With my forthcoming cruise around the Antarctic Peninsula as the excuse, a few days ago I started posting some scans of slides dragged from the ancient past, when I spent two summer field seasons in Antarctica on British and Norwegian science programmes.

I’ve got something like 1500 slides from those trips, a mix of Kodachrome 25, Kodachrome 64, and Ektachrome (100, I think). About 250 I had selected around 15 years ago, and stored in archival boxes. The rest, some of which I’ve barely glanced at, are in the “rejects” folder. Many are in poor condition, having suffered fungus attacks. A large proportion are badly exposed, badly composed, heavily vignetted, or out of focus. Usually all of these. But some are interesting - to me at least, from a number of points of view. They show how I took photographs when I had no real idea of what phtography was about. Sometimes they are of some merit, but mostly they show that I was trying to tell stories to people back home, to capture atmospheres, moods and colours. There’s no real sense that I had any concept of “landscape photography” as an aim in itself.

some freshly minted scans

From a technical point of view, I’m benefitting from a lot more experience in scanning. I have had attempts at scanning selections in the past, in particular about 6 years ago, when I published a small book, but now I have a fully colour managed Kodachrome calibrated, Silverast HDR workflow, and I can use Silverfast 8 HDR. I started scanning on my Canoscan 9000F flatbed, but eventually switched to the Minolta film scanner. Even though the benefit with some of these slides is minimal, and I lose the 64bit HDRi option, the ability to auto focus, set the focus point, or fully manual focus on the Minolta is a significant benefit for extracting the finest detail.

Initially I was hoping to create a Blurb book, just for me, to take along on the trip, but the amount of work required just to do the initial 48bit HDR scans is huge. It seems I’ve been feeding the scanners since summer, and I’m not even half way through. So at best it will be an iPad portfolio, and starting a few days back, a daily post on Flickr. Maybe life is easier with digital…

I don’t really understand how people do it. People who post one - or more - masterpieces a day on Flickr, on their blogs, on their websites. Photos they took the day before, with a camera they bought last week, and will have discarded next month. The pressure to “keep up” gets so overwhelming that sometimes I want to give up on this whole interaction stuff, or give up on photography altogether. I could just stop taking new photographs now, and spend my remaining years reprocessing, fine tuning, giving some of my archive the attention it might deserve.

I’ve got so many different projects, all unfinished, all seemingly endless. For example, I decided to revisit a large folder of slides from my Antarctic years which I’d discarded as no good. Most them are indeed hopeless, but some, in fact quite a lot, have a degree of documentary or personal interest, and a few are potentially hidden gems. I’m maybe half way through the initial “raw” scans. Since my expectations are not that high anyway, and I’m not looking for anything larger than an A4 print, I decided to scan them to 64bit linear (the other 16 bits are the IR channel) on my Canoscan 9000F, rather than my slower film scanner, but even then it takes ages. And then I have to reprocess to “normal” 48 bit in Silverfast HDR, then finally touch up in Photoshop. Probably quite a lot, considering their state.  And then there are the several hundred which I considered “ok” in the past, many of which have never been scanned, or at least not properly. And that’s project 1.

A sample from Project 1: looking over Rothera base, on Adelaide Island”

Then there’s a huge backlog of digital images, many taken this year in Italy and France, especially of the lavender fields in the Var, and of flamingoes in the Camargue, which I’ve hardly touched upon, or which need reworking from scratch due to my reversal out that disaster of a piece of software called “Mountain Lion”. And still from this year, their’s a whole bunch of shots from Iceland in February which remain in limbo. 

I have 38513 photos in my Aperture catalog, going back to December 2003. Many, many of these deserve further attention. And before 2003 ? Well I’ve got two shelves full of slide binders, and a very full MediaPro catalog.

And then… my ongoing obsession with the XPan is all very well, but the workflow of getting an image of film into my archive is heavy going, and there again there are backlogs.  And stuff from the last decade screaming to be rescanned, for example a whole batch from New Zealand over 10 years ago.

And finally, what for ? Almost nobody sees this stuff. I’ve no real idea how may visits this website gets. It’s not zero, but it’s not very high either. Sometimes I get a few comments on Flickr, but for me 10 is a lot. Possibly I don’t do enough networking. Possibly my photos are not interesting, or don’t reach the level now needed to rise above the noise.

And yet every day bloggers like Kirk Tuck or Ming Theing are showing what they did in the last 5 minutes with their new camera, while at the same time regularly delving into their archives, AND writing several feature length blog posts a day.

I mean, what are they ON ?

