PixelatedImage Blog

Today was a blast. We spent the morning in “the Iceberg Graveyard” and the afternoon on Petermann Island. The afternoon landing was incredible. Easily the most beautiful landing so far. I brought only my 300/2.8 lens with me, which turned out to be a mistake, but I made some fun penguin portraits before returning to the ship to swap my 300mm for a 16-35 lens and and do some landscapes. Here, because so many of you seem to like penguins as much as I do, are a couple more in the series I’m working on.

Petermann Island is the furthest point south on this adventure. We’re currently heading north towards the Drake Passage and while we hope to land again tomorrow, it’s all dependant on weather, which has not been in our favour. This is likely the last postcard you’ll get from me before I’m back home, and that might take a few days. I’ll do what I can to get one more postcard out before the journey is over. Thanks for joining me, it’s been really fun getting these out to you and reading your comments.

One quick postcard before leaving the Iceberg Graveyard in which we’ve spent the morning chasing ice and seals and dodging a blizzard. The seals were tough, but not for the usual reasons. Most of the time wildlife runs away or buggers off. Not here. Here they just don’t give a damn and it’s all you can do to get them to open their eyes or lift their heads. I came close to throwing snowballs at these seals, just to get their attention. I’m not proud of it, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. (Kidding about the snowball…mostly.)

We’ve been floating now for something like 5 days, but I haven’t looked at a calendar. Time here passes very differently, in part because the light just sticks around for so long, and in part because so much of this incredible landscape blends into each other after a while. So much beauty is almost overwhelming. I woke this morning to a cold morning, adrift in a sea of white ice, pulled the covers over my head and went back to bed. I’m still there waiting for the wake-up call and the motivation to pull on the wool and fleece and go find coffee. At the risk of oversaturating you with these vast landscapes, here’s another from a day or two ago. Click the image to see it a little larger.

Thanks so much for joining me on this adventure. I’ve read all the comments and emails, forgive me for not replying. Bandwidth and time are in short supply.

I’ll give you three guesses about January’s Desktop Wallpaper.

I’m on a boat, ice-breaking through the Lemaire Channel in Antarctica, the snow is blowing in huge flakes on high winds. Spent this afternoon on a zodiac, again, chasing light and ice. Amazing place. Came back to the boat and had a martini (possibly two) iced with the clearest ice – straight from the antarctic ocean – I’ve ever seen. And now it’s almost 9pm and we’re in a sea of ice. I’ve never been in such an infinite, serene, wild place. Anyways, here’s one more postcard, click it to see it larger. Hope y’all are well. I’ll reply to comments and Twitter etc., again, when I’m back in a world that doesn’t charge $1.50/mb.

The colours here, every blue you’ve ever seen, and others you’ve only dreamed of, are unbelievable. John Paul Caponigro said something interesting yesterday, he said, “we’ll go home and people will assume we’ve boosted the saturation in Photoshop. We’ll tell them we haven’t, but that we really should in order to make it look the way it really felt.” He’s right. No saturation boost here, but I swear the colours are really much more vibrant. There’s a luminosity that is almost shocking. I am in love with this blue place.

*BTW, to clarify, when I mentionned the “polar bear swim” the other day I didn’t mean to imply that there are polar bears here. There aren’t. It’s just a term for the ludicrous phenomenon of stripping down to nothing but shorts and going for a swim in stupidly cold water because, well, other people are doing it too. It explains the nasty cold I’ve got now.

We’re camped out at Cuverville Island right now, spent the afternoon wet and bounced around in Zodiacs chasing ice. You wouldn’t believe the colours. I’ll show you something from this afternoon soon; in the mean-time here’s a pair of penguins.

We spent this morning on Half Moon Island after our first peaceful night off the Drake Passage. We woke to gorgeous light and just after 8am were in Zodiacs bouncing to shore. People keep asking me what I most want to photograph, and at this point I still don’t know. A new place like this is a little like a first date, there’s a getting-to-know-you time that’s needed, a chance to let this place tell me who she is and what she’s about. To jump off the boat and start shooting is a little like meeting someone new and talking too much. You need to give her a chance to speak. And in the case of the antarctic, what she’s saying is serene and infused with light.

I’m not gonna lie, the shore landings are rough on my feet. If you’ve seen a penguin hopping and waddling around, you’ll have a sense of what I look like, though arguably less adorable. But shooting from the zodiacs is amazing, floating in slow circles around the massive blue-white ice is like a dream.

