Antarctica Travel Forum

I know this is a "how long is a piece of string" question, but I want to be sure I do not end up restricted in how many pictures I can take. So, if you have taken digital pictures on a recent trip to Antarctica - how many did you take? I would also be interested to know how you stored them. Did you just take extra Memory Cards or did you back-up onto some other medium? If the latter, what did you back-up onto and how did you do it?

With thanks in advance.

Hi, I took around 500 photos while in antarctica, I could have taken more. the number of photos you take is some what determined by how many landings on shore you have. the more landings the more photos. I took 3 500Meg memory cards with me and it was plenty. I simply left the photos on the cards until I got home. Also half of one card was taken up with video footage I took with my camera. No still photo can capture penguins waddling around, belly flopping on the ice and toboganing down the hills. I would not risk loosing my photos by trying to tranfer them to another medium. My sister had the unfortunate experience while on hoidays to take her card to a photography shop to have them burnt onto CD, somehow they got saved as 50kb JPGS which were barely large enought to print as a 6x4. Enjoy Antactica, the photos will never capture it anyway.

For photo storeage and very easy downloads, i use Archos GMini 400, 20GB. You can find them at www.archos.com. Pocket size, very handy, and if you use Compact Flash Cards, you just plug them in directly otherwise you need an adapter but it's still very small and versatile. I wouldn't use the music player though while on a trip, to conserve power and keep the Archos for photo downloads. Not sure what power source will be available to you on the ship.
Good luck and have a great trip!! Pam.

I used a Flashtrax portable hard drive to store my images - very simple to offload pictures (battery life is a problem). For me, the portable hard drive was a requirement, as I shot most pictures of my trip to Antarctica (and subsequent hiking in Argentina and Chile) using the RAW format (which allows some post-processing of some photographic parameters later - so I don't have to worry about shooting a scene with the wrong settings etc - I can always change them later. RAW formatted pictures are much bigger in size than standard JPGs (for my camera, one picture was 8MB). I ended up shooting about 3300 pictures in total - around 2000 on the trip to Antarctica.

The number of pictures you take is strictly a personal preference. With digital I tend to shoot a lot more than with film - I've returned from trips in the past with a film camera only to find that some of the pictures didn't come out exactly the way I wanted and was somewhat disappointed that I couldn't fully share the experience - with digital it's a lot easier - because of the amount of storage space I carry with me, I don't worry about 'rationing' my pictures. Some people would argue that by taking a lot of photographs, you lessen your experience while you were there. I disagree, but that's because I enjoy taking photographs, and that was part of my enjoyment of the trip.

This is indeed an open-ended question! The answer depends on the extent of your photographic enthusiasm, the length of your trip, what you find and see, even on the weather.

I thought long and hard about the same issue before our trip and finally decided to work on an average of 25 photos per day. Then I multiplied by the number of days. On the strength of that calculation, I finally decided against buying a portable storage device and instead just bought more memory card space, as it's becoming cheaper. At the end of each day, I went through the photos and binned fairly ruthlessly. Even so, I found myself at the end of the trip wishing I had more digital memory and on the last stop I was down to rationing. Between my wife and myself, we took about 1500 photos plus video.

Many people on our trip took laptops, that enabled them to burn CDs, look at photos etc. If you have a laptop and space in your luggage, that seems a good answer, otherwise a storage device would be handy. The only concern with the latter is that you're "putting all your eggs in one basket".

Best wishes for a great trip.

Don't underestimate the number of pictures you'll want to take. My wife and I each took 700-800 photos *per day* once we arrived and I transferred them onto my laptop at the end of each day. A lot of them ended up being repetitive or blown shots -- for example multiple attempts to catch a rare bird in flight or penguins jumping out of the sea -- but it's a drag to have to find things to delete on your camera while other things are going on around you, so the more capacity you can bring the better.

I had several people ask if I would mind burning the contents of their memory cards to CDs so they could have space to take more, and I was happy to do it. I think most people would have taken more photos if they had more cards or a laptop with them. It's hard to take a bad picture in Antarctica.

Oh i hate deleting on the memory card, cos then the next photos slot into the gaps and the fotos get all out of order. hate that.
yes if someone has a laptop to burn cds that's perfect. so take some blank cds with you just in case:-)

I took enough memory cards for the entire trip. However I also took an Epson P2000 which I used to back up my photos each day just in case any problems arose with cards or camera, but less luggage than taking a portable laptop PC.

The Epson P2000 has a really clear LCD viewing screen, much bigger than on my camera, which proved useful during the trip, for example to show photos to people who knew more about birds than I did and could identify what I had taken.

I agree with a previous reply about taking some video mode footage, something I had never tried with my camera before this trip. So allow for this when estimating memory requirements. Friends back home have appreciated seeing the zodiacs being boarded and moving off from the ship, hearing the sound of penguins and seeing them walking etc.

I also had the philosophy of taking lots of photos and deleting many when I returned home. Digital allows one to be more daring and experimental than I would ever have been with film, for example taking birds flying alongside the ship.

Hi,

just got back (literally hours ago) from our trip to the Antarctic on the Nordnorge. My wife took 1600 (digital) pictures, and we have 9 hours of camcorder footage to wade through!

Additionally, I took another 1300 or so on film. Some of those photos will have been taken either in Iguazu, or Santiago and surrounding area before/after the trip. I would guess about 1200 of the digital photos and most of the video footage was taken in Antarctica.

Shim

Well, I have several thousand photos, but I think I've got a bit of an edge when it comes to how often I get to snap photos in Antarctica as opposed to everyone else here.

As for digital photography, I'm on my second (much cheaper and much higher res) camera in the last five years. It's a cheap Kodak (US$200), and it takes horrible indoor pictures because of the flash, but the outside pictures are of acceptable quality. It's always inportant to me, however, to remember two things:

1.) Memory cards are cheap. I can take over 400 five-megapixel photos on my 1/2 GB card. Shell out the money for more memory. Same with your laptop.

2.) Batteries are light, carry a lot of them. I deal with the cold everyday, and I carry four backup NiMH batteries in my pocket in addition to the batteries in my equipment. Cold kills batteries.

That being said, there's still a lot to be said for learning photography as a skill and using a manual (yes, manual) SLR 35mm camera. Mine is 20 years old, and I still use it. Some of my best photos are still taken with that camera.

Of course, I have far more digital pics than 35mm now, and I never leave home without my laptop.

Just make sure you don't miss out on the memories that you store in your head whilst you're worrying about the memory on your camera.

I don't go to Anarctica until November - but have taken other trips. I use a Wolverine Storage device when I don't take my laptop. It has a 60 GB hard drive and slots for major memory cards. You can check it out at www.wolverinedata.com

The device also operates as an MP3 player and video player. I came home from China with 3600 6meg pictures and 10 video clips. All were saved on the Wolverine in two places. I don't leave home without it now. Have a great trip.