Cover of Portia Polar Bear's Birthday Wish

A few days ago I mentioned that we had a new children’s book coming this fall. It’s a book I’m especially proud of due to the  incredibly creative way the author weaves a positive life lesson into a book about baby polar bears. It will be great reading for the young and young at heart and I’m hopeful you will enjoy the photos as well. The author Margie K. Carroll selected the pictures and did all the design work on top of writing the text. She’s a very talented lady and a very good friend.  We’re both pitching in to split the costs of self-publishing and I could never have picked a more qualified and unique individual to be business partners with. I’ve included a photo of the cover for a sneak peak as well as a shot of Margie working in my studio selecting photos for the book. I was quite humbled and amazed at her ability to find just the right image to tell the story she had already written. Margie sorted through hundreds of thousands of images over a three day period, 12-15 hours/day. We plan to have books to market by September 1, 2010 just in time for the Christmas season. We’ll be adding a sample of the book in the near future in a format that will allow a viewer to flip through pages on a computer similar to looking at the actual publication. Stay tuned. Let us know if you enjoy the cover. You can see photos of Margie’s big adventure to Montana by clicking on this link.

Our ship sails along in the midnight sun with walrus

A bit of history about this beautiful place known as     Svalbard/Spitsbergen. Svalbard is situated between 74° and 81°  (northern latitude) and 10° and 35° (eastern longitude) and is a    group of islands known as an archipelago. The area compromises  a land surface of over 61,000 sq km. Glaciers cover over 22,000 sq  km of this arctic landscape. the Vikings were the first to find this  ”cold edge” or Svalbard as their language described it. Later, an  explorer name Willem Barents found several islands of the      archipelago in 1595 and called the main one Spitsbergen. Not long after Barents arrived, soon came the whalers who believed for a long time that Spitsbergen/Svalbard was a part of Greenland. Eventfully this was proven to not be the case and in 1925, Norway was granted sovereignty over Spitsbergen and along with it the opportunity to introduce the old Viking term, Svalbard.

My reason for taking this adventure is to continue my work with Polar Bears International in my quest to document the arctic. This part of the world is predicted to change dramatically in the next several decades and it’s my goal to have a visual record of what parts of it was like before the changes took place. Many of the images I collect will be used in a forth coming book as well as be available for many of the other projects PBI is involved with. The following photographs were shot during a 21 day period.

To see a gallery of images from the trip click on this link Svalbard Polar Expedition

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