Obsession
[This post written 6/18/08; position: lat -57’49”, long -43’40”; temp -14C; wind chill -28C]
Believe it or not, it is actually warmer now than it was earlier today. I am in the habit of doing my writing in the cabin I share with Joanna, who spends most of her time down on the main deck. It works out well. So after breakfast, I came back to the cabin to check email and get a shower. While I was at it, I glanced at today’s temperatures and wind speeds. It was frigid out there. And a peek through the porthole revealed that an inch or so of snow blanketed the ship. I’ve chosen two pictures I hope will help convey the shivers I felt.
There was not a lot of visually exciting stuff on the agenda for today. The engineers were going to try to launch the ROV again, but that was called off due to rough water. We were running the high volume water pumps at times, and doing periodic CTDs (Continuity, Temperature, and Depth) to keep a running record of water salinity and temperatures at various locations and depths. And John Helly was still busy analyzing his data to come up with more precise measurements of the iceberg. (Captain Mike told me today that the old 16 mile figure for the length of the iceberg has been scrubbed. And just now, between the time I wrote this post and the time I send it off, I’ve heard from Ken Smith that the size of A43K is now confirmed to be 20.5 nautical miles by 7.5 nautical miles.) At any rate, there wasn’t much to photograph or report on today. So I decided to spend my time working on the endless task of organizing and appending metadata to my photographs.
I’m not quite sure how many I have taken on this trip so far. About 1,800, I think, just looking quickly at the Mac’s file info for my “Antarctica Photos” directory. And that is after trashing at least a third of what came out of the cameras. Digital photography is incredible, in that it frees you from worries about the expense of what you’re doing and allows you to click away at will. But it can easily yield up a hundred nearly identical pictures of the same object or scene.
I took a break from this work to go down to lunch, and after eating I went up to the bridge where I took yet more iceberg photos (indeed, photographed them until I could no longer feel my fingers), and had a good conversation with Ron Kaufmann, who has spent quite a lot of time in Antarctica and is also an avid photographer. He said, “When you see your first iceberg, you take lots of pictures of it because…well…it’s your first iceberg. But then you find that every iceberg is unique and has its own beauty, so you take pictures of every iceberg. But then you notice that the light is constantly changing, so any given iceberg looks different from moment to moment, so you photograph each iceberg at many different moments.” We laughed, because it’s so very true, and it’s so easy to see how it could go on ad infinitum.
Later I looked through the pictures other members of our cruise have put up on the shared drive of the ship’s server. And I see that Ron and I are far from alone. In aggregate, we must have thousands of iceberg pictures, all taken within the last two weeks. Some of these are so breathtaking I’m sure they will end up printed and framed, or perhaps even published. I even found pictures of one or two icebergs that I myself missed. But my overall impression, after a day of poring over iceberg photos, is that each of us should resolve to spend no more than a week or two obsessing over them when we get home. Down any other road madness lies. Sweet dreams. 🙂