Back in Barrow, May 10th: Searching for snowy owls...

the sun rose today at 2:54 a.m. and won’t set again for 84 days on August 2nd.

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Top of the World

The end of the road for this trip. 3222 kilometers from Germany to Utsjoki, Finland. About as far north as you can go in Finland, the mountains in the background are in Norway.  One of the most beautiful landscapes I have seen in Scandinavia but hard to do the vastness of it justice in one photo. See more here ...

April Fools: Lappland

We just crossed the artic circle, tomorrow we start filming reindeer in Lappland

Heading North Again: March 30 2013

After a very warm January, February and April 2013, a high-pressure system over Scandinavia has finally brought real winter weather to to Germany this year. Lots of snow in Northern Germany so before heading north to Skandinavia we added a trip to Ruegen for some aerial filming of the dunes and the famous white chalk cliffs  set in a frozen winter landscape.

I met up with Dietmar on Ruegen where we had spectacular flight with Sven Nikolaus of Ruegen Helikopters and then took the next ferry from Rostock to Denmark, and then onward from Stockholm through the Scharen Islands to Finland where the first stop was two days filming great grey owls on frozen a field about 200km north of Helsinki shown to us by our new friend Hannu and his wife. The owls just kind of hung around most of the day waiting for the snow to soften up, but in the late afternoon sun they started hunting mice by dive-bombing into the snow at full speed. Amazing that an owl can hear and locate mice 100 meters away doing whatever they are doing under a foot or more of snow.

Spectacular pictures to start off our tour of Skandinavia 2013 for our Snowy Owl film.

2012 HAS BEEN AN EPIC YEAR                                                 

2011 finished off with a bang as my new Epic-X arrived just in time for Xmas!

Since then we have been running pretty much non-stop around the globe.

FEBRUARY

We got up to speed just in time to leave behind the grey German winter for summer time in New Zealand to search for Epic shots of an iconic bird, the New Zealand Kea. Featured along with the New Caledonian Crow for the film "Clever Birds, Kea vs. Crow" a film by Volker Arzt, produced by Text und Bild Productions.

MARCH - MAY

After just a short rest back home, Dietmar and I began principle filming for our film about Peregrine Falcons. Thankfully much of this film was able to be shot close to home for a change, with my main location being in a church tower just over the hills in the small medieval town of Esslingen.

From the skyscraper roof of the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt to Germany's largest strip mine on the top of the largest bulldozer in the world, the falcons took me and my Epic to some strange locations around Germany.

May finished off with a tour of Germany from Stuttgart to Cologne, the North Sea, Berlin and the Spreewald then back home where we finished the season with some beautiful shots of the Schwaebische Alb.

JUNE

Next stop was Barrow Alaska for our second big project going on: "Travels of the Snowy Owl”

A film that started out in Dietmar's head being about the color white that has since taken on a life of its own. In Barrow we met up with Denver Holt to film the nesting biology of the snowies on the tundra. We ended up sleeping a bit during the daytime and shooting mostly in the beautiful light of the arctic after dinner from 10pm to around 9 am in the morning! Denver set us up with a great nest where we were able to film life on the tundra without the owls being stressed thanks to Dietmar’s amazing 44x 9.7 Fuji zoom and the Sigmonster 300-800mm f5.6. finally able to realize the dream of every frame being a great photo! The resolution of the Epic is truly amazing, I am quickly falling in love with the 5K widescreen format!  5120 x 2160 pixels - every frame really is a photo.

JULY - AUGUST

Barely home from Alaska for 4 days (at least working nights kept me more or less in the German time zone so jet lag was not such a problem this time) and I was packing and heading off again for New Caledonia and New Zealand with Volker Artz.

New Caledoina is the home of what appears to be the most sophisticate example of complex tool use in the animal kingdom (other than by humans). Here we spent three weeks in the tropical cloud forest filming crows making and using tools to forage for grubs and other insects and thanks in large part to my assistent Matt Goodman’s diligent preparations we were able to film some behavior that has never been shown before! New Caledonian Crows making and using 3 step Pandanus tools in the wild cloud forest location on this remote South Pacific Island.