St Andrews Bay Overview, South Georgia
Fujifilm GFX100S II, GF 500mm f5.6 lens, 1/2000 second @ f5.6, ISO 250

This is St Andrews Bay, South Georgia and the receding glacier behind. The photo was taken from our ship, the Greg Mortimer and we're at least a kilometre away, perhaps two. You can't take the ship too close to the beach because of the shallow seas.

Up on the higher reaches are tufts of brown grass breaking through a blanket of fresh snow. Down below, the blacks and whites are an immense population of King Penguins. How many do you think there are?

Back in 1925, I'm reliably told, the glacier was a lot closer to the sea, so there wasn't as much room for the penguin rookery to spread out like today. Plus penguins had been hunted extensively. It's certainly sobering to learn how much the landscape has changed in 100 years - and how much the penguin population has increased, because back in 1925, the count was just 1100 penguins.

Now that I am back from my voyage, a part of me wants to check the numbers I was told. The 1100 penguins I have verified elsewhere, but the number of penguins today is harder to find.

Since 2000, the number of 'breeding pairs' has increased variously from 100,000 to 200,000. Today I'm told there are 250,000 breeding pairs, so that's 500,000 penguins. Now, add in the penguins who are not lucky enough to be one of a pair, plus the juveniles and adolescents and the estimate quickly jumps up to 700,000! That's a lot of penguins.

By all measures, South Georgia is an environmental success for many species. Fur seals, for example, were all but gone around 1900, but today there are 6,000,000 of them jostling for position along the foreshores. But it's difficult to photograph such huge numbers. The photo above is only a part of the penguin colony. And much of the colony is hidden behind the glacial moraines. Even the enlargement below doesn't really show you what 700,000 penguins looks like.

So, when it comes to photography, do these big numbers really matter? Imagine 6 penguins or perhaps 60? That's manageable, but imagine 600 penguins standing on a football field! Now increase it to 6,000 or 60,000 and suddenly 600,000 or 700,000 is relatively meaningless.

As photographers, large numbers can create very interesting compositions, but as soon as you put an edge to the numbers, the number no matter how big has become finite. That's why I like to compose some of my photos with wall to wall penguins (or walrus, or trees, or stones etc) so they stretch from one side of the frame to the other, indicating infinity.

It's not necessary for every photo - and I like the fact that the photo above shows such a huge landscape - and how much of it is covered by penguins.