I love guiding. I like to share my passion for the polar regions with others and I really like it when I see somebody walk around somewhere with this happy smile on his/her face, clearly enjoying himself. At certain moments this gives me more joy as the moment itself. However, I also love photography, to capture the moment and share it with all of you back home.

The combination of the two is sometimes difficult. I can’t put my own photography above the experience of the paid customers… When I look at the images I took this summer, the majority was taken from the ship, where I have some time off and when a Polar Bear approaches the ship, most people are too busy enjoying the moment to notice a guide telling stories about it anyway…

But on land, it’s a different story. I can’t really expect the guests to wait for the guide to be finished taking pictures… So my camera normally stays locked away in my backpack. This also meant I hardly had pictures to use for the log that we keep, or pictures of people on land.

For that purpose I bought a new camera. A small compact, waterproof and able to shoot in raw (Olympus tough tg4) that is strapped to the shoulder strap of my backpack. This one I can grab in a second, take a few pictures of the scenery or people walking around, and stow it away, before the last ones of the group have caught up with me. The image quality isn’t what I’m used to with my dSLR’s, but that can hardly be expected with a camera only a fraction of the prize. But it’s still good enough to use for pictures on the internet, as you can see in the image above.