Joanna Carver, reporter
(Image: Paul Nicklen)
Everybody loves penguins. They're cuddly, funny and sometimes, like here, remarkably graceful. More interested than most, though, is Paul Nicklen. He has just become the Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer Year for this photo, Bubble-jetting emperors, which was no easy task to capture.
Nicklen was near a colony of emperor penguins in a frozen area of the Ross Sea in Antarctica. He found a hole in the ice where he hoped the diving penguins would exit, leaving him a perfect window to catch them charging up to the surface. He waited underwater, holding himself still against the ice and breathing through a snorkel to avoid producing bubbles.
By the time the penguins showed up, his fingers were frozen - and the birds were moving so fast that he had to wing it on focusing and framing.
"It was a fantastic sight, as hundreds launched themselves out of the water and onto the ice above me," he said, "a moment that I felt incredibly fortunate to witness and one I'll never forget."
Nicklen has made a career of photographing the animal inhabitants of the iciest regions of our planet. He's captured polar bears, walruses, leopard seals and dozens of other animals against the backdrop of magnificent tundra. Beyond aesthetics, though, he's concerned to show how our world is changing.
"I call myself an interpreter and a translator," he says on his website. "I translate what the scientists are telling me. If we lose ice, we stand to lose an entire eco-system. I hope we realise through my photography how interconnected these species are to ice. It just takes one image to get someone's attention."
See more in our gallery: "The best of Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012"
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