Overview

Picture yourself standing on arctic tundra at the edge of Hudson Bay, photographing a pair of polar bears wrestling in the glow of sunset as they wait for the bay to freeze over so they can begin their annual hunting season on the ice. An arctic fox watches the action from the sidelines. The only sounds are the bears, the breeze, and waves lapping at the ice forming on the shoreline. Then imagine, as the light fades and temperatures drop, you walk just a few feet away to sit beside the fire in a cozy wilderness lodge, joining your fellow photographers for a glass of wine while reviewing the day’s photographs, in anticipation of a gourmet dinner and excited conversation about the opportunities that await tomorrow. Keep your camera ready, though… the aurora borealis may well appear in the night sky.

Join Roy Toft and Justin Black at Seal River, a remote wilderness lodge positioned in prime polar bear territory on the shores of Hudson Bay about 40 miles north of Churchill, Manitoba. This is a very special opportunity to intensively photograph polar bear behavior close-up in the wild. Forget the diesel-belching tundra buggies at Churchill and the crowded cruise ships at Svalbard. Our small group will photograph the bears from eye level, on foot, via short excursions onto the tundra and from the grounds of the lodge, where polar bears walk within inches of the fence line.

Roy, a highly regarded and widely published professional wildlife photographer and inspiring workshops instructor, recently had the opportunity to photograph the polar bears at Seal River, and he was blown away by the quality of the photography and the overall experience. Seal River is a comfortable fly-in lodge that offers unique access to a high density of polar bears with a lovely landscape backdrop. To ensure you make the most of your visit, Roy and Justin will provide highly attentive, thoughtful, and generous instruction throughout the trip, offering feedback and useful guidance drawn from their combined four decades of experience as professional nature photographers. They will provide recommendations on camera setup optimized for wildlife photography, teach strategies and techniques to empower you to anticipate and capture fleeting wildlife behaviors, offer advice on composition and working the available light and weather conditions for best effect, and more. In the evening, Roy and Justin will provide feedback and constructive critique of your images to ensure that the quality of your work improves significantly over the course of the trip.

Included in the package are round-trip flights (Winnipeg – Churchill – Seal River Lodge), all lodging, all meals, all beverages, all photographic instruction and bear guiding, and Canadian tax. Though most Visionary Wild workshops and expeditions are packaged and priced as single-occupancy by default, this workshop is packaged as double-occupancy at $10,950 per person, due to the limited number of guest rooms and beds at  Seal River Lodge (its eight rooms sleep a maximum of sixteen guests), and the fact that their operating season is relatively short, which makes the single-occupancy supplement for this trip $6,550. We will be happy to help pair up individual participants of the same gender who wish to share a room, but we can certainly accommodate those who wish to book single-occupancy rooms.

Click “read more” at below right to continue…

We are very pleased that Roy Toft has joined the Visionary Wild instructor team for this workshop. In 2009, Justin and Roy were part of rapid-assessment conservation photography project in British Columbia’s Flathead Valley, organized by the International League of Conservation Photographers, and they have been trying to find the time to lead a trip together ever since. In the Flathead, Roy naturally fell into the informal role of “campfire comedian” for the ILCP team, keeping everyone in stitches every night. He’s got a great sense of humor and is a great deal of fun to spend time with (he has three Labrador retrievers, which is very revealing of his personality). A Senior Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers, Roy is widely recognized as one of the best wildlife photographers working today, published regularly in National Geographic, Smithsonian, Audubon, Wildlife Conservation, and Discover magazines, as well as other notable publications.

He is a highly talented, caring, and generous teacher too. Each year, Roy leads several small group photo tours and work­shops for photographers of all levels to destinations in Latin America, the Arctic, Africa, and Asia. With a background in wildlife and conservation biology, he is adept at helping others capture images of animals in the wild that that convey a sense of the animal’s character and spirit.