Antarcticans Database Project
A collection of Antarctic pictures from those who lived there  more information

Click the small image to enlarge, click on the text to go to thumbnails pages of that group, there are often several thumbnails pages which lead to many more larger image pages. Can you contribute?

South Pole Station 1960-61


South Pole Station and - Geographic South Pole
2007-2008


Stonington 1971-72


McMurdo 1970-71


McMurdo 1976-77


Ellsworth - 1957


Deception Island - 1962


McMurdo 1961 - Looking over the station and airstrip with Mt. erebus in background


Navy Christmas Caroling McMurdo 1963


McMurdo 1972-1974


McMurdo 1980-81


Journal - Operation Deep Freeze 1971-72 USCG Staten Island


Signy 1985-86

Hope Bay and View Point 1960's


John Biscoe 1963-64


Siple Station 1985-87


Rothera


Signy 1969 - Sandefjords manhauling trip


John Biscoe and Admiralty Bay 1950


South Georgia 2010


McMurdo 2007-2009


OBP 1982 - RRS John Biscoe at South Georgia


Halley V - Construction - 1989 / 1990


Halley


Signy 60 years, 1947-2007


Signy 2017-18

Contributions

For some time there has been a section on this site where people who have worked in Antarctica in the past can register their details to find old friends, the links to these pages are in the margin to the right.

One recurring theme from people who post their details looking for old friends they went south with, is that many have lost pictures that they used to have (or perhaps they simply didn't have many in the first place) and would like some for themselves or to show to friends and especially family who came along long after they left Antarctica. I think it will also be valuable to build up a record of life in Antarctica that is starting to recede into history, to put it into perspective I am 55 as I write this, when I was born Shackleton's Endurance adventure had taken place 45 years earlier.

In April 2016 I sent an email request to those people who had registered and had at some point in their lives been "Antarcticans" to contribute copies of pictures from their time south that maybe were languishing in a drawer or cupboard somewhere, often with a mental label of "do something with these one day".

On receipt I clean up these pictures sent and arrange them to be published here by location and date.

If you can contribute to this then please send me scans that are large as possible (up to 4000px in the largest dimension). I can clean them up to some degree (though the cleaner they are to start with the better), crop, adjust horizons and balance colour etc. before publication.

The easiest way to send pictures is via DropBox, let me know when you are ready and I will create a folder and send you the link by email to upload your pictures, alternatively, they could be sent by email or dvd. Information with the pictures is also of great use, as much as possible. I can also scan a limited number of slides, though this will involve posting them here and back again.

Paul Ward
64 High Street
Great Paxton
St. Neots
Cambs.
PE19 6RF
UK

webmaster - CoolAntarctica and ex Signy FID, '85 & '86 winters.

Copyright - I will assume that all pictures sent to CoolAntarctica are the copyright of the person sending them, they will be labeled as such on the pages they appear. By sending them you are giving permission for them to be used on CoolAntarctica.com ONLY.

Digitizing tips

Minimum 1200 dpi resolution, easily within the range of modern scanners. Take the time to set everything up before you start so that you can just process the slides with no further thought.

Mid-range scanners are perfectly adequate. I use a flatbed scanner with slide adapter as it is more versatile for other things, dedicated slide scanners can speed up the handling time.

The most important thing is to CLEAN THE SLIDES AS THOROUGHLY AS YOU CAN FIRST. You can remove hairs and speckles in Photoshop or similar but it is time consuming and not always invisible. Far better to not have to remove any dirt in the first place, I use an ordinary photographic blower brush to do this, go over each side with it immediately before scanning even if the slide looks clean, it seems tedious but saves far more time later.

If the scanner has options such as auto-crop, despeckle etc. DON'T use them, there will always be far too many you have to go back and rescan manually. I have since heard that some scanners have a method of doing this by scanning with visible and then infra-red light which work by "subtracting" the speckles from the actual picture and are much better than previous methods. I suggest you make sure it works as it should before you start doing dozens or hundreds. In any case there is no better solution than having clean slides in the first place.

Scanning can be quite slow, you don't want to just be sat there waiting for it to happen, once I've done a few I start to adjust them on the computer correcting sloping horizons, brightness/contrast, colour balance etc. Or you could do some other task while it happens in the background, nothing too mentally taxing that gets disturbed by the stop-start of changing slides over.

Dedicate some long periods to scanning / filing etc. once you're in the "zone" you'll do it much more efficiently than having to keep getting up to speed each time in dribs and drabs

Make sure you keep the initial raw scans in one master file and save all adjusted pictures in different files as new copies.

Plan some sort of naming / numbering / filing sequence before you start, it is a real pain looking for that picture you have in your head with no idea where you put it or find it's been accidentally kicked under the metaphorical fridge.