Last Dispatch

While I was at North­ern Voice, Pam’s final email came in:

There won’t be many pho­tos from the Zodiac cruise through Ple­neau Island, also known as ‘The glac­ier grave­yard’. Get­ting from ice­berg to ice­berg for obser­va­tion proved to be a wild ride. Wind, waves, and snow hin­dered picture-taking for all but those being paid to do it. The rest of us clung to the side robes with heads turned into sleeves. I sup­pose we learned that form of pro­tec­tion from the penguins.

When ice­bergs become grounded, it’s ero­sion that shakes them apart, even­tu­ally becom­ing ‘burger bits’. It might take an ice­berg 10 years to rot. They look snowy from a dis­tance but up close you see accu­mu­lated rocks frozen in the solid ice. We cruised through icy chunks where a leop­ard seal hid out and taunted Zodi­acs try­ing to land.

The next day oppo­site weather in quiet, sunny Cuverville Island. We observed more gen­too pen­guins in a big smelly rook­ery. One of the guides noted that in the past 3 years, snow cover has retreated from the shore expos­ing sharp rocks and pro­duc­ing new mosses. We could hear the pen­guins squish as they stepped across the tour trail.

In the evening a British base com­man­der lec­tured on ‘A Year in Antarc­tica’. He described how a par­tic­u­lar sci­en­tific group phys­i­cally and men­tally han­dled a 12-month rota­tion. In addi­tion to work­ing in pairs, they also had to deal with per­sonal annoy­ances such as soup slurp­ing. If a coworker got the bet­ter of you, they were asked to ‘repair a meter’ in the out­er­most hut. (It was equipped with essen­tial overnight gear.) When the base sup­ply ves­sel returned the fol­low­ing year, the com­man­der explained that, nat­u­rally, out­go­ing crew went through with­drawal and grief. Replace­ments were to allow them a few days for intro­spec­tion before they left.

Our stops over the last 5 days have included Decep­tion Island, Peter­mann Island, Half­moon Bay, Par­adise Bay, and Neku Har­bour. We crossed 66-degrees south lat­i­tude, a joy­ous moment for the cap­tain, within spit­ting dis­tance of the Antarc­tic Cir­cle, the fur­ther­est south this ves­sel and this cap­tain have ever been.

We’re now think­ing about home. Tonight at the Captain’s farewell party ‘Las Pen­guinas’ my picture-taking bud­dies and I will rem­i­nisce about this incred­i­ble jour­ney to the awe­some Antarctic.

Pam will be back on Tues­day, and I’m hop­ing that her pho­tos will be up shortly after that.

Northern Voice 2008, Day 1 Continued

The high­light of the after­noon was for me, as it turned about, Pho­to­Camp. That’s the ses­sion on pho­tog­ra­phy led by Kris Krug, Pres­i­dent of Bryght. I’ve been to this ses­sion in past years, but this year Kris had a slightly dif­fer­ent for­mat (although he had done Pho­to­Camp this way at other venues like Bar­Camp): A group of dif­fer­ent experts in a vari­ety of pho­to­graphic tech­niques and top­ics fol­lowed. Tim Bray talked about what ideal small cam­era to get, even if you already have a larger Dig­i­tal SLR (and I was glad to see that he pro­moted the site DPRe­view, a site that Steven had rec­om­mended many times when I was shop­ping for a cam­era.) Local art pho­tog­ra­pher Rachael Ashe showed some stun­ningly psy­che­delic effects you can get by using long expo­sures in a dark room along with var­i­ous kinds of coloured lights; a kind of light paint­ing. You can see an exam­ple done today here. I’ve seen other exam­ples of this online, but the ones she did had an almost iconic (in the reli­gious sense) qual­ity. Novak Rogic of Microsoft showed how you could make ele­gant and almost pic­turesque lit­tle plan­ets from stiched together panora­mas, Duane Storey (who I am hop­ing to pur­chase one of his stun­ning pho­to­mu­rals of the Van­cou­ver sky­line from) talked about how to set up a store to sell your pho­tos on SmugMug.com and Miranda Liev­ers, a local por­trait and wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher, gave a superb show of how to make the best pic­tures from avail­able light. It was that last pre­sen­ta­tion that par­tic­u­larly impressed me, and I hope I’ll be able to use some of what I learned in future photos.

After Pho­to­camp, I went to the ses­sion on Word­Press (partly as a pre­lude to tomorrow’s keynote by Matt Mul­len­weg, the found­ing devel­oper of Word­Press, one of the most suc­cess­ful blog­ging soft­ware pack­ages today, and the soft­ware I use to pub­lish all of my blogs.) While that was mainly a break­out ses­sion where we all had the oppor­tu­nity to avail our­selves of local experts, it was fol­lowed by a ter­rific pre­sen­ta­tion called ‘More than Cat Blogs’, which was how Word­Press can be used to build web sites that are either not blogs at all, or don’t look any­thing like blogs. (unfor­tu­nately I didn’t get the pre­sen­ters name and he hasn’t posted any links to his ses­sion or him­self on the North­ern Voice Wiki).

After all of these pre­sen­ta­tions, I went with sev­eral oth­ers to the nearby Mahoney’s bar, where Vox­ant News­room, a dig­i­tal news video host­ing ser­vice, was offer­ing free drinks and t-shirts in return for fill­ing out a short sur­vey regard­ing blogs and other demo­graphic infor­ma­tion. It was nice to be able to get drinks (and even­tu­ally din­ner) so close the the con­fer­ence, and I was home at a decent hour, ready for a full sec­ond day of North­ern Voice tomor­row. It starts early (at 8:30 AM), so hope­fully I’ll be up and ready.