Happy New Year!! Credit crunch aside, we wish everyone a happy and safe 2009 filled with great experiences and photo opportunities.
Our Christmas/New Year expedition to the Falklands, South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula was terrific. The highlights were very rough seas - what an adventure, great traveling companions and numerous safe landings with terrific wildlife and scenery of course. 
This expedition is about bytes and bytes of photographs: at times you are spoiled for choice and simply don't know where to look. Our first landing at West Point Island on the Falklands gave us an outstanding viewing of Black Browed Albatross with their very young chicks and in some cases eggs in the nests. What great birds, we typically see them at sea and this sighting on land was very, very special. 
At Gold Harbour, South Georgia on Boxing Day we sat unharassed by the usual Fur Seals (one of our traveling companions has a great idea, sushi related, to put to the Japanese and Norwegian whalers which would deal with these sweet looking, prevalent menaces as a quid pro quo to leaving alone the reducing whale population - 'scientific research' aside of course). Anyway, the absence of Fur Seals meant we could plonk ourselves on the beach and without moving, have uninterrupted viewings of the belching, manky eyed but nevertheless intriguing Elephant Seals a few feet away, Penguins behind us or peering at us inches away, from the other side of the lens, watch the various Penguins coming up from the sea onto the beach in front of us and then sea birds running on water, coming ashore and then displaying remarkably their dominance over a carcass. We just didn't know where to look! The sun was shining, our tans were coming along nicely (we were warmer than we are currrrrrently back in London, (bbbrrr)) and the mountain - beach - small iceberg scenery was truly breathtaking. It is probably the most enjoyable photographic few hours we have ever experienced - that's a bold statement I know but we'll stand by it. 
Neko Harbour at the Antarctic Peninsula on January 1st was equally magical. There are 125 or so glaciers around the harbour so it's very, very scenic and you know you are in Antarctica and not merely at a stunning ski resort. Having recovered from the New Year's Eve festivities (an on-deck barbecue with Russian pop music that would trump a barbie on Bondi beach any day) we said Hello 2009 with some special times at Neko: Gentoo penguins with days old chicks, blue glacial backdrops and a magical iceberg filled harbour and avalanching mountain setting. The session was capped off brilliantly when right at the end of our zodiac cruise back to the ship, via various icebergs looking for a resident Penguin or Leopard Seal, we scored with a Gentoo readying itself to dive off the ice. Whoa!!! We had to be quick but the Canon 5D Mark IIs burst brilliantly and we managed to get a series of our Gentoo at very close range from sea level before our ever-obliging zodiac driver called time and we headed back to the ship for hot showers, lunch and the pulling of anchor. Ooh yeah, and this was only January 1st!
We are thrilled with the image quality of the two new 5D Mark II bodies - more on these to follow in a later Blog, but with one exception, (a programme dial which is too easily knocked), they get a big thumbs up from us.
So we are back in London and within two weeks we will have our trip report and 25 or so photos loaded onto this website. Let us know what you think. And for those of you interested in our next trip to Antarctica, we are working up our ideas for an even better 3rd trip, probably for Xmas 2010 so once again, please register your interest early as capacity on our favoured small ships is limited and six clients missed out on this year's trip....
Happy New Year and happy traveling.
ShutterspeedTravel
Xmas and New Year: The Falklands, South Georgia and Antarctica
