Antarctic Photography Techniques
Mission: To Take the Best Possible Polar Photographs
If you're already a good polar photographer or you just want to skip to my comparisons between films, click here (long webpage download, lots of pictures).
Before beginning, it should be said that the goals
of my photography fall into two broad categories:
1) Simple shots for friends, web pages, and general fun.
2) Publication quality photos.
The first category is easy because just about any camera will produce passable results. I recommend a good digital that will fit in your pocket; the size and weight are important because if it's too heavy you might leave it behind. The best shots will always occur without warning, so you need a handy camera with you as often as possible. Pocket-sized is also important so that it can stay warm and dry when not in use. Enough said about that.
Okay, let's cut straight to goal 2:
How do you produce very high quality photos, suitable for publication, in Antarctic conditions?
RULE 1: KNOW WHERE YOU ARE GOING. PLAN ACCORDINGLY.
That sounds like a no-brainer, but Antarctica is not
a continuous mass of ice and cold.
Your polar destination should influence your choice of equipment.
If you're going to the Peninsula or coastal areas, the weather is dominated
by a maritime climate. Cold is rarely a problem. Most tourists
going to these areas will want to plan for wet.
If you're headed into the interior, or about to winter-over, cold and condensation
will be the problems.
Outside at the South Pole (about -20F/-30C in the summer) most batteries will go dead
in, say, 10-20 minutes. This puts a serious cramp on automatic,
autofocus, and/or digital cameras. They'll still work, but only for
disappointingly short times. In the winter (-60 to -100F/-80C) they'll go dead
immediately. Many winter-overs bring a fully manual film camera, such as the
Nikon FM-2, even going so far as to have the camera "cleaned for the cold"
wherein all the internal lubrication is scrubbed from the camera mechanisms.
Even light oils and silicone lubricants turn into solids at those temperatures.
Also, if you're going to be using a camera in sub-zero temperatures, your face may
stick to any metal parts when you look through the viewfinder. I taped all the
metal bits on the back of my cameras with black cloth gaffer's tape and that worked
wonderfully.
Take your fancy digital and autofocus cameras? You bet. But be sure
to also bring along one that will work when you're frozen stiff and 2000 miles from
the nearest spare batteries. A few cameras can be equipped with external
battery packs that
you can keep in an inside parka pocket with a wire leading outside to your
camera; these are good at the Pole and anywhere on the Plateau.
Some camera companies (Nikon, Canon, et.al.) like to advertise how
rugged their cameras are. "Been used in every corner of the globe..." and
so on. The conclusion to that sentence should be "... and often FAILED."
No camera is indestructible or invincible against every environment. O-rings
shrivel, lubricants seize up, and in bitter cold everything is brittle and fragile.
Lenses that use composite materials, for instance, have real trouble in
extremely cold environments. The ones with the most problems
are typically autofocus lenses that
have internal or external plastic components to enhance their performance.
The problem is that plastic, metal, and glass all shrink differently when exposed
to cold. I used a Nikon 24mm autofocus lens at -40F/-40C during one winter
and I could hear the lens elements bonking around in their mounts. The lens
still worked, but focusing was difficult because the action had become so
sloppy. Now I use fully manual, metal-barreled lenses for such conditions. The
focusing can get difficult because the lubricants are congealing, but at
least I can focus it.
Pay attention to your tripod too. I still have a nice, fluid-head tripod
that's useless for Antarctica because its internal lubricants become hardened
gum at a relatively warm 20F.
RULE 3: THERE AIN'T NO K-MART.
Stock up on batteries, gobs of film, extra digital flash cards, and everything
else before you leave. This is no time to be cheap. Ask yourself, how much do
a couple extra batteries cost compared to the cost of your trip? If you find
film at your station or on your tourist ship,
chances are it will be five years old, exposed to x-rays, print film if
you want slides, slides if you want negs, and always the wrong ASA.
RULE 4: WHEN SHOOTING SNOW AND ICE, OVEREXPOSE.
A few years ago I had a chance to talk with Maria Stenzel, a photographer
for National Geographic who was visiting McMurdo Station. I noticed that,
first of all, she was using some of the same off-the-shelf Nikon 35mm
equipment I was using! As a guest photographer,
however, she took thousands of photos, spending as much time as necessary
to set up shots, often days or weeks. What appears in Nat'l Geographic
is the edited cream of her photographic crop.
