As requested, prints from the Ghosts of the Arctic short film are now available to purchase online through my website. The collection includes three 13″ x 19″ Fine Art Prints as featured in the credits of Ghosts of the Arctic. Printed on the finest 100% cotton Somerset Museum Rag paper, each open edition pigment on paper print is hand signed. Available exclusively through Melrakki Publishing. 
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Make the Right First Impression with Your Photography
One of the most common questions I am asked via email from photographers wanting to turn professional (or even just earn a bit of extra income from licensed images or print sales) is ‘How do I start to sell my photographs?’
Well, its a good question to which I think a great many photographers would like a simple, easy to implement (and free) answer. The realistic truth though is that there simply isn’t a quick and simple fix; but I am going to give some advice and a point from which you can start based on my own experience and from mistakes I see others regularly making on the internet. I will caveat my comments below that they apply to someone looking to either turn professional, or at the very least compete in the professional space.
First impressions count in the world of photography. Wether you are a wedding photographer, portrait, commercial, pet, baby, children, photojournalist, documentary or a Nature photographer like myself; when it comes to a potential clients first viewing of your work nothing is more important than the opening impression. Make the wrong opening statement about your work and you will loose your client; or at best, leave yourself in a position that is virtually unrecoverable.
In this digital age the first impression a potential client is likely to have of your work is via your website. And whilst it is true to say that a photographers website is nothing more than ‘glossy brochure’, it is also true to say that when it comes to first impressions your website is the key to your client’s decision making process. Quite honestly one of the biggest problems I see with many photographers online work is poor presentation with too many photographs and a confused message that is spread across a badly designed amateurish looking website.
I am going to go out on a limb here as I have some experience in this area. If you are at all interested in being taken seriously by a potential client then you absolutely must avoid free website hosting services (I wont name them, but there are a great many of which I am sure you are aware of at least some of them) that are jam packed with a multitude of banal websites full of even more banal photography. Such websites send an immediate message that not only are you not serious about your work, but that you also don’t consider it important to make a good first impression. Make no mistake – Your potential clients are very smart people. They know how serious you are about your photography in just a few seconds after they load your website. If their experience is ‘yet another free templated site’ you can expect them to change channels faster than you can blink.
If you want to make the right impression (the first step to making a sale) you need a professionally designed custom website (it is ok to be based off a template as long as its customised to your genre and style and as long as its not a mass market hosting site that is dominated by amateurs) that has been carefully crafted with thought and attention to detail to match your photographic genre and style. If you take the time and make the effort to create a site such as this you will already be head and shoulders above most photographers out there. You will be creating a professional polished platform for your best work that makes it stand out from the crowd. Not only that, you will make the right first impression with your potential new client and give yourself the best opportunity to make a sale. To accomplish this you need to not only grab your clients attention in the first few seconds with your site, but encourage them to stay and purchase.
In my own case, I used liveBooks * who worked with me to build a custom designed site based off an initial brief I gave them for the look I wanted. We then worked together as a team to develop and refine the site until it matched my hope and vision. This approach isn’t free (but nothing good in photography is), but it is guaranteed to make the right first impression and present a coherent professionally designed front and that is the very first step to winning your next client and making a sale.
* By way of full disclosure I have been working with liveBooks for more than ten years now. I purchased and paid for my own professional liveBooks website and pay my annual subscription hosting fee with them.
Ghosts of the Arctic Wins Vimeo Best of the Month Short Film
In some more good news Vimeo has awarded Ghosts of the Arctic a highly coveted pick of the month for best short film. Pro Counter and Peta-Pixel have also featured the Video on the home page of their respective websites. 
National Geographic Features Ghosts of the Arctic Behind the Scenes
Following on from National Geographic’s recent publication of my Ghosts of the Arctic film, National Geographic has subsequently published some Behind the Scenes footage that shows a little of what went into the making of this film. Due to the difficulty of this shoot and the extreme cold it was almost impossible to capture much in the way of detailed behind the scenes footage. However, the footage published does include some extra shots we did not use in the final film and should give some insight into the making of Ghosts of the Arctic.
Ghosts of the Arctic – Polar Photography Movie Release
Today I am extremely excited and proud to be releasing my new short film – Ghosts of the Arctic. The product of more than two years of planning Ghosts of the Arctic was filmed exclusively in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard in the depths of Winter. It is my hope that the film will impart some of the haunting beauty of this incredibly precious and endangered polar wilderness; as well as give you some insight into my life as a Polar photographer. I hope you will take six minutes out of your day, set your display to full screen, turn off the lights, crank up the volume, and allow Ghosts of the Arctic to transport you away to one of the world’s most spectacular polar regions; in it’s rarely seen winter veil. Please Enjoy.My most sincere thanks to both Abraham Joffe and Dom West from Untitled Film Works who worked tirelessly for a week straight putting in eighteen hour days in freezing temperatures to shoot and produce this film. My thanks and gratitude also to my friend Frede Lamo who likewise worked tirelessly with good humour and whose assistance with expedition logistics simply made the impossible, possible. Without the dedication of this team this film would simply not have been possible.
It would be remiss of me not to also provide a little insight into what it was like to make this short film. During the Winter shoot we experienced temperatures that were never warmer than -20ºC and frequently plummeted down as low as -30ºC + wind chill factor. We were exposed to the cold and elements for up to sixteen straight hours a day. Many days we drove over two hundred kilometres on our snow mobiles in very difficult terrain and conditions as we searched for wildlife. The bumpy terrain left us battered, bruised and sore. We experienced three cases of first and second degree frostbite during the filming as well as a lot of failed equipment and equipment difficulties as a result of the extreme cold. We had batteries that would loose their charge in mere minutes, drones that wouldn’t power up and fly, cameras that wouldn’t turn on, steady-cams that would not remain steady, HDMI cables that became brittle and snapped in the cold, frozen audio equipment, broken LCD mounts, broken down snow mobiles and more. We existed on a diet of freeze dried cod and pasta washed down with tepid coffee and the occasional frozen mars bar.
It is hard to put the experience into words, but just the simple act of removing ones gloves to change a memory card in these sort of temperatures when you are exposed and exhausted comes with a serious risk of frostbite. In my own case, I removed my face covering for one three minute take and suffered frostbite (from which I have not fully recovered) across the right hand side of my face. And whilst not all of this will come across in the film, I think I can safely say it was without any shadow of a doubt the toughest film shoot any of us have done.
For the technically inclined: Ghosts of the Arctic was shot in the 2.35:1 cinema ratio in true 4K High Definition with Canon, RED, Sony and DJI 4K High Definition camera systems.
Absolutely no wildlife was interfered with in any way shape or form during the filming and everything you see is totally natural behaviour.
Fine Art Prints from the still image photographs from Ghosts of the Arctic are available upon request.
www.WILDNATUREPHOTOTRAVEL.com 