Stories

“There is no such thing as completion.

There are only stages in an endless progression.

There are no final outcomes or decisions…

since nothing ever stays the same”

— Frederick Lenz

I was reading Kiliii Yuyan’s Guardians of Life, and I kept returning to how he had photographed snow. The light, the colour and texture seemed just so perfect.

It made me want to go back to my images from the last Svalbard trip in 2024 and compare. And that’s opening the door to a rabbit hole and I absolutely love rabbit holes.

That Svalbard trip was a fantastic one, unbelievably rich in opportunities as we sailed down the many fjords, which was amply reflected in the almost 14,000 images that I had returned with!

As I opened my Lightroom catalog, I decided that I will not look at the images that I had shortlisted earlier and worked on. I shall look at the ones that I had kept aside.

What followed was another delightful voyage of discovery. Kiliii Yuyan was forgotten. I was on my own trip.

That rueful self reproach at how could I have not selected this image. That silent yet joyful exclamation at discovering a hidden opportunity in an image. And, most of all, the flooding back of memories of that remote, desolate place and the beauty it held. The cold, the silence, the emptiness.

Time works weirdly. When you work on your images immediately after a trip, you are still flush with excitement. The memories of how exactly you felt about a specific moment are clear in your mind. Your editing decisions reflect that in known and unknown ways.

When you are looking at the same images a few years later, you approach the same photos differently. Your memories are quieter and even a little fuzzy. Your memory is what you think that day felt like. More often than not, instead of the details of a specific moment, you remember more what the overall experience felt like.

I am not sure if one is better than the other, but both are different.

My editing decisions now were coloured by how I remember a trip that had taken place more than two years ago.

I decided to drop colour, to increase the greys and reduce the whiteness. Maybe it was just my mood when I started editing. But there were other reasons too. The Arctic is cold and I wanted my images to convey that even if some of the days might have been sunny. Grey conveys that better – a desolate, forbidding place.  I reduced the highlights and along with the increased grey that lent subtle texture to the snow and showed gentle patterns should you look closely. I shed my usual reluctance to crop aggressively and decided to crop freely wherever it helped the image.

I cut down on the sharpness of the polar bear in some places. I feel there was a softness to the place. The snow that was soft enough to leave footprints. The soft curve of the ice. And, above all the soft and smooth movement of the bear as it effortlessly covers vast distances. An overly sharp polar bear seemed incongruent to my memory.

Naturally, I compared this recent effort with my previous one. Some are similar, there are subtle differences in others and more evident ones in many others. In some of the colour versions, the subtle blue beneath the ice looks breathtaking. In other instances, I prefer the softer greys of the polar bear than the dirty pale yellow that it actually owns. I loved the soft patterns on the snow that are more visible in the current exercise.

Yes, it isn’t that one approach works better than the other, they are just gently different.

And that made me wonder….when is a photograph truly completed?

Does it ever get completed?

I am sure I will edit these same images differently a few years down the line.

Let me know what you think.

In the meantime, some of the images from this exercise. I am not adding any captions…if the images make you stay with it, pause and take what you will 🙂

And a bonus image…one that doesn’t really flow with the rest but which does look too cute to be excluded 🙂

Cheers!

Ashok