Lyon College alum travels world, shooting photos

By The Associated Press

Not many people have a job that take them to the ends of the Earth, but Bob Smith is one of those few.

Smith, a graduate of Lyon College, has traveled to the most remote regions of the planet, including both Alaska and Antarctica, capturing images through his work as a nature photographer that few others will witness in person.

He returned to Lyon last week to share his images as part of the college’s homecoming festivities. Smith’s wife, Penney Alexanderson Smith, is also a Lyon graduate, whose family lives in the Melbourne area, while his parents, Charles and Jean Smith, all live in Batesville.

Smith’s presentation includes a host of images and a video clip taken on a recent expedition in which one of the underwater divers had a close encounter with a leopard seal. Leopard seals grow up to 10 feet long and can weigh 750 pounds.

“They’re shaped like little torpedoes and have muscular shoulders,” Smith said. “Divers are always cautious around leopard seals because they’re unpredictable. They’ll bite the Zodiacs (small inflatable boats) and deflate a bladder. They’re very curious. They don’t feel threatened by anything.”

A female swam up to a divers who was on her way back to the surface, and the diver tried to keep the camera between her and the seal. In the meantime, the camera had been left on, so there are several images of the seal trying to mouth the lens before the diver could be hauled out of the water by a seaman on the Zodiac.

Smith spends two months each year in Antarctica and the Arctic aboard the National Geographic Endeavour and Explorer expedition ships for Lindblad Expeditions. A self-published book resulted from expeditions last December and January. He was on board the Endeavour as a photography instructor.

“I’ve spent time in Alaska and (the) Arctic ... so I thought I was prepared for Antarctica,” he says in the book’s foreword. “I anticipated the cold, icy waters, the ice on land, and colder temperatures. What I was not prepared for the sheer immensity of the land — icebergs that towered over the ship, 100,000 penguins or more in colonies, the sight of a wandering albatross gliding over the surface of the ocean for hours on end — all framed by the endless sight of rock and ice flowing from mountaintops down to the edge of the sea.

“For all of that, Antarctica has a diversity I did not expect — the variety of islands combined with the continent itself, volcanoes, black sand beaches, and all the underwater treasures of plant and animal life.”

Antarctica has one of the harshest, yet most fragile climates anywhere, Smith said. Average Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula are warming faster than anywhere else on Earth, he said, at a rate of a half-degree Celsius each decade for the last 40 years. With less ice, there are fewer krill — tiny shrimp-like creatures that feed on phytoplankton and zooplankton — and fewer humpback whales and fewer penguins, and fewer seals, which eat the penguins.

Antarctica is great to shoot, Smith said, but “it’s hard to do it on your own.”

He said a photographer wants to get the shot he’s looking for without 50 people looking on. He shot 25,000 images over a 35-day period, then narrowed that down to 96 images for his book.

“So much of what you shoot is similar,” he said. “But how many times are you going to put chinstripe penguins in the book? I try to find images that tell a story.”

Besides capturing the beauty of Earth’s most remote continent, Smith said he is also trying to illustrate the climate changes. He said Antarctica is as big as North America, but it’s a very different environment than the Arctic, where it’s “all sea ice.”

Antarctica has ice accumulations over millions of years, but a very dry climate, like a desert.

“What snow does fall doesn’t melt, so literally there’s 10,000 feet of ice on top of the continent,” Smith said.

In November, he heads to the opposite end of the planet, photographing bald eagles in Alaska. Then in July, he’ll head to Lake Clark National Park in south-central Alaska.

The Lake Clark park has the last salmon run of the year, Smith said, drawing grizzly bears from around the region that can be photographed “up close,” as well as puffins, trumpeter swans, sandhill cranes and other wildlife.

While Alaska may be his preference for photography, Smith said an area in Grand eton National Park called Oxbow Bend “has more wildlife per square inch than anywhere else I know of.”

A Batesville High graduate, Smith graduated with honors and received a data processing degree from Lyon in 1977, then earned a master of business administration from the University of Central Arkansas.

He moved to Colorado in 1994, where he met wildlife photographer Weldon Lee and attended a one-day seminar. Smith was hooked and wanted to learn more.

“He taught me wildlife photography and I did marketing for his seminars,” said Smith, who spent 15 years with Apple Inc., marketing multimedia solutions.

From there, he met Rich Clarkson, director of photography for National Geographic, who “knows everybody in the business,” Smith said.

Smith has taught at the “Photography at the Summit” photographic workshop the past nine years, Santa Fe Workshops the past two years and spent two years managing the offices of Thomas D. Mangelson and the “16 Images of Nature” galleries.

As much as he’s seen and done, however, he still hasn’t seen it all yet.

“I haven’t been to Africa,” Smith said, but he plans to visit Botswana next year.

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