Aside from the equipment, Maria and I had two other things in common: first,
we bracketed like crazy. And second, when photographing the ice around
McMurdo, we were purposely overexposing many of our shots by about 2/3
of a stop. The logic here is that ice, which is white, confuses most light
meters. Your average camera's light meter is determined to find a balance
between the light and dark areas of a scene. If it's all white, it will compensate
the exposure so that everything is gray. Every picture will look gloomy.
You'll have to adjust the amount
of overexposure, of course, depending on the ambient brightness
and how much of the scene is snow and
ice: if in doubt, meter skin or some neutral object to find the proper
exposure correction. Before departure on one trip, I photographed several
subjects in front of a bright white garage door and bracketed an entire roll
of film to determine a starting point for exposure compensation.
One friend I know took hundreds of
photos of his summer at McMurdo, and, sadly, every single glorious one of
them was gray and
dark because he didn't correct for the brightness of the landscape.
That brings us to...
RULE 5: EVERY NOW AND THEN, LOOK AT YOUR RESULTS.
This is a good idea anywhere, but it can be especially important --
and difficult --
in the Antarctic. Given the opportunity, occasionally develop a
test roll. This will often reveal ugly trouble: exposure problems,
chronic scratches on the film due to grit in the camera, film splitting
or cracks, etc. It's a harsh continent and it will take a toll on your
camera equipment.
One of the biggest problems with Antarctic photography is the extremes of
contrast (I'll go into this more later). By developing some
of my film and examining digital pics while on-the-road, I found
that many of my icebergs were burnt out
because the camera metering was averaging the white ice against a dark ocean.
The results were bergs that were so white they lacked any
detail at all. Thus rule 6:
RULE 6: IN HIGH CONTRAST SITUATIONS, EXPOSE FOR THE HIGHLIGHTS.
Due to the idiosyncrasies of our eyes and perception, an underexposed,
black ocean may still look natural, but an iceberg with no detail will
always look overexposed.
This same issue occurs everywhere in Antarctica: think of
black penguins against a snowy background, or a nunatak projecting from
a glacier. Always expose your photos so that the bright object retains
some details.
The colder it gets, the slower you should wind your film. At -40F/-40C, do a
slow count to 5 as you wind each frame. There's two reasons for this: 1) static
electricity can discharge between the film and camera as it
is being wound, creating spark dots on the emulsion; and
2) at low temperatures, the film cracks easily. I haven't experienced the
static dots, but I have had film crack and thereby lost some exquisite shots
of nacreous clouds (see photo, right). When
I saw the cracks in the slides I cursed and threw them out. Then I fished
them out of the trash and kept them as a [bad] example of what can happen.
Visually, the cracks look
like vertical lines on the film, although horizontal cracks are possible too.
As I see it, this is one of the major downfalls of automatic 35mm cameras in
cold weather: there is usually no way of slowing down the automatic winding.
Assuming your batteries last long enough, the autowinding may cause cracks
or spots on your film, or -- worse yet -- the film may actually break inside
the camera.
Nacreous clouds, by the way, are some of the most beautiful, psychedelic
colored phenomena in the world, and one of the gems of polar regions.
They're also called Polar Stratospheric Clouds or PSC's, and they're
part of the catalytic process that causes ozone depletion.
Look for them at the end of the winter, just before the sun comes up.
They'll only form when the stratosphere is -77C or colder, which almost
always means it will be pretty darn cold on the ground too.
Generally speaking, underexpose them: the clouds are typically the
only bright spots in a dark sky, so they're often overexposed by
automatic metering.
RULE 8: CONDENSATION IS THE ENEMY.
The good news is that still-image cameras are
much less susceptible to problems from condensation
than are video cameras. The bad news is that all cameras
are becoming
more sophisticated and dependent on electronics, making them
very intolerant of moisture.
The scenario goes something like this: you're outside taking pictures,
it's been a wonderful day but very cold, and you run inside to warm
up. You sit down to review you pictures but suddenly your camera
stops working. Then you notice that the lens is totally fogged up.
That's what has happened inside your camera too, and if you're lucky
it will come back to life as soon as it dries out.
The best way to prevent condensation on (and inside) your camera is
to let it warm up slowly. I used a soft lunch cooler, stowing the camera
in it before entering any building. I then waited for about a
half hour before opening the cooler. That worked pretty well
for me, but a
plastic bag or good camera case should also work just as well.
The colder it gets, the more important this becomes.
As I write this, I'm preparing to deploy for a summer on the Antarctic Peninsula.
This trip will be one of rain, snow, sleet, rain, drizzle, mud, rain,
penguin guano, ocean spray, and a
whole lot of putting around in open boats. Did I mention rain? The wetness is
so pervasive that I'm purchasing an underwater housing for my digital camera.
