Antarctic rescanned

Many, many years ago I was lucky enough to be paid to go to Antarctica, twice in fact. With hindsight, it is a pity that I wasn't just a touch better at photography at the time (not to mention science, but that's another story). I took many, many photographs, with a combination of borrowed Canon FT bodies and a ramshackle collection of lenses – some actually extremely good, although I didn't know it at the time – and an Olympus XA compact. At least I followed the sound advice to use Kodachrome, not negative film, although the downside to that is that badly stored Kodachrome deteriorates over time. And I seem to have been better at keeping horizons level in those days.

Yours truly posing in front of MV Aurora, somewhere near Brunt Ice Shelf, early 1992

So, inspired by recent photos of Antarctica shown at the Luminous Landscape, I decided to have one final (?) attempt at salvaging something from the archives using the latest and greatest tools at my disposal. In my defence, photography was not the aim of my journeys, and my motivation for it was purely to have mementoes and photos to show to family and friends. Others took it far more seriously. Actually, it is rather ironic that I was "trapped" at Damoy Point for over 4 weeks (I expected to be there two days), an absolute paradise for photography. Many of my colleagues were very jealous, but I couldn't understand why. I just wanted to get out! This revised set has replaced the Antarctica archive I had online previously. Many of the photos are the same, but all have been scanned at the highest possible resolution in Silverfast Ai Pro, with a diffuser, then been cleaned up in Photoshop, with noise reduction using Noise Ninja, vignetting reduced using Photoshop's new lens correction filter, and colour correction using PixelGenius Photokit Color, in particular the excellent grey balancers. Apart from these, I carried out various manual corrections and enhancements where necessary. A few I decided work better in black & white.

Me (left), Jeff Ridley (right) and one of the GLACE pilots who's name I'm afraid I've forgotten, in front of the GLACE Twin Otter (there are few hairdressers in Antarctica)

The results are probably about the best I can achieve, so I should draw a line under this stuff now. I might add a few more over the coming weeks – I still have my second level archive to reconsider – but 38 keepers isn't a bad score, all things considered. You can see them in the Antarctica gallery. You can read more on my experiences in Antarctica in an article I wrote some time back.

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