I photographed this arctic wolf in northern Ontario. It was an astonishing minus 45 degrees. You can see the animal's breath freezing as soon as it hits the air. This was the experience that educated me about boots. My boots were rated at minus 40 and my toes were still cold. So a few days later when I drove south to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and it was zero degrees (it felt like summer!), I bought boots rated for minus 100. My toes have never been cold since. When I wear them I feel like Godzilla, but they work. I shot this with my medium format film camera, the Mamiya RZ 67, and I was amazed it still worked in the extreme cold. Each roll of film, after it was exposed, was fastened by licking an adhesive strip of paper and gluing it tight. At minus 45, the adhesive didn't work. I had to use rubber bands to tighten the rolls of film onto the plastic spools and prevent them from unraveling. At first, I tried thin rubber bands, but they were so brittle in the cold they broke. Fortunately, I had a few thicker rubber bands and that solved the problem. I used a 350mm Mamiya lens and a shutter speed of 1/250. The aperture would have been f/5.6, and for all my wildlife photography back then I used Fujichrome 100 transparency film. I determined the exposure with a Sekonic handheld light meter on incident mode. The 6x7cm slide was scanned with an Imacon hi-res scanner.
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