# Antarctica broke my 1 in 2000 rule

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Nigel Danson
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucrxM1kvRz8
- **Дата:** 14.04.2026
- **Длительность:** 14:46
- **Просмотры:** 19,143
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/52565

## Описание

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## Транскрипт

### Intro []

So, in this video, I'm going to talk about how my recent trip to Antarctica, I made a book about it, more about that later, broke my one in 2,000 rule. —

### Antarctica [0:32]

— Morning everyone, fantastic to see you all again. So, like I said, I've just come back from Antarctica and I'm going to be talking a lot more about that later. Some of the images that I took and just a little bit more about that experience cuz it was absolutely amazing. But, over the last 20 odd years, I've taken 500,000 digital images and that's a huge amount and only around 250 of them are five-star what I call portfolio images. That's one every month. So, about 12 a year on average. Depends on what the years are, whether I've got more creativity, less creativity, whether the conditions are good, whether I do more photography, etc. But, usually it's round about one a month. And if I go on a trip like Antarctica, I usually expect to get maybe one, two, or even three of those five-star images. Now, I'll get on to what a five-star image is and how I categorize a portfolio image later in the video, but when I went to Antarctica, I didn't get any portfolio images. five-star images. And at first, I was so, so disappointed. But, I sort of planned it like that and I'm going to explain what I mean by that and why in the end it didn't really matter at all and photography isn't, in my opinion, just about getting those banger images. Although, obviously it's fantastic when you do get those. So, yeah, I've just come back from Antarctica. Um I was running a workshop there. It was we had the whole boat. It was really amazing. Some amazing professional photographers uh were as well as incredible amateur photographers as well. We had a fantastic time. I admit, I am the luckiest person in the world to be able to go to Antarctica. I never ever dreamt it would be possible for me to go to Antarctica. When I first started photography and for the many years that I did photography, I just thought that would be a pipe dream. It was something that I just watched um David Attenborough talking about it and it would just never be an opportunity. But, this is my third trip to Antarctica. I wanted to approach it a little bit differently because in the first two, it was all about trying to get that amazing shot. Um And I'll come on to some of the amazing shots that I've got from there in the past trips. But, it was all about that portfolio image. But, in this time, I wanted to sort of go and experience it a little bit more, not be just behind my camera, but also capture the quieter moments. Um And there's two things I wanted to do when I went there. One of which was I wanted to concentrate a little bit more on pano images and I'll show you some of those in the book. So, two by ones mainly because I feel like Antarctica works really well from there. And the year before or two years before, Andy Gibb had done a similar project and I thought it was really good. It really inspired me. So, I wanted to do that. And then, I also wanted to just capture some collection of images that sort of told a story about the scene. And but and through going doing those two things, I felt that meant that I wasn't really focusing on trying to get that portfolio image. Although, I probably still expected that to come. So, some of the things that I was looking at were the behavior of penguins, um how the feathers moved in the wind, just maybe the feet of penguins, them drinking water. So, a lot of behavioral shots I wanted to try and get as well as video of the penguins. But, also just like the smaller things like how the water was catching the light and the icebergs and the mountains reflected in the water. I felt that would be really interesting. But, none of those were going to make this portfolio shot. And then also I wanted to capture the scale of the location. And to do that I had to include zodiacs and some of the actual penguins maybe on icebergs and things like that to try and to really try and capture the scale of Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, which is so