To Antarctica - New Year's 2011

Such an awesome trip. We saw so many things (and so many penguins!), had a great crew, a great ship and great weather. Definitely one of our favorite trips to date.

Pictures taken: 3500
Hours of video shot: 4.5
Total distance traveled: 18000 miles
Distance on the National Geographic Explorer: 2014
Ship's fuel usage: 4000 gal/day
Ship's water consumption: 16000 gal/day
Relative roughness of the Drake passage (scale of 10): 7 on the way down, 2 on the way back
Passengers who did the Polar Plunge: over 60

We took our trusty Nikon D300s cameras, a Nikon 18-200VR zoom, a Nikon 10-24 zoom and a Nikon 80-400VR zoom.

For video we took a new Canon XA-10 that we got just for the trip. Canon shrank one of their professional cameras down to the size of a large camcorder. Adding a shotgun microphone resulted in a great little camera that had great image stabilization and fantastic image quality.