Stark contrasts

Stark contrasts

As I sit in the ferry terminal in the beautiful Colonia del Sacramento in Uruguay waiting to board a boat to Buenos Aires and then a plane to Dubai, I wanted to leave you with one my favourite images I took in Antarctica.

I took this image during our first true day in Antarctica while crossing the LaMaire Channel a beautiful narrow straight that was our first closeup look at this beautiful part of the world. We were blessed with an amazing morning with no winds and bright sunshine so the reflections of the nearby mountains looked amazing. I have quite a few photographs of these reflections and I will post as many as I can over the next weeks, but in the meantime I will tell you the quick story of this image.

As some of you may know, my trip to Antarctica was a photography workshop with David duChemin and I was part of a group of four other people who joined David in this adventure. It wasn’t your typical “use this f-stop and these settings to capture this scene” type of workshop, but more of a shared adventure during which we talked a lot about photography around delicious bottles of Argentinian red wine. Part of this workshop was an image review every evening, discussing an image from each of us and giving creative feedback to each other.

When I presented this image, I had it tightly cropped around the bottom left iceberg in a 2×3 ratio. The group (and I agreed very quickly!) felt that the image would be stronger if more space would be allowed around the iceberg and in the end I cropped it to 8×10 with quite a lot more breathing space at the edges. The final image ended being one of my favourites so far from the Antarctica trip, but I still have at least another 1000 images to go through so there might be others that I will like more.