The result of over six years of work can be seen in Canon Ambassador, and nature photographer, Thorsten Milse's new coffee table book 'Polar World' -- a 354 page tome that features nearly 300 images shot in the extreme weather conditions of the Arctic and Antarctic regions.

The book includes both German and English language versions of all the text, technical information about each image shot, a mixture of landscape and wildlife images, plus a foreword by German explorer Arved Fuchs. Thorsten Milse explained: "I shot the project over a six year period -- the first pictures are from 2004. The last time I was there was in 2009. In 2010 I started with the book layout and I worked for one year on the book. It was hard work."

Milse added: "For this six-year project, there were over 200,000 photos, and more than 20 expeditions with icebreakers, helicopters, Zodiac boats and Ski-Doos. It is hard to go into these regions -- when the open water is totally frozen you have no chance. There is only a short time available with an icebreaker. Although it's a long time period for a book, in the Arctic the little polar bear season is only four weeks and it's then same for the emperor penguins -- you have only four weeks to take good photos."