After I had signed up and was assured of a berth on the ship, I bought a Nikon D80, my first DSLR camera, a 300mm telephoto lens, and a 18-200 mm f/3.5-5.6 zoom lens. I had dabbled with photography many years earlier but knew almost nothing about digital photography. I spent the 4 months before leaving for Antarctica taking practice photos of birds, stationary and in flight, hoping that this practice would keep me from screwing up photos of the albatross, penguins and scenery.
While on the trip I realized that nature photography, especially bird photography, was an excellent retirement activity for me. It combined many things I enjoy: being outdoors, photography, birding, travelling to new places, messing about with computers, and learning new skills and concepts. And, indeed, I have spent much of my time since 2007 involved in nature photography.
Four months of practice helped, but nonetheless many of the photos taken on the National Geographic expedition were under- or over-exposed. Moreover, my post processing skills at that point in time did not do justice to the images that were properly exposed. Consequently, a high priority current project is the "restoration" of photos I took during the first few years after acquiring the Nikon D80, especially those taken on trips to Antarctica, Iceland and Newfoundland. Although I have posted, printed, and shown in slide presentations many photos taken in those early years, many more have never been fully processed. The tendency to attend to recent images allows the older ones to lie dormant. A few examples of restored or reclaimed 2007 images follow.