incredible. Okay. So, let's talk about what a portfolio of images in my eyes it it's changed over the years if I'm honest and it's going to be different for different people. So, don't use this as a rule, but in my eyes a portfolio image is something that's a real special image, obviously. It's got to be something that really stands out, jumps out of the page. But, there's usually there's four elements that I talked about many, many times over the years, which is the composition of the image, the subject light in the image, and the exact timing that you take that image. And all those four things, if you get them right and you're lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, create what I call a portfolio image. And you know, some of them are quieter, more in your face, but they tend to be images that I see as not seldom taken and you know, really spectacular. And here's a few examples. So, this is the rainbows, the four rainbows, not just a double a pair of rainbows, but two pairs of rainbows. Really spectacular in my eyes. From Antarctica, I've got the shot here of the feeling of Antarctica, the immense power of Antarctica, of the waves, etc. This was taken in my first trip to Antarctica. The penguin iceberg, this was taken again in my first trip to Antarctica where the penguin was just sailing past on the ice boat. Now, I've taken lots of shots like this, but what made this special was the light as well. And the time of day I took this, it was really early in the morning, and we had this really soft fog, which is You don't see that often in Antarctica. And then there's another example here, um when I was in Los Glaciares, um on my second third trip to Los Glaciares, and I got these amazing lenticular clouds at sunset, and everything just came together. That's my idea of a portfolio image, and I didn't get any on this trip. But it didn't matter. And I'm going to explain why. So, I think that digital means that we create a lot of images, and I think that that's a double-edged sword. I think it's brilliant because it means that we can fail fast. You know, you can just try and make loads of mistakes, and it means that we have lot of quicker learning available through digital because you can just experiment as much as possible. That is brilliant. The problem is, I think with digital you're not as focused. You're not as purposeful with it. And that means that you can end up with lots of average shots. Now, in this trip, I did end up with lots of average shots. I also ended up with lots of penguins' arses because they were just jumping all the time, and I had it on pre-release capture, so that added up to lots of images taken, which is good because it means you can capture something great. But it also meant that I was probably not focusing as much. But what I was focusing on was creating, in my back of my mind, this collection of images, which I've not done before, which is just like a collection of panos, a collection of images that tell a story about a particular subject that I was shooting. And I think that was super rewarding. Now, don't get me wrong, I really wish I'd created got a portfolio shot. There was amazing photographers on board, you know, the professionals and the amateurs were all incredible, and there was one shot to me that really stood out. From Tony, um I'll link his Instagram here, and this is his shot of a penguin on an iceberg with this incredible use of polarizer. It's got this incredible, um, sense of depth that the icebergs go down onto the water, and it really was special. So, well done, Tony. This actually won an award, um, on the boat. We we picked the best photos, and then they were all voted on by everybody, and Tony won first place. He got a medal. Here's Tony celebrating with his medal. But, yeah, the problem is when you see these people, you have a fear of missing out as well. You're thinking, "Oh, my photography's not great. " So, I came back from this trip a little bit downbeat, to be honest. I concentrated on these other projects, but I'd seen all these amazing photos by all the people on board, and I thought, "I don't think I've taken anything that's that great. " But, when I started making my book, and I'm going to show you this now, it all changed, and I was pretty happy about it, to be honest. Um, and I feel like I created a collection of images that tell a brilliant story of this trip, and do demonstrate some of the really interesting things that I've already talked about.

