I am finally back from Patagonia (southern Chile) and it seems there are a lot of comments on my last four blog posts which were written over a month ago before I left. I'll be responding to those comments as soon as I can. It seems my blog post on 14 bit capture from a few weeks ago created the most buzz. I'll certainly try to respond to those comments and post some examples of what I was talking about here in the next couple of weeks. At the moment I am buried under a mountain of images that need to be edited and processed from my adventures in Patagonia.

I thought for this blog post it might be interesting for folks to see just how I dealt with images while in one of the most remote and inhospitable places I've ever been to. For two weeks in February I was lucky enough to be covering the Patagonia Expedition Race, which began in Punta Arenas and ended in Puerto Williams, a distance of more than 600 kilometers at the end of the world in the very southern portion of Chile. Since it was nearly impossible with the weather and the extreme terrain to cover the entire race I chose to cover the 2nd half which traversed the Cordillera Darwin (Darwin Range). The Darwin range is extremely remote. We spend the better half of two days getting there by boat. And to cover the race we basically had to put ourselves in front of them which meant trekking in with big packs through un-mapped, rugged and trail-less terrain that hadn't been seen by any humans in a long, long time. We had been told that less than 10 expeditions had ever visited this area in recorded history - and one of them was when Darwin explored the glaciated area in the 19th century, hence the area's name.

Ok, now to how I dealt with images and the like. We were based at a place just across the bay from the Darwin Range and there we had a generator that allowed me to download images and do some editing in the evenings. To protect my computer I bought a Pelican 1490 case fitted with a computer tray and an organizer. I saw information on setting up a Pelican case for outdoor location shooting on Chase Jarvis's website - so I can't say this is my own invention but it worked out really well. And since it was raining sideways pretty much every other day and we were camping in tents the Pelican case was key for my computers safety. Here are a few photos of that setup.

Because I knew I would be transferring the Lightroom catalog for the race to my imaging machine back in the office I set up a brand new catalog for the images at the start of the race. While waiting for the racers I shot several stock shoots with some friends and the writer who accompanied me. Lightroom enabled me to really stay on top of the images I had shot. And since I was shooting with a new camera - the Nikon D300 - I also spent some time making sure the auto-focus, white balance and image noise were all in line.

I had two backup hard drives in the Pelican case (as in the second photo). The Lightroom catalog was stored on the laptop and all images were stored (and referenced) on the hard drives. Since I had a USB 2.0 drive and a Firewire drive I used the Firewire drive as the working drive - which gave me better read/write speed than the USB 2.0 drive.

While covering the race we hiked into the Valley of Death (no I am not making that name up). We hiked under massive glaciers and into a jungle of sorts. Even the racers said it was the craziest terrain they had ever seen. There was this "turva" stuff which I have never seen anywhere else on planet earth - it is like a living sponge that is filled with water and you can fall into them quite deeply. I even found a large pool of quicksand early on (not quicksand li9ke I had ever heard of, it was worse). I went in up to my waist with one leg and it locked onto me like concrete. It was the consistency of pumpkin pie and my fellow trekkers tried to pull me out but nearly dislocated my ankle - so I had to start digging in this stuff for like 10 minutes to get down to my foot - finally I got out but it was a big eye opener into the type of terrain we were heading into. I have never seen anything like it. It was a peat bog jungle.

And then it started to rain....and it kept raining. All night and all day the next day - pretty much everything we had was wet save for my cameras, the sleeping bags and one set of clothes. We had crossed some pretty big rivers the day before but now on the way out those rivers were huge because the entire mountain range was draining into this river basin. So when we got back to the river crossings we had done the day before the levels were over our heads and they were raging fast with ice cold glacier water. I have done some pretty crazy river crossings in my time in Alaska, Canada, Utah and other locals - even here in Chile - so I knew what was scary. We found a place that was dicey but possible - maybe - two by two we used some standard river crossing techniques and crossed in pairs - it was only up to just above my waist - near chest level for others.

Keeping the cameras dry was a constant struggle. I am amazed that I came home with a working camera at all actually. But I did thoroughly test out Nikons D300 and can say that for all intensive purposes it is pretty much waterproof - at least in intense driving rain. I stored images on Compact Flash cards and the Epson P2000 while in the backcountry, then when we returned imported the images off the Epson to my laptop and then into Lightroom. All in all it was a wild adventure that I won't forget anytime soon. There are a lot more stories to tell - look for them on my blog at http://michaelclarkphoto.blogspot.com/.

That's it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark