The equipment was a camera, tripod, panorama slide, dragonfly (*), remote release and time for extensive bracketing.
Where are there harder contrasts than in the polar regions, between light and dark, between rock and glistening snow and ice.
No camera is able to reproduce such levels of contrast. The brightness would have been eaten up in the picture and the darkness would be drawn in. The juxtaposition and offsetting of horizontal photo series to form a panorama is not enough to capture the scenery seen by the human eye in the photo. The photographer working with modern software uses a trick. For each position of a photo belonging to the panorama, not only is a correctly exposed photo taken, but an exposure series with one or more overexposed and underexposed photos (**), which are later calculated over one another in complex computing processes in order to match the color dynamics and the range of contrast expand and bring the panorama as close as possible to what is seen. Brightness and dark areas remain drawn and differentiated in color. It then happens that a panorama photo often contains 50, 60 or more high-resolution photo files, which requires a gigantic computing effort.
But even the calculation of this data would not lead to the expectation of a satisfactory result when it comes to most of the motifs shown here. Since there is a very clear time lag between the first and last photo of a panorama, the water and ice have continued to move in the meantime, so that both the vertical exposure series and the horizontal image sequences often no longer fit exactly on top of each other and can no longer be calculated.
An elaborate process of editing and manual retouching that took many weeks was necessary after the expedition to bring these 8 Antarctic panoramas into the final state to be viewed here.