All being well, in the second part of January 2013, we will be in Antarctica. For my (far) better half, it will be the first time, overcoming the terrors of the Drake Passage to visit the far-off world of penguins and icebergs. For me, it will be a belated return after 2 trips now over 20 years ago. This time, I’ll be a tourist, with nothing to worry about other than getting a few nice holiday snaps. Of course, photography was also a fairly big deal back then, although at least for me it was more a case of muddling along under a degree of peer pressure, rather than any serious intentions. In fact I couldn’t really understand why some of my colleagues at the time aspired to being professional photographers. I suppose we all had our own interests. Naturally there were wildlife enthusiasts, and a good sampling of fanatical outdoor adventure explorer types. My deepest interest, which as far as I recall I kept pretty much to myself,  was actually the history of Antarctic exploration, and the stories of people who’d tried to make a life in the region. Mainly whalers and sealers - not a terribly popular theme in the late 80s / early 90s. So anyway, I was fascinated by any trace of an old hut, of traces of camps on beaches, the stories behind names given to places, and all of this. But since actually I was there to work, all this was of secondary importance, and the ships that carried me were intent on getting me to where I needed to be and offloading me as fast as possible. Sure, there were some incredible sites, but that was more because they’re inescapable, not because they were being sought out. And the unfamiliar, heavy physical labour of helping out with offloading supplies at various bases meant that a lot of good sailing time I spent in my bunk!

However, due to the vagaries of weather, planning and other people’s priorities, I did end up spending nearly 6 weeks in a small hut on a small island in the Antarctic Peninisula, on the other side of the channel where the now-obligatory tourist ship stopover, Port Lockroy, is situated. In those days, Lockroy was deserted, and sadly inaccessible from where we were “stranded”, but climbing up to the ridge I could stare att it in the distance and imagine… One fine day, though, a remarkable event did take place. A tourist ship did actually turn up, which in those days was a very rare event indeed. It was a US-registered vessel, as far as I remember called the “Society Explorer”. I don’t know who was the most surprised - us, or the ship when we called then on VHF radio. Anyway, they a zodiac over, and the three of us - Alan, a meteorologist, Clem, a veteran field assistant /  cook, and myself were invited on board for a barbecue. Is was a surreal experience. I had to sing for my supper though. As the token scientist, I was invited to give a talk on glaciology to the passengers.

No, there are no polar bears in Antarctica, and ice is blue because that’s the way God Planned It. Any questions ? Good. Where’s the bar ?

I’m pretty sure the clientele was all in the millionaire bracket in those days. There were very few tourist ships in Antarctica. Most of the passengers seemed to be American retirees, and the ship was complete with a mini shopping mall and full of plush fittings. I could not understand how people could sit inside sipping cocktails when just a few hundred meters away there was Port Lockroy bathed in fantastic evening light. In those days I had no though of wanting to take photos. I just wanted to go there. Anyway, I gave my talk, and we adjourned to the after deck where the three of us - me in particular I suspect - got very, very drunk.  I still remember the aftermath back at the hut. It wasn’t pretty. But I never imagined that one day, I’d be one of those tourists.

I’m in two minds about Antarctic tourism. Obviously, I can’t be against it without being hypocritical, and the increasing levels have bought cruises down to a just about affordable range, although it’s not something most people would be able to do with a decade’s worth of savings. In the past criticism of tourism from, mainly, field scientists, did seem to have at least an element of elitism about, in particular from the British establishment. But it does seem to have gone a bit too far.

Neither of my two trips to the Antarctic were particularly successful scientifically. The first, with the British Antarctic Survey was actually a total disaster. I have to take the ultimate responsibility for this, being the lead scientist in the team, but the deck was stacked against me due to being dependent on a surly and depressed technician who screwed up big time, and being denied any time at all for pre-field testing by a field manager who seemed to think he was running some kind of Thrilling Yarns type of summer camp for Boys. The fact that I didn’t mesh terribly well with the British public schoolboy ethos of the whole thing didn’t help. It was really right at the tail-end of that sort of idiocy, and I wasn’t the only member of the science contingent to be seriously pissed off with it. Unfortunately I was also a little politically naive, which led to some issues later on. I’m still pretty annoyed about the whole experience 😊

My second trip was totally different. I was part of a small, underfunded, slightly insane Norwegian-led independent expedition. In this case the general atmosphere was much better, and the science turned out ok as well, if not Earth-shattering. We had some problems with reliability of electronics, especially freezing LCD screens and dying batteries, but overall our approach and preliminary results gained some plaudits from the international community. Unfortunately not from my boss at the time though, the now Professor Duncan Wingham, head of NERC these days, who wasn’t very convinced of the value of fieldwork, and thought everything could be done by mathematical modeling. Probably still does. Nice enough chap, in his own way, terrifyingly clever, but more than a touch bonkers.

Fieldwork. It has its uses.

For the third trip, there’s not so much pressure. Just to hope for some good weather, sip some cocktails, and get a few reasonable photos. Oh, and decide what camera to take. And which lenses. And which camera bag. And…. Panic!