The wildlife is amazingly cooperative, so I won't need a 500mm lens or anything
exotic. (Having said that, I've taken a 500mm lens down before to capture
a very specific event: fata morgana mirages on the Ross Ice Shelf. But
I'm not going there this time, so the heavy artillery stays at home. A high
quality 80-200 zoom is my lens of choice for the Peninsula critters.)
RULE 2: IF IT'S GOING TO BE COLD, TAKE A CAMERA THAT WILL WORK.
Naturally, if you or I were flown to all the prettiest places and allowed
to stay there until we were satisfied, we'd come home with
some good photos too. But most of us don't have that luxury so we have to snap
them when we can.
This is an example of a high contrast situation, with a dark ocean
and bright ice.
Judging by the histogram of the full image, the picture was exposed nicely.
However, there is more room at the bottom (darker) end of the luminosity
spectrum. I suspect the metering was either set to overexpose slightly
(as described by "rule 4" above),
or, more likely, that the camera meter was simply averaging the scene.
Looking at just a portion of the original image I can get a better feel for the
exposure.
In this section the exposure was weighted to the upper end, burning out
some of the whites.
I've seen this same effect in a lot of my pictures and that tells me that
the bright areas are throwing off the metering, so when faced with
a high contrast situation I should even consider underexposing the
picture by a bit. Bracketing is probably the best bet, but this is
also the problem I'm trying to overcome by testing print film.
(Photo taken with Kodak E200 slide film.)
RULE 7: WIND THE FILM SLOOOOOWLY.
But is digital ready for prime-time in the polar regions? That depends on who you talk to. If you only want to enlarge your photos to 5x7 or even 8x10, then yes, digital is the way to go. (But I'd still supplement it with a fully manual film camera, especially in ultra cold environments like the South Pole.) Likewise, if you're satisfied that digital can produce the quality you need for your enlargements, that's great.
Me? I'm not convinced. The technology is progressing rapidly, but two issues are still outstanding: 1) Apparently most photo clearing houses demand at least 35mm resolution, even in digital photos, and a color depth of 42 or 48bits (16 bits for each color, red, green and blue); and 2) except for a few high-end pro digital cameras, which few of us can afford, the resolution just isn't there yet and neither is the color depth. Most digital cameras, including "prosumer" models, only have color depths of 24 bits, or 8 bits/256 shades for each color. I agree that 256 shades is usually enough, but the real standard is 16bits/65536 shades for each color.
If you do the math, you'll find that the equivalent of a 35mm transparency would require a 12-16 megapixel camera, depending on what type of film you're comparing against. For me, I love tack-sharp images -- the kind you can only get with a fine grained film such as Fuji Velvia (50 ASA). I have a 4000dpi slide scanner than can produce a 5500x3700 = 20 megapixel image from a transparency or negative. On a well-focused and properly exposed Velvia slide, 4000dpi doesn't get down to the grain of the film, so even then some of the detail is lost. If you read slide scanner reviews you'll occasionally see comments like "...anything above 4000dpi would be wasted because you're already at the grain of the film." Well yeah, if you shoot with 200 ASA film or greater. But for a fine grained film that's rubbish: if I had an 8000dpi scanner I could still pull additional detail out of my best pics. That would be the equivalent of a 11000x7400 = 81 megapixel camera! You're not going to find one of those in the B&H catalog anytime soon, no matter what your budget is.
By now I can hear you saying, "Ya ya ya, but digital is so much easier, it's the only way to go." Maybe. But have you tried taking pictures of auroras at -40 using a digital camera? Do that successfully and I'll agree.
Okay, I've made my case for continuing with film -- for the time being. This is as much a justification to myself as to you. So the question then becomes: What's the best film for polar photography?
I sweated the scanner purchase for weeks. I knew I needed 4000dpi for my
purposes, and also some kind of infrared dust correction. This boiled down
to two choices, the Nikon 4000ED and the Canon FS4000. I'll say right from
the get-go that both are excellent scanners, although I ended up purchasing
the FS4000 and know of the Nikon only by reputation. If you just want to
run off some 8x10's on a good printer and you're not interested in submitting
photos for publication, a 2000dpi scanner will probably be great for your
purposes -- and they're a lot cheaper.
