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| Pictures of Antarctica |
1 - Photographic Equipment |
| Information: 1 - Equipment | 2 - Taking the pictures | 3 - Basic digital techniques Pictures: Antarctic gallery | Penguins | Icebergs | South Pole | Greenland | Svalbard |
| Other pages: Travel - Basics | Travel - Details | Travel - Clothing | Antarctica Boots | Questions | Group Travel Photo: Equipment Technique Digital |
| Fly-Cruise Locations: Antarctic Peninsula | South Georgia and South Sandwich | South Shetlands | Falklands | Leave from: NZ - Australia UK |
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Don't get obsessed with photographic gear, most of my photographs that I have published on this site (those in the Picture Galleries) were taken using a now obsolete mid-range completely manual and mechanical 35mm film camera (a Pentax MX) mainly using a standard 50mm lens for scenery and general shots or a 100mm lens for wildlife. Photographs are made more by the photographer, less by the equipment and once you get to a certain level of ability (lower than you might think) spending more has little effect. It's always nice to have high quality, highly featured equipment - just don't expect it to compensate for pointing it in the wrong place at the wrong time. Digital cameras are now the norm. When I first wrote this page in 2001, I said that I wouldn't take a digital to Antarctica as my only camera. Times have moved on however and digital cameras are now of a quality, price and reliability that they can be used as the only camera with confidence.
You may have heard that there is more to digital cameras than the number of pixels. For a number of years now camera manufacturers have produced digital cameras with increasing pixel counts, but without the corresponding increase in picture quality, why is this? Shouldn't an 8MP camera be twice as good as 4MP? a 16MP four times as good? Pixel number alone is misleading, it should be considered in conjunction with sensor size as well. The rectangles below are the actual sensor sizes for four currently available digital cameras of similar pixel count. As the sensor gets smaller, the pixels are squeezed closer together and quality of image suffers. The advantage of a smaller sensor however is that the camera itself can be significantly smaller. Camera size and weight are also given for a comparison, though no comparison is made of features that the cameras have, each is one of the best rated in its particular class. There are other sensor sizes currently in use, those shown are amongst the most frequently encountered. Note the huge jump in sensor size in mm2 between the two SLR models and the two point-and-shoot models and the difference in pixels density. This explains why larger SLR cameras deliver far better quality results than smaller models with the same number of pixels - Sensors - size matters! Sensor size is comparable to format with film cameras.
SLR stands for Single Lens Reflex. It means that you look through the taking lens (it only has one), and so see exactly what the sensor sees. Just before the photograph is taken a small mirror that enables you to see flips up and out of the way so the light falls on the sensor (some recent models such as the Lumix G1 above, do not have a mirror to further reduce size and weight, view finding is electronic only via the sensor).
Most cameras these days come with a zoom lens which gives a range of focal lengths from wide angle to short telephoto. Anything less than 35mm is wide-angle and any greater is telephoto. For the majority of shots, you won't need much longer than 200mm. There are many zoom lenses that will cover the range from 50-200 and you will probably use them for the vast majority of your photographs. Something over 200mm is nice to have, but prices soon rise dizzyingly and you are now entering the realms of the very serious photographer and will hardly ever be used by any other than the photography buff or professional (not least because such lenses are heavy and cumbersome to carry around). Likewise wide-angle lenses down to 25mm are commonplace and affordable, below this prices increase very quickly.
Fixed lenses are lighter in weight than the zoom equivalent, have a larger maximum aperture (they are brighter to look through) and will always be of better quality than a zoom. Lenses longer than 200mm are essential for much wildlife photography - but not in Antarctica, you can get close enough without them.
 In
the old days of film, it was the cost of the film that limited how
many pictures the non-professional photographer could take. One
of the biggest changes with digital is that as long as you have
enough memory cards, you can keep going all day long and then when
you've downloaded the pictures, you're clear to take another
load without any extra cost.With the cost of memory cards coming down all the time and now being a small amount of the cost of the camera itself, there's no reason to not have enough memory. If you have a DSLR camera with in the region of 12MP, Start with 2 x 8Gb cards fir still pictures, if your camera has a video facility, 2 x 16Gb may be a better start point. As you use your camera more, you'll get an idea of how many you need, as a rule of thumb I try to always have about 50% more memory capacity for a photographic trip/journey than I am likely to get through. Memory cards
 You
should always have a skylight filter on every lens you have to protect
it from damage, a polarizing filter can be useful too to get some
good deep blue skies and clouds.Beyond this - forget it. I've never seen a single good wildlife or landscape shot that has been enhanced by the use of a "creative" filter. To (mis) quote Samuel Johnson they are the "Last refuge of a scoundrel". Skylight filters
Binoculars are described by two numbers "10 x 50" for instance. The first number is the magnification and the second is the diameter of the front lens in millimeters. This tells you first of all how much bigger things appear and then how much of it you see at that magnification, (a bit like looking down tubes of different diameters). A front lens diameter of 50mm is fairly common, but the binoculars will be quite bulky, anything less than this is described as "compact", much easier to carry about, but a smaller diameter tube to look down. A magnification of 10 or 12 is about as much as most people can manage to hand-hold without shaking about all over the place and is generally most useful . Don't go for the "most powerful" binoculars you can get, you won't be able to hold them steady without a tripod or something to brace against. If your pocket will stretch to it there are now "image stabilizer" binoculars available. These have an electronic method of eliminating shake and reducing curvature of field. Binoculars | Image stabilizer binoculars
Photographic pages - 1 - Equipment | 2 - Photography Technique | 3 - Digital Technique |
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