(always) Learning to See ...

Antarctica 03

It is time I got a bit more organised with this series so I will continue to post some more random images on weekends with grouped images during the week, starting monday with ‘Ice’.

Todays image is from a national park near Ushuaia in Argentina, the port our expedition began from.

As a teknote this image was made with the new canon 100ml 2.8 IS macro lens lens which I am very happy with.

I will aim to write more about gear in the next couple of weeks as well as more details on the trip itself.

In the meantime here is something I wrote to a friend today.

Antarctica is looking at achieving top position in the Best Trip of All Time category. Landscapes that can best be described as transcendent. Nature that is almost intimate in its accessibility while still being overwhelmingly  heroic in its struggles and demonstrates that survival is a species issue. A tour/ship/crew/staff combination that was all one could ask for. It has left us pinching ourselves at our own ‘luck’. It is certainly hard to relocate myself back in ‘the world’.

Actually one idea that stays with me is that I no longer have the vague sense of being cheated that the ‘promise’ of space travel from my youth never eventuated (after the early days of the space programme when travel to the moon or mars for the ordinary man seemed likely by now). Antarctica, while being moonlike in some ways I guess, encapsulates a powerful sense of a landscape that doesnt ‘belong’ to mankind. It is its own place and we enter on its terms and with less certainty than we are used to. Anyway having travelled to antarctica I realise that the wish to travel to space was about untouched wilderness and the sense of ones own utter smallness.