Peter Essick
Hot on the Path of Global Warming
A National Geographic Photographer Circles the Globe
In Search of Warming Signs
By
Jeff Wignall
If there is one thing that National Geographic photographers have a well-deserved reputation for, it is getting the picture no matter what it takes—or where it takes them. Or how long it takes them to get there. Or how they have to get there. Or for that matter, how little time they have to shoot once they have gotten there.
Veteran Geographic shooter Peter Essick is no exception to the tradition; in fact, he is probably the very definition of that type of photojournalistic obsession. In shooting more than 20 feature stories for the magazine, Essick has had to endure some epic journeys to get the shot and bring it back home.
Take, for example, his picture of a scientist counting a roost of Adelies penguins on Torgersen Island in Antarctica. To get the shot Essick hired a private 50-foot yacht to sail him (sail—as in hoist that mainsail) through the notoriously turbulent Drake Passage from Ushuaia, Argentina on the southernmost tip of South America to Palmer Station in Antarctica. The trip took seven days (in each direction) and much of that time was spent in 20-foot seas and 70 mph winds and, says Essick, it was even less pleasant than it sounds: “You can’t really go up on deck when it’s like that so you spend your time down in the hold. There were five of us onboard and it was kind of stuffy in there; we had to really work to not get seasick.”
Essick didn’t know it at the time, but seasickness was among the least of his worries. “It wasn’t until after the trip that the skipper, a Swiss guy named Eric Barde, confessed that during the height of the storm he felt he’d reached the limits of the boat’s capabilities,” says Essick. “He had to take down all the sails and we were really at the mercy of the seas.”
Once in Antarctica Essick had less than a week to shoot his photos and get back on the boat for the return sail. “I had never been there before, it’s a difficult place to go for one shot.” says Essick who has an almost poetic gift for understatement. “You can’t fly there because there is no air strip.” Most of the researchers who man the research station go in by icebreaker in November and stay through March—a time frame that Essick’s fast-lane shooting itinerary didn’t allow him to follow.
Ironically, says Essick, at one time there was enough sea ice in the region to prevent getting into Palmer Station without an icebreaker leading the way—even during the brief Antarctic summer--but because of global warming, the sea ice no longer extends to that area. “That’s one of those global warming things,” he says. “Years ago you couldn’t even sail there.”
The Antarctica shot was just one of dozens he shot for three separate essays that ran in the September 2004 special issue of National Geographic devoted to global warming (“Global Warning: Bulletins from a Warmer World”). Each of the three essays was devoted to one aspect of global warming: “Geosigns” looked at physical changes like rising seas and melting glaciers, “EcoSigns” dealt with the effects on flora an fauna (like the penguins) and “TimeSigns” explored the scientific research into climate change. In total his essays ran more than 60 pages in the magazine—a hefty spread even by Geographic standards.
The story was the brainchild of Geographic environmental editor Dennis Dimick, who Essick says directed the entire project. Because the topic is inherently controversial the magazine decided to pursue the story based on research findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)--an international organization studying global climate change. “A lot of people don’t even believe in global warming,” says Essick. “So it was important up front to say that we’re assuming that there is climate change and that we’re going to go by scientific voices, rather than follow the pseudo-science people that are trying to debunk it.”
When it came to choosing specific subjects and locations, Essick got a basic outline of the concept but did much of the research and found many of his subjects himself. A lot of leads were found by reading scientific journals—a bit of intellectual curiosity the Atlanta-based shooter says he picked up at a young age from his father, a high school science teacher. “My criteria was that I would try and find scientists that had published a peer-review paper that detailed their research on a specific topic,” he says. “Then I would contact them and see if they were doing any field work and if there was anything that I could photograph.”
All told he spent more than six months on the road during a nine-month period shooting an average of eight weeks on each of the three essays. “It was like doing three stories at once,” he says, “but I shot them at the same time and was doing pictures for each of the three on the same trips. It was a busy year.”
Indeed, the assignment began in June of 2003 with a somewhat relaxing pace--spending three-plus weeks in Alaska--but quickly accelerated into an almost seamless series of two- and three-day hit-and-run shoots that literally took him around the world. After the Alaska shoot he shot in more than thirty locations, including a dozen-plus locales in the United Sates and an Atlas full of foreign stops that included: Peru, Austria, the Virgin Islands, Switzerland, Chad Ethiopia, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Belize, Mexico, Costa Rica—and, of course, Antarctica.
