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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE - The first season of Ice Road Truckers began and ended with Terry Woolf's work.

Now the Yellowknife filmmaker is getting recognized for his contribution with an Emmy nomination.

Cinematographer Terry Woolf is among the directors of photography nominated for an Emmy Award for work on season one of Ice Road Truckers. Despite the honour, he maintains the best film about the ice roads is the 1985 documentary Ice Roads by Allan Booth of Yellowknife Films, on which Woolf served as Booth's assistant. - Daron Letts/NNSL photo

Woolf is among the directors of photography on the team of cinematographers nominated for the prestigious award in the category of outstanding cinematography for a non-fiction program. Woolf will attend the ceremonies in Los Angeles, California, on Sept. 13.

A lot of the footage Woolf shot for the program involved documenting the building of a spur road off the DeBeers ice road before the southern film crews arrived.

That footage ran extensively during the first episode of the series.

He also shot the decomposition of the ice roads in the spring on Gordon Lake, including some aerial views.

"You can see these huge cakes of ice where they carved the ice road and it's all broken and mangled like some kid has come and smashed it all up," he said, describing one of the scenes he captured for the end of the first season.

He recorded interviews and filmed some of the appearances by hometown hero Alex Debogorski that aired throughout the season.

Producers asked Woolf to work on the second season this year but he declined because he was working on an episode of the National Geographic series Perilous Journeys, which documented the ice road in Tuktoyaktuk.

Woolf moved up to Yellowknife in the 1970s after working for several years for TV Ontario and at stations in North Bay, Sudbury, Timmins and Pembroke.

He switched into construction work in Yellowknife, but it wasn't long before television lured him back behind the camera.

"Every day I passed the CBC office and one day I went in and I said I'm a TV tech and they said they were opening a studio in two months and you've got a job," he recalled.

He worked at the CBC from 1978 until 1982.

"I've been freelancing ever since," he said.

Woolf just returned from shooting on the Amundsen icebreaker for a documentary on Arctic sovereignty in the Northwest Passage with investigative journalist Julian Scher.

Work with his company, Lone Woolf Productions, has brought him to Greenland, Europe, China, Africa and other far away locales.

"My favourite location is the NWT," he said. "It has the nicest people."

Woolf won a Gemini award, the highest Canadian honour for his craft, alongside Bonnie Dickie and Gary Milligan for the 1987 documentary They Look A Lot Like Us: A China Odyssey.

That work explored the experience of Inuit youth visiting China.

The documentary will screen tonight during the Dog Island Film Festival at dusk on Yellowknife Bay.