Antarctica, Photography
These days Niall is immediately recognisable as a keen photographer by the digital SLR permanently slung around his neck, more often then not accessorized with an impressive mine's-bigger-than-yours telephoto lens. On a photo-heavy expedition like the Antarctic holiday, Niall was asked so many questions about his camera gear and photo taking that I thought I'd include a summary here.
Main camera gear (Niall's)
- Canon EOS 20D SLR
- Canon EF 75-300 mm lens, F4-5.6
- Canon EF 100-400 mm lens, F4.5-5.6L IS
- UV filter (used quite a bit)
- Polarizing filter (used occasionally)
- 2 x 1 gigabyte memory cards
- Lowepro Dryzone waterproof camera rucksack
Subsidiary camera gear (mine)
- Sony DSC-P7 3.2 Mpx point-and-shoot
- 1 x 128 megabyte memory card
- Sony VAIO VGN-TX670P ultra-portable laptop for downloading all the photos
The photography
Niall shot at 8 megapixels. He started off by saving jpegs but towards the end of the holiday, on Arjen's encouragement, switched to raw format for greater flexibility in processing. He had a Gitzo monopod with him, but didn't use it all that often, choosing mainly to hand-hold or use a rucksack as a rest when lying down.
Photo processing
What we'd consider very basic processing has been applied to all the photos on the website. Colours have not been enhanced - the icebergs really did look like that - and nothing has been added or removed (bar water blobs from two photos; see below). Panoramic photos were created by merging several overlapping shots using Canon's PhotoStitch.
Raw photos were edited using Canon's Digital Photo Professional software to improve the dynamic range and sometimes to correct the exposure. All photos were then edited using Adobe Photoshop for one or more of the following:
- Rotation to level horizon
- Crop to zoom in on subject or improve composition
- Levels/brightness correction (usually auto)
- Contrast correction (usually auto)
- Colour correction (usually auto)
- Clone stamp to remove blobs caused by water drops on the lens
Finally, all images were resized to a maximum width of 800 pixels for the web.