This afternoon we headed to Deception Island and explored the old whaling station, rusted and abandoned, and finished the day with a polar bear swim and some vodka. It wasn’t pretty. Or warm. But while the hypothermia is temporary, the glory is forever. What a day!

To say that it takes some time to get to Antarctica is an understatement. After 20 hours in the air and a couple days in Ushuaia, we boarded the Quark Expeditions vessel, Ocean Nova. Then for 48 hours we sailed south. You’ve never seen so many people wearing sea sickness patches behind their ears, nor so much fleece and Goretex. As it is we lost a good chunk of the nearly 70 passengers to sea-sickness, brought on by high winds and huge rolling waves. I mostly slept like a baby, and though I found walking around the ship a little challenging, I’m not sure it was really any harder for me than others.

It’s Friday, Dec 02, 3pm as I write this, and we’re fixing to load the zodiacs and land in the Aitcho Islands tonight to meet some penguins. Before that we’ve an hour of bio-security to go through, to prevent contamination of the environment with foreign species of grasses and bugs. I’m super-impressed with the folks running this, both the staff and crew from Quark Expeditions as well as Seth Resnick and John Paul Caponigro. These are the good guys and I’m thrilled to be spending time with them.

Internet’s not cheap onboard, but obviously we’ve got access; I think I paid $140 for 100MB of data. Once we get through the Drake I’ll be spending my time shooting and have no intention of ruining my new-found sense of remoteness with much time spent online, but at least this way I can drop you a postcard once in a while, and in a small sense take you along on this journey with me instead of just reporting condensed and vague impressions when I get home.

10:30pm. We’ve cleared the Drake now, and the photograph above (I hope it looks OK, images don’t load so well from here…) comes from moments after returning from our first landing. It’s an amazing thing to wander among thousands of pairs of chinstrap penguins who’ve never learned to fear humankind. Humbling. Beautiful. And the zodiacs? Bumping through the antarctic waters in high wind and waves is a blast. I’m now back in my cabin, downloading images and drinking a celebratory whisky – tonight I hobbled onto my 7th continent.  I’m a happy man tonight.

If you’ve not already seen it, or got your hands on it, don’t forget to download the free ebook from Craft & Vision. You can get more information on that HERE, and if you get a chance I’d be grateful if you told others about it as well. Cheers!

A couple months ago I asked the photographers who write for Craft & Vision, if they’d help me put together a free eBook. I asked them to help me make something that we could just give away (as in FREE, no catches) to the photography community, especially to the students and enthusiastic amateurs among us. They responded really excitedly. The only guidance I gave them was this: it had to about something that could improve the craft of beginners or even advanced amateurs, it had to be something they cared about, and it couldn’t be recycled stuff from something they’d already written. In the end we put together 11 great essays that together will help photographers improve what they do.

This is practical stuff, not just 11 versions of “Improve your vision” or “Practice A Lot.” Eli Reinholdtsen wrote about the power of moments. Nicole S. Young wrote about more intentional compositions. Andrew S. Gibson wrote about personal projects and collaboration while Alexandre Buisse discussed sharing our work as a means to growth. Piet Van den Eynde, in his usual style, gave me two articles—one about giving your images a greater sense of energy, the other about seeing beyond the usual stereotypes about lenses. Landscape photographer Michael Frye talks about learning to direct the eyes of the readers of our photographs. Stuart Sipahigil wrote about slowing down and learning to see. An upcoming C&V author, Martin Bailey, sheds some light on printing. And I’ve chimed in with an article about taming digital exposures and creating stronger portraits.

Together we’ve tried to create something that is, and will always be, free. But more than that, we wanted it to be helpful. What we got was more than just amazing content – it’s almost 70 gorgeous pages and I’m really proud of the Craft & Vision family for creating it together. We welcome you to download it, to learn from it, and to tell others about it. It wasn’t specifically meant to be released around the holidays, because I think generosity should be a 12-month-a-year thing, but since it’s December 1st, let me also take this chance, on behalf of the whole Craft & Vision team, to wish you happy holidays and peace and beauty as the new year comes. If you download this and love it, would you help us spread the love and tell others? We’ll pay for the bandwidth if you’ll tweet about it, blog it up, and Facebook the heck out of it.

Ushuaia, Argentina, 2011.

After the woeful neglect of last month, I’m desperate not to leave you without something to put on your desktop. This is as fresh as it gets. Shot this this morning, and if you keep scrolling down to the blog post below, you can read more.

This is a 2560 x 1600 desktop wallpaper. Enjoy!