - among many pictures of the fox! Perhaps small price to pay, all things considered, but I can hardly bear the thought of a lot of quality photos are lost forever
