It took me a few sightings to appreciate that icebergs are as diverse as they are plentiful. This means I started shooting iceberg portraits relatively late on our trip. Here are a few highlights.
Category Archives: Images
Half-a-Million Penguins
More from the Antarctica notebook.
The next impossible photo to capture is the one that conveys what it feels like to stumble upon half-a-million penguins, which is what we did at St. Andrews Bay in the South Georgia Islands.
St. Andrews Bay was cut by two glaciers, which are now in retreat, leaving a wide gravel shore that is home to a massive king penguin colony. We learned that this is one of the largest penguin colonies in the world, holding roughly half-a-million penguins during its peak season (December and January). Quiet simply, visiting this many animals all at once boggles the mind, body and spirit.
But how do you capture this experience photographically? Again the internet provides lots of good attempts (image search “st andrews bay south georgia penguins“). Here’s one of my favorites from National Geographic:
And here’s one of my own photos taken from the gravel beach looking out across the colony:
While these images capture the density of the colony quite nicely, neither gives a sense of its expanse. Hopefully these photos do just that:
I took these photos from the deck of the ship as we sailed away from St. Andrews Bay. The first photo really tells the whole story: the multi colored specs at the bottom are penguins (!!); the massively retreating glacier in the middle of the photo is Heaney Glacier; and Sheridan Peak is at the top.
The second image was ‘nested’ in the first, and the third image ‘nested’ in the second, hopefully providing a three-step zoom effect on this landscape.
In the end I fared better at this task than the Penguins Porpoising, which in retrospect remains the true Holy Grail of Antarctica photography.
Filed under Images, Uncategorized
Penguins Porpoising
The Holy Grail of Antarctica photography is the full-frame, head-on shot of penguins porpoising. I tried over and over to get it and came up with bupkis.
Penguins porpoise when they swim fast through the water and leap into the air. They porpoise in rafts, and they do so quickly. I’m not sure why penguins porpoise—maybe to get a clear look at their surroundings, or to escape predators, or because they can—but it is great fun to watch. Penguins are as graceful moving through the water as they are clumsy on land.
Image search “porpoising penguins” on the internet and you will see lots of great photos– but none of them are the Holy Grail.
There are two challenges to getting the perfect shot. I already mentioned the first; it is hard to snap porpoising penguins because they move through the water so quickly. The other challenge is distance and setting. It is hard to know where the penguins are and when they will pop up, and typically the setting is a huge distraction anyway. To illustrate this point, here’s one of my average photos of porpoising (I have a zillion such images from our trip):
Here is a zoom-in on a pair just bombing along:
And finally, here is a handful of similar images, but zoomed and cropped:
Filed under Images, Uncategorized
Molten Chocolate Cake à la Mode
Mmm… molten chocolate cake à la mode:
Mmm… another piece please:
Wait. Sorry. Don’t eat that:
(Wilhelmina Bay, Antarctica)
