Mountain and glacier, Palanderbukta, Svalbard
Phase One XF 150MP, 240mm LS Schneider Krueznach, f4.5 @ 1/1250 second, ISO 100, exposure averaging for 30 seconds. 

It’s hard to know exactly how big this landscape really is. Some photographers suggest including an object of known size to give a sense of scale; others like the fact that you just can’t tell, enjoying the ambiguity.

Years ago in Antarctica, where the air is incredibly clear, I remember looking at a ship on the other side of the bay. It seemed quite close and I figured the mountains behind it must have been at least 1000 metres high. It took us a long time to sail closer and I realised the ship was much bigger than I had thought; a behemoth carrying 2000 passengers and the mountains were probably 3000 metres high! In some ways, the scale didn’t matter, yet knowing how big things really were certainly changed the way I looked at them. So scale can be important, but then again it needn’t be.

In this photo at Palanderbukta in Svalbard, I’ve given no clue as to how vast the landscape is. There’s nothing in it that you can relate to with certainty, except that you know glaciers are usually big and therefore the mountain in the clouds behind it must be big too.

For me, this image encapsulates the wonder I feel in the Arctic landscape. The low clouds, subtly blurred with the long exposure, cloak the mountain range, itself shedding huge swathes of snow in the late season. It’s a landscape in annual decay, not necessarily due to global warming, although no doubt an environmental scientist will see things in there that I don’t. The glacier, for instance, is certainly receding as evidenced by the smooth, lightly clad areas of dark, dirty ice in the foreground, where the glacier used to be much deeper.

And then there’s the tundra. In a landscape that is usually covered in whites and blues, the orange rocks and grasses make a great colour contrast. The colour difference stretches the distance between the foreground and the background (because warm colours advance, cool colours recede). And they are unusual colours – although when travelling in the Arctic, lots of things are unusual for a photographer based in an urban environment.

On a voyage around the Arctic, you’re almost guaranteed a range of weather conditions and while the light might look a little flat and uninviting as you leave the ship for an excursion, it usually doesn’t take long for the atmospherics to morph into something quite different. And that’s part of the fun and the adventure of travel photography; you just don’t know what you’re going to discover.

I used a telephoto lens (equivalent to a 150mm on a full-frame sensor) to isolate the part of the landscape that was of most interest to me. It also simplifies the landscape, so the subject is quite clear. A magnificent location.