Antarctica Photography with an iPhone

Somewhere in Antarctica. iPhone photo by John Cannon.

In one of the photography lectures I gave onboard our ship to Antarctica, I showed some simple edits you can do to your smartphone photos—tweaks you can make right on your smartphone, with no need for a laptop and Photoshop and all that. You can crop, straighten crooked horizons, add contrast, improve the color saturation, and so on.

One Penn State passenger who took the instruction to heart in a big way was John Cannon. He was taking some pretty great photos with his iPhone to begin with, but he really became enamored of playing with them in the iPhone’s photo editor, and frequently would show me the results he was getting. And each time he did, I’d love the image so much that I’d ask him to Air Drop it to me immediately. (Not familiar with Air Drop? Remind me and I’ll do a post on that sometime.)

The photo at the top of this post is one of John’s, and so are the ones below. Read more

A Very Long Stay at Deception Island

We were told at the beginning of the Expedition to Antarctica that “flexibility” would be the word for the trip, and that’s proving to be especially true today. Our itinerary for today called for us to visit Deception Island in the morning, then sail about three hours north to Half Moon Island to see a colony of chinstrap penguins. (Most of what we’ve seen so far have been Gentoo penguins, which are definitely cute, but chinstrap penguins are flat-out adorable.) We accomplished the Deception Island part just fine, but that’s where things stalled out. A weather front came through with a lot more strength than expected, and we’ve been experiencing snow and strong winds—so strong that we’re stuck here until the storm passes.

At right is a shot (click on it to see it larger) of what the scene looked like out our dining-room window at lunchtime. The weather in Antarctica is so changeable. We’ve seen fog, rain, bitter cold, and bright sunny days where we were sweating like crazy in our ship-issued red parkas. But I think even the crew is surprised at today’s all-day snow in the middle of the Antarctic summer.

We did have a more or less successful landing at Deception Island this morning. The island is actually Read more