HIGHLY COMMENDED CATEGORY BLACK & WHITE
David Gibbon | Caught In A Blizzard

Name: David Gibbon
Picture title: Caught In A Blizzard
Category: Black & white
Nationality: UK
Occupation: Part-time photographer, also a Content Creator

Technical information
Camera: Canon 1DX
Lens: Sigma Sports 150-600mm F/5.0-F/6.3
EXIF: ISO 4000, f22, 1/1600 sec at 230mm

David says:

In March 2020 my wife Louise and I took a group of photographers to the very remote Hornstrandir Nature Reserve in the far north-west of Iceland. We sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to reach our destination and spent five days in a rustic cabin as we followed the blue morph Arctic Fox. We experienced some extreme weather and, on this particular day, gale force winds and heavy snow made for a true Arctic blizzard. In fact, visibility became so bad it was a total whiteout and was difficult to see anything.

As temperatures dipped to -22 with wind chill, I watched this female Arctic Fox as it struggled to stay upright. The winds battering its body while the cold saw ice forming on its face. Although Arctic Fox are built to withstand extreme cold, these kind of conditions make it tough for them to find food and each winter the mortality rate hits a peak as some perish.

To capture the emotion and textures in this scene I converted the image to black and white, and I used a narrow aperture of f/22 to bring the heavy snow into view in the background.