Entering Deception Island

January 6th, 2013

First of all, I just wanted to wish you all a very happy new year and I hope 2013 will be at least twice as fun and productive as 2012! I also wanted to thank you for your support in 2012 as that support got my blog featured as one of the top 20 photoblogs for 2012. Please take some time to go through the other blogs in the list as there is some great work to be seen.

As you can imagine, Antarctica was quite an exciting trip last month and it will take me a while to sort through over 2000 images, gather my thoughts on the highs and lows (if there were any!) of this trip and settle on the images I like most. It already feels a little bit like I had a dream about going to Antarctica so I’m happy I at least have the images to look at and prove to myself it was real. Which leads me to today’s image, taken at the entrance to Deception Island.

Deception Island and in particular Whalers Bay is probably one of the more well-known places in Antarctica, mostly due to its long history as a safe harbour in the treacherous  icy waters of the Southern Ocean. It was first surveyed in 1829 by the British Naval Expedition to the South Atlantic under the command of Captain Henry Foster and by early 20th century, Whalers Bay was a full-blown whaling station with more than 13 factory ships being based there. What makes Whalers Bay such a safe place for ships is the fact that the entire bay is a caldera formed by a volcanic eruption and it is protected by a very narrow entrance.

The image below was taken as we were approaching Deception Island and as you will notice from the EXIF data it was taken with my D7000 instead of my D800. My D7000 came in-handy during this trip as I always had the light, cheap, but excellent Nikkor 70-300mm lens attached to it which allowed me to take some of the really long shots. For those of you not so familiar with the crop factor, the D7000 is not a full-frame camera and as a result the 70-300mm lens behaves like a 105-450mm lens on a 1.5 crop factor.

This is probably one of my all time favourite images I have taken and I wanted to post it as the first image of 2013 to give me something to strive for this year. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on the image.

Shot with NIKON D7000 | 270mm | ƒ/5.6

This post belongs to:
Antarctica

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  • http://www.facebook.com/fadibou Fadi Chami

    I would have loved to see it in more blue but still its an awesome shot, Happy new year

  • http://www.momentaryawe.com/blog Catalin

    Thanks Fadi. I think the reason it works for me in these dark tones is because of all the history of this place, all the shipwrecks and all the hardships the first explorers had to go through. Happy New Year to you too!

  • Glenn Dixon

    I will never get tired of looking at this wonderful photograph. It made my jaw drop when you presented it to us during the image discussion session on the Ocean Diamond. I saw this exact landscape in person when I made my second voyage in late December, although it was a bright sunny day so it did not have the same sense of eerie mood. It reminds me of “Team Yellow” standing out on the bow making epic photographs. Good luck in the coming year my friend! Print this big and put it somewhere special. I’ll tell all the Israeli girls “I know the guy who shot that!”

  • http://www.momentaryawe.com/blog Catalin

    Hahaha… Well I hope you found your Israeli girls at some point! Thanks very much for the kind words and have a great year! Oh and get planning on the Dubai stop-over.

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