Originally published in Outpost Magazine

Passionate about people and places far away, Pat and Rosemarie Keough abandoned the corporate world to explore the globe with their cameras. They've since become award-winning photographers who, with the publication of their book Antarctica, are taking their vision of wedding conservation to photography to a new level.

Lying on the frozen ice you peer out from behind tinted goggles as the Arctic wind whistles fast and furious. The feeling of timelessness is all-encompassing but you're ready, alert and, most importantly, focused on the curious shapes in the distance waddling closer. Looking through the viewfinder, the light and composition are near perfect, just a moment longer and you'll have the shot.

Antarctica is a place where penguins, petrels and the endangered albatross spread their wings, and fish, seals and whales fight and float with the currents in the surrounding seas. It was also home for two austral summers to a husband and wife team who captured images of life on the frozen landscape. Their determination has resulted in one of the most breathtaking and expensive photography books ever created.

Pat and Rosemarie Keough met as paddling partners on the South Nahanni River in the Northwest Territories nearly 20 years ago, having independently joined the same 540-kilometre canoe expedition. "You really get to know someone if you paddle whitewater with them for a month," says Pat, 58. "We ended up sharing a tent. It was our first date." Although both were fully engrossed in the corporate world at the time - Pat at Consumers Gas in Ottawa and Rosemarie at Proctor and Gamble in Toronto - their enthusiasm lay elsewhere.

"Both of us are self-taught photographers, it's a passion for us," says Rosemarie, 44. "When I met Pat, I was a member of the Toronto Camera Club and I would go out with friends each weekend and take photographs. It's always interesting to see, when you shoot in a particular area where others have taken photographs, what they saw and you didn't, it opens your eyes."

Their honeymoon was spent exploring India and figuring out what to do with the rest of their lives. "We were strong amateur photographers when we met," says Pat, "and while in central India we convinced a forest ranger that we really were outdoor wilderness people. He let us stay in an abandoned observation tower in the central Ghat Mountains that was used to observe elephants and canopy birds. It was there, entirely on our own in this beautiful wilderness, doing photography, that we thought, you know, we really like exotic world travel, what skills do we have that we can pool, now that we're married, which will allow us to have a career where we can be together, take photography, travel and make a positive statement about things we believe in? So we decided to publish books featuring our images."

Never having written an article or published a single photograph didn't matter. "We lived on Pat's salary for the next two years as I looked for ways to market our imagery and did the research on how to put a book together," says Rosemarie. "When we approached the publishing community, we were told that the book we had in mind was not feasible, that a publisher could produce 40 other titles for the same financial investment as the single book we were proposing."

Frustrated, they decided to mortgage their house, convince friends and family to loan them money, and publish a photography book themselves, on their own terms. Their first book, entitled The Ottawa Valley Portfolio, became a Canadian bestseller with 20,000 copies sold. They never looked back, and have since published several more photography books under their company Nahanni Productions Inc.

"Early in the 1990s when we relocated to British Columbia, we both desired a new artistic challenge, and a means to leverage our talents and capital to assist worthy social and environmental causes. We conceptualized an entirely new series of books that would be objets d'art unto themselves," Rosemarie says. As a result they dedicated the past decade to exploring how to incorporate 15th-century book-binding techniques with state-of-the-art printing methods to create the world's highest-quality books filled with eye-popping, hairraising photos from extraordinary places.

They wanted to choose a destination based on its natural environment or the existence of a culture that remained intact, pristine, traditional and unspoiled. Antarctica fit the bill. From November to March of 2000 and 2001, the Keoughs endured blizzards and snow blindness to bring polar beauty into the homes of armchair adventurers. With the sun never setting, the best time to take images was at night, when the light was less harsh and the risk of snow blindness lower.

"I could not take pictures through my goggles so I had to take them off to scout the subject," Rosemarie recalls, "which might be for several hours before taking a single picture. All that time my eyes were exposed to too much light, so I tried to do it during the night hours when the light was still very bright, but softer, richer and not so blaring. It was also more complementary for photography."

With Nikon FM2 and F5 cameras, Fuji 35mm slide film (mostly ISO 100), and lenses ranging from 24mm to 600mm tucked under parkas to protect them from the blowing snow, they set out to achieve balance. They wanted to capture the elements in all their variety and splendour: untouched historic huts, modern touches of man, huddled penguin rookeries, surrounding ice shelves and stormy seas. After choosing 330 images from 800 rolls of film, their effort has culminated in an internationally recognized award-winning book, Antarctica, the first of their Explorer series.

"Our motivation behind the Explorer series is to use our photographic eye to bring attention to places that have a unique nature or a special cultural heritage," says Pat. At a print-run of only 1,000 hand-made books, and a price of $2,900USD, it is one of the most expensive books ever produced. But with this and all subsequent books in the series, they will not recoup a cent. They will be donating the proceeds from each book to a specific cause, and in this case it's BirdLife International's Save the Albatross campaign.

"The only reason this happened is because the two of us are a couple. I would not have done this on my own, nor would Pat," says Rosemarie. "But the energy of the two of us together, the tolerance for risk, both financial and personal, has made it possible." Two of their upcoming projects are about the Pacific coastal mountains of North America and desert landscapes and eco-systems around the world.

"We see our life's work as volumes in this series, so there will be no limit on the number of books that will be created," says Rosemarie, "I just hope we have long healthy lives. We are the type of people who are going to wear out before we rust out."