Since this is an article about polar photography, I'll cut to the chase on the scanner issue. After reading dozens of reviews I came to the following conclusions about the scanners mentioned above:
1. There's a lot of hype. Don't believe everything you read. The classic example is the "optical density range", which is a logarithmic measure of the dark-to-light range the scanner is capable of obtaining. This is an oft-quoted measurement because it is supposedly the scanner's ability to "see" into the dark areas of a transparency, which is where scanners have the most difficulty. 14-bit scanners, such as the Nikon, typically claim an optical density range of 4.2. Ha! I laugh. That's theoretical, as if *all* of those 14 color bits were really being used when scanning a slide. It's really more like 3.6 or 3.4, meaning that the sensor just can't detect all 2-to-the-14th (16384) possible shades of each color. More realistically, you'll get 4000 shades, and slightly less for the Canon which has an estimate ODR of maybe 3.4 or 3.2. Math jargon aside, the upshot is that most of that vaunted 42 or 48-bit color depth is wasted on meaningless data bits because the sensor just can't discern that many colors. Whether or not the extra 0.2 of ODR matters is subject to debate. I fretted about this because, for polar photography, contrasty images are such a problem. In the end I decided that the extra range would have been nice but it wasn't critical enough to spend $600 more to get.
2. Are you doing slides in bulk? Get the Nikon: it has a bulk slide loader available for several hundred dollars more. The Canon can handle 4 at a time, but if you're doing masses (I'm not) then reloading the tray would get bothersome. Similarly, if you're doing negatives, you'll probably want the Canon because it handles film strips a bit better (max of 6 images per strip). Also, with negatives, the dynamic range is greater so the ODR of the scanner is less of an issue.
3. You can't have enough memory. My computer is a 1.8GHz IBM, loaded with almost
a Gig of memory, and it stills runs out. A 4000dpi, 48-bit raw image will be at least:
3000x5000 pixels x 48bits / 8bits/byte = 90000Kb per image!
In reality, most of the 4000dpi images I've scanned come to 100-120Mb each. That
is a lot of disk space, and can eat all the RAM in your computer in a couple gulps.
When you factor in Photoshop's memory requirements and everything else running
on your computer, you can see why you'll want as much as possible.
4. Software matters. Canon produced a wonderful scanner and then chose to drive it with an overly simplistic program called FilmGet. If you're not worried about super-duper quality, FilmGet does just fine. But it just doesn't offer the kind of options professionals want, such as color space choices, and it does apply sharpening without telling you -- and there's no way to turn it off. Also, FilmGet's color, contrast and brightness manipulations may be performed internally in 24 bits, not 48, so scanning in an image in 48 bit color may be pointless if you use any of FilmGet's other features. (This may have been fixed in the latest release of FilmGet, but there are still the other outstanding issues.) Like many other users, I blew this off entirely and purchased a copy of Hamrick's VueScan, which offers much more control. To be honest, VueScan also has some quirky things about it and a "home-built" feel, but it works. The only problems I've had with VueScan have been in how it applies the infrared error correction: VueScan seems over-zealous (or even forgetful) at times, while FilmGet's algorithm appears much more graceful.
5. Infrared error correction is a necessity. No matter how clean your film looks, there will always be dust, imperfections, and the occasional scratch. If your scanner doesn't have something like Nikon's DigitalICE or Canon's FARE infrared correction schemes you'll spend forever in Photoshop fixing the images. Trust me on this one.
6. Depth of field was the final issue I considered before purchasing the scanner. It turns out that the Nikon uses 3 LEDs as a light source that, in the opinion of myself and others, is much more reliable and accurate than the special bulb used in the Canon, which has the potential to drift or change brilliance over time. But on the flip side, the LED and optical design of the Nikon apparently forces it to have a very narrow depth of focus. The result is that heavily warped film may not be entirely in focus when scanned with the Nikon, or you may have to spend a lot of time futzing with the focusing. Several reviewers have weighed-in on this issue: it seems to be troublesome for some people and not a problem for others. Given my desire for sharp images, and the fact that many of my slides are warped (in these discussions, anything other than mirror-flat is considered warped), I couldn't see risking a great deal of expense only to find out that the scanner was too finicky for most of my pics. So I bought the more-forgiving Canon FS4000. If it hadn't been for this one, relatively less important issue, I would have bought the Nikon based on its better light source, software, and optical density range.
One final note... In the process of creating this web page I used my film scanner more than ever. It has limitations, the scans are not always what you expect, and it tends to highlight the grain of the film and any defects in both the pictures and the emulsion itself. But occasionally I get a glimpse of its potential: some really incredible scanned images.
Okay, enough of that. *Whew.* Let's get to the film comparisons...
Continued... PART 4: A COMPARISON BETWEEN FILMS.
(Long download)