### The book [8:43]

Okay, let's talk about the book. So, I produced this book with Saal Digital, and Saal Digital are an online platform that allows you to upload your photos, and then arrange them in the book, and they make it super easy. They've sponsored this video as well. So, thanks to Saal Digital for sponsoring this video. Uh, just a quick word about them. They are, in my opinion, the best way of taking your photos that are digital, um, and producing something that is so well color matched to your screen and how you've edited them. That means a lot to me. I really care about it. And if, you know, we are going to look through this in a lot more detail, but you can see that, you know, all the images in here, you know, they've got the right brightness, color rendition, and they look fantastic. And the software's super easy to use, as well. You can also choose loads of different sizes of books. I'll show a few here now that you can see the different sizes of books that you can get. And also you can download the software onto your computer which I think is really beneficial. Now, I just went for quite a big book here just to show it a little bit better and I used the sort of luster paper which I think just feels really nice and just [clears throat] looks absolutely amazing. So, if you're looking to get a book with Saal Digital, there's a discount code. I'll put it here and make sure you check them out. There's a link in the description. Right, let's get on to the book. So, yeah, I did So, this is a good example of a pano that I took. This is a life flat book by the way, which is quite cool. So, I did a lot of sort of more pano type shots like these. But what I found worked really well is that this is a good example. This is a shot that I would have usually taken. This was an absolutely amazing day by the way and we got really lucky cuz the zodiac when we arrived here just came when the the mist was just rising. But actually, I quite like this one with the zodiac. Yeah, so this was an absolutely amazing morning. But one of the things I wanted to capture was the penguins on the icebergs. So, I feel like with the background in, I feel like this really, you know, captured the landscape a lot bit a lot better. But what I really like when you're producing a book like this is that you don't just choose one shot, but you can choose a couple of shots that are slightly different. This is cropped in a little bit different. This is like the pano like I said. And I feel like these collections of images just tell a lot of a better story and give a different look to the scene. Yeah, this is a great example of a pano that works really well. The reason that panos I think work really well in Antarctica and and both polar regions is that you're not you don't tend to be interested in the sky as much. And you and here there's not as interesting foreground. So, a lot goes on in that sort of middle third. And you can see here, this is called the iceberg graveyard, that the penguins just standing out Um looked so good. And again, you know, this collection of two images together tell a really nice story, I think. But I really like the behavior of them. And again, I put a collection of behavior of penguins on one page here or or one double page here. And this is something I just hadn't taken before, these types of shots. So, you know, this makes me really happy. I'm not a wildlife photographer. This is me being an amateur wildlife photographer. But I loved, you know, the this penguin here feeding its chicks. You know, I really thought hard. I learned a lot from Rachel and Danny who were the professionals on the trip about about, you know, thinking about things like the tongue of the baby sticking out here. The background works really well. You know, this penguin here is just walking It's got the feathers in its mouth and, you know, it's just walking and it looks really good. And this one's just jumping and kicking up mud. And I feel like those types of shots are something I just wouldn't usually shoot. Again, you know, this one then the behavior of it. And And I really enjoyed that. I really it really reignited my photography. And I feel like doing these sort of things that are a little bit out of my comfort zone, not trying to get these absolute portfolio shots all the time, is going to improve my photography cuz I'm going to look at things a little bit differently. And that is great. I did want to show you So, this was another zodiac shot here with the iceberg. So, there's actually two zodiacs, a third zodiac over here. Just showing the scale of it, which is just incredible. And these this boat with the lay flat just looks absolutely amazing. You know, you get it You know, you can put images across the page like that. You know, again, this is another example of something that I would not have usually thought about, but because we had someone who was a street photographer, Roman, on the trip, professional street photographer, then I learned a bit about that as well. And so, this was a um an an Argentinian base, but I waited for this person to walk across here. I saw him coming out of this hole and I just feel like this is again a shot that I just wouldn't have thought of before and it tells a story of the trip and that and this book is just creating something a little bit different for me that means a lot to me which is really good. Obviously there's a lot more images that I could go through in here. I did a series as well you know as doing these I thought about abstracts so there's a lot of abstract type images like these you know a lot of them maybe have like a bird in a lot of the icebergs and I really concentrated on the abstracts. Again none of these are probably portfolio shots but they're still four star shots. They're still pretty decent shots that I really like. But yeah, what an amazing experience it was. This is a penguin falling off an iceberg. Yeah, it really was an amazing experience and I feel like it taught me a lot about my photography. You know, I tried things a little bit differently you know, by trying these panoramic shots by looking at animal behavior a lot more and what a place Antarctica is. I'm so grateful. I wouldn't be there to be honest if it wasn't for everybody watching these videos. I just wouldn't have these opportunities. So thanks ever so much. If you've enjoyed the video give it a thumbs up and as usual thanks for watching. Check out Sol in the description below if you're looking for a book. It's a great way of showcasing your photography. And until someday bye.