Much of the reason for the wide range of geographic venues, he says, is that that is where warming evidence is most obvious. “The first wave of global warming takes place in more extreme environments—like the top of a mountain of in the northern latitudes. That’s where the research is going on."
One of the stops that had the most profound effect on him was Bangladesh where he says the danger of global warming is imminent and profound: “If the sea were to rise about three feet in sea level--and that is possible in the next 100 years--you would have 70,000,000 people displaced,” he says.
Often he says it would take two days of flying just to get to the locations and typically he was limited to a single day of shooting once he got there. “I would basically get there and have one day to actually do the photos and maybe the next day I would have a few more hours to shoot and then I was gone again.” It was a pace he kept up for eight weeks at a time with rare stops at home long enough to unpack, get reacquainted with his four-year-old son and get packing again.
The toughest part of the pace he says is just being there at the right time to get the shot and having everything coordinated at the location. “Basically when I got there I would tell the people ‘Look I’ve got to do a shot tomorrow, so what can we do?’”
Of course not all of his subjects were cooperative. On his trip to Alaska he had one day to photograph migrating caribou, but when he got to the location he was told they were already gone. “So I said, ‘Let’s go get them!” he recalls. “And we ended up flying all the way into Canada to find them.”
And then, of course, there are the ordinary extraordinary logistics of getting his film and gear from one exotic location to the next. “The equipment I carry is a little bit different for each assignment, but typically I would have four or five checked bags full of gear—lighting equipment, some underwater cameras, three or four bodies and an assortment of lenses. The basic lenses I use are a 16-35 mm, 24-70 and 70-200. But I also use macro lenses and a 500 mm lens for wildlife.”
He also brings a lighting kit that includes a Dynalight 1000 w/s power pack, two heads, and an assortment of Lumedyne flash units and tungsten lights. In addition Essick, who travels without an assistant, says he carries a lot of backup gear—chargers, batteries, screwdrivers: “You have to fix your own stuff when you’re working like this.”
Each of his hard shell Pelican bags, he says, average about 70 pounds. “I carry as much as I can put on one of those smart carts in the airport and still push it myself,” he says. “It would be nice to be specialized and just do one thing, you could go a lot lighter, but with a story like this you have to go heavier on gear.”
Essick says he typically shot about 400 rolls of film on each of the three essays—which worked out to about 10 rolls of slide film a day. For the round-the-world portion of the assignment he found he could carry about 300 rolls of film in one rolling carry-on suitcase. The film itself was packed in Op/Tech lead bags—which he says tricks security personnel into hand inspecting. “I used to always ask for a hand check but that got to be very difficult, especially after 9-11” he says. “Now they say they can’t see anything and so they take it out and hand inspect it anyway.”
And although he says some photographers at the Geographic are starting to convert to digital, he still works exclusively with film on assignment. One of the downsides of shooting film, he says, is that often he doesn’t see processed film for weeks, even months, after he’s shot it. “On this assignment I worked for several months without seeing a single shot,” he says. “I did about four fifths of the story without ever seeing a picture. That is hard to do. You really have to rely on your past experience and your knowledge not only so you know that your camera is working, but you have to know that you’ve got the shots.”
The most fascinating aspect of the long assignment, says Essick, was getting to work with the many scientists who are studying global warming around the world. Particularly interesting were the paleoclimatologists who study things like ice cores and stalagmites to see what the climate was like in the distant past and what it might be like in the not-too-distant future. “For me these people are almost like detectives, they look deep into the past and they can see how fast the changes have happened—which is pretty fast,” says Essick. “They can also see that at certain times it was all spruce trees, all pines or whatever and get a pretty good idea of what changes occurred in the climate.”
And did his nearly year-long journey solidify his belief in the reality of global warming? “When I first started the assignment I thought it was probably happening but I didn’t know that much about it,” he says. “Living here in Atlanta the average person on the street doesn’t really notice that much global warming.” It was talking with people in places where the effects are more obvious, like Alaska that made him realize people were seeing the effects. “I would tell them I’m doing a story about global warming and they would immediately say, ‘Yeah, it’s a lot warmer here now.’ They can really feel it. They notice it happening.”
The more he talked with experts he says the more he came to realize there was something other than environmental hype happening. “These scientists really believe there is something going on here—so that has a big effect on you, too. They are getting hard data back and they are seeing that there is something happening.”
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