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| A gathering of penguins at the foot of a hill. |
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| Get out of the way, important penguin business is happening! |
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| Not sure how this happened but they are apparently having a duel. |
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| The one on the right is having words with his second. |
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| You can see the shadows of a few people gathered around here. We're all beyond the 5m limit, but the 25mm lenses on the camera make it look closer. |
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| A penguin picks its way up the rocky beach. |
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| The red band behind the penguin is algae. |
The weather at Cuverville continued the trend for bright, sunny skies. Clearly sticking around in the area while we waited for the medical emergency to hopefully resolve happily was working out for us. With such conditions you might expect photography to become easier as weather can be removed as a variable. However I found getting the sheer dynamic range of almost every subject difficult.
The View-Master Personal camera has a neat system where dials for aperture and exposure time interact to give an indication of suitable subject conditions, eg sunny, dark subject and sunny, light subject etc. I never use it, favouring a light meter app on my phone which generally does a good job. Normally I'll point it at my subject, zooming in a little to meter the part I'm most interested in exposing correctly, and unless it's in the shade on a sunny day the Fuji Velvia 100 I shoot on is tolerant enough to yield a decent photo. Here however my subjects were mostly very contrasty penguins against a background of rocks and pristine snow. I was uncertain. I began to distrust my metering. I was also shooting on some other cameras including Fuji's W3 3D digital camera. I was using auto on my digital cameras because between swapping everything around and taking gloves on and off, fiddling around with exposure settings just wasn't a sensible use of my time. This was fine for the other cameras but the W3 began over-exposing everything for some reason. I eventually wrestled it back under control with some minor manual tweaks but if that was screwing things up, what chance did my 1950s View-Master personal have when set by someone who had begun to doubt their own eyes?
I had taken a lot of film with me because I didn't want to run out. In fact despite saying I shoot Velvia 100, all the Antarctic shots are on Velvia 50, which has a bit more room for bright exposures, but the real reason I took it was because I couldn't get anything else at the time. Knowing that this was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, I bracketed most of my shots with the hope that one of them would be well-exposed. The lesson learned here after I got home is that in very extreme lighting conditions I should bracket more aggressively. A lot of them were quite similar in exposure in the end and some were just too dark to be of much use. Of what I kept, the exposures are quite uneven from shot to shot. They look fine in a viewer individually, but consecutively the effect is rather inconsistent. I took the opportunity when scanning these reels to correct the exposures in Lightroom where possible. The results are still a bit uneven, but I'm pleased with the results.
For anyone interested (and I imagine anyone who isn't interested in the technical details stopped reading a couple of paragraphs ago) the other cameras were a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ70 and a Sony Xperia XZ1 Compact phone.
The Lumix is one of the compact super-zoom cameras. With a 30X optical zoom this came into its own and took some great shots. I agonised somewhat over shooting with this on automatic, as with manual control it will save raw files which would give me much more flexibility when I got home and processed them. However as stated before, the controls are fiddly and automatic works well most of the time. The deciding factor was one of the camera's best features, which is a digital view-finder. This meant I could clearly see the exposure it was using without having to deal with reflections off the screen, which it's fair to say were a huge problem for anyone relying on them in the Antarctic sun. It was a good choice. The photos came out great with little need to tweak exposure.
The Xperia was my old phone. I left my current phone (a later Xperia model) on the ship. It was primarily used as a light meter, but it was also fun to take the occasional panorama with it. It was also easy to slip in and out of my pocket so I used it on Zodiacs in conditions where I left my other cameras safely stashed in my dry bag. Crucially, although it wouldn't be great if I lost or broke it, it wouldn't be as catastrophic as losing my main phone, which while fairly useless in the expensively wifi'd environs of the ship, would be very useful once I got back to civilisation.
Bonus selection of digital 3D and 2D shots on Flickr
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