Forrest Brown

I’m on a 19 day cruise put on by Aurora Expeditions to the Falkland Islands, South Georgia Island and the Antarctic Peninciala before returning to Argentina. When most people think of a 19 day cruise I think that they picture one of the giant luxury cruise ships. But the ship I’m on is a fairly small Russian research ship named the Polar Pioneer that has been converted to carry passengers instead of researchers. The ship holds 54 passengers and in addition to the group of photographers I’m with there’s a group of Russian scuba-divers and a group of sea-kayakers, plus a few people who are not part of any of any specific group. Aurora Expeditions is an Australian travel company that specializes in adventure cruises to remote parts of the world, so that means that the majority of the passengers are Australian, there’s a few other Americans and 1 Canadian.

No, the big ship on the left is not the ship I'm on. If you look closesly, you'll see the Polar Pioneer on the right.

I’m doing this cruise as part of a nature photography workshop but on by LuminOdyssey that I first heard about while on the Hokkaido Nature Photography workshop last winter. Hopefully on this cruise I’ll be working to improve my photography while getting to photograph amazing Subantarctic and Antarctic landscapes and wildlife.

I thought it would be interesting to do a blog posting each day of the cruise to write about what we did that day and to post a few of my photos. But since there’s no internet on the ship, I’m going to write everything on my laptop and do a mass posting once I return to civilization.

Some of the photographers went up in helicopters the day before. Here's a shot I took of the Polar Pioneer as we flew over.

Today we boarded the ship in the late afternoon and the ship set sail around 7:30 in the evening from Ushauia, Argentina. The time was mostly spent getting familiar with the ship and also doing a lifeboat drill, which I hope we’ll never have to do for real.

The lifeboat drill.