September 22nd, 2012

This is so spectacular that I couldn’t not pass it along to RBCers. The photo was taken under thick ice by George Karbus as the Arctic was being bathed in the colors of aurora borealis. Courtesy of the UK Telegraph. Wow.

11 Responses to “Photo of a Lifetime”

  1. “The photo was taken under thick ice..”
    It must be faked, there isn’t any now.

  2. Barry says:

    Amazing.

    James, ‘thick’ got redefined, to take the place of the former ‘existing at all’.

  3. Maybe I’m too cynical, but I just don’t know. I’ve seen auroras, but never like that, esp. through a foot of ice. Maybe with an extra long exposure it might work, but otherwise I think there was some type of manipulation/fakery.

    • Derek Lyons says:

      I’m with Brian on this one – auroras are too dim, and ice too opaque for this to be completely real. It has to have been *very* heavily processed, to the point where it’s much closer to “digital art” than “digital photograph”. (The blown out highlights in spots lend additional credence to that belief.)

    • Warren Terra says:

      Can’t be a terribly long exposure, really – the diver can’t be holding still, and you’d get blurring, especially of the fin visible edge-on. But they may have cranked the gain and played with the brightness and contrast.

    • Anonymous says:

      Who cares? It’s a cool picture, say “oooh” and lighten the fuck up.

  4. Brad says:

    Given extended sensitivity of (ISO Eqiv.) 25K- you have 6 stops above what was once considered “fast” – Tri-x @ 400 ISO – and you can figure at least one more stop for easily corrected underexposure. Of course the joker is “thick ice.” Ice that I could skate on on a lake could be quite clear and called thick. As to Auroras brightness – they are quite a bit brighter in the arctic – so I don’t see a reason to conclude that this is photoshopped – somehow the fact that it can be done easily has come to imply that it must have been done.

    • I’ve seen auroras in central Alaska. Again, not like that. Also it’s sea ice, not crystal clear freshwater ice from a motionless pond somewhere. Not really buying it.

  5. CharlesWT says:

    Other locations of the image describe it as “A diver swims beneath thick ice while the sun shines above the White Sea in the Arctic Circle.”


SiteMeter