There’s nothing like good old nature to make you feel miniscule. While we were in Antarctica I was constantly awed by the sheer scale of the landscape, the wide stretches of ice, and glaciers that disappeared into the sky.

The sun was up well before we were, out of bed at five to relish in the quiet before the rest of the ship woke up. Gliding through gentle seas dotted with icebergs, we looked to be heading straight for a range of mountains. But that tiny gap? That’s the Lemaire Channel, and we were about to thread our way through it.

Though it is often calm through the passage the wind howled at us, channeled between steep slopes on either side. It whipped past, numbing noses and fingers in seconds, pulling tears from my eyes and freezing them as they tracked across my temples.  Most people opted to stay inside the bridge where the view was just as spectacular, and the temperature much warmer. It wasn’t the best photographing location though, so we braved the winds that tore at the bow and observation deck. I alternated between taking photographs and trying to warm my hands, but gave up once they’d gone numb!

How do you capture a sense of the scale of a place? I found it difficult, struggling to fit much of the landscape into even my widest lens. The Lemaire Channel seems narrow from a distance, and it is, but it’s still too wide to fit in one frame! The mountains seemed to loom over and above us, tall as they were.

Adding people into the frame, I found, was best. Even though we weren’t right up close to the mountains, it still gave a point of comparison. With a person in the image, you can put yourself in their place, and see what they see. By crouching down I could look up at both the people and the mountains. While this made people large in the frame, the mountains were larger.

Looking back, some of my favourite photographs from Antarctica are the ones with people in them. I didn’t expect that, because I’m mainly a wildlife photographer. But these photographs let me put myself back in the context that they were taken in. They draw me in, just as Antarctica drew me in.