LEXsample :: photography tips for Antarctica

Tips for taking landscape photographs

A tripod and a long exposure time change the rolling sea into a veil.

A wide angle viewpoint (lens) will often give a beautiful impression of the landscape.
Choose an unusual point of view (very low, or taking a very high overview).
Keep the horizon straight, this will often give you the best result.
Try to picture one element from the landscape in the front: a piece of rock covered with lichen, flotsam, a whale bone. It will suggest more depth to your photograph. There is no need to position the element in the middle.
Movements such as walking penguins, streaming water, can be captured using a long exposure (1/15, 1/30 seconds or longer) in order to obtain a blurry effect. Do use a tripod or any other solid support. Take multiple photographs varying with different exposure values, there will always be a couple that did not work out the way you wanted it.
A long exposure time and a small aperture provide more depth of field to your picture. On the other side: isolating a detail from the landscape against a background of blurry colours can be charming too - the latter effect is best optained with a telelens of 90mm or more.

Panorama photosgraphs

Using a level tripod you can take panorma pictures by shifting horizontally a little bit each time. There are a few points to bear in mind:

Ensure that every photograph overlaps with the next one.
You need to fix the exposure (set it manually) to avoid exposures differ between shots.
Use a standard lens (50mm). A wide angle lens will cause the horizon to curb and it will result in mismatching overlap areas.

Depending on how professional you want the result to look like, you can simply glue the photographs one after the other in a scrap book, but digital photographs can be 'stitched' together using software designed to do just this. This type of software is often provided with the camera, but you can also try stand-alone products.

If you want to take panorama photography seriously, you may want to consider getting a specialized panorama camera that uses normal (35mm) film, but using multiple exposures at once. I have not heard of digital panorama cameras yet, but I would not be surprised to find they are already on the market.