Freeze Frame – Historic Polar Images
I find myself once again contemplating running the At The Mountains of Madness campaign for a small group and this time we will all be extremely geographically dispersed and playing over a virtual tabletop using Roll20. Whilst I was once upon a time quite sceptical about playing tabletop games online I have slowly but surely come to accept it - but maybe more on that in another post.
As always I like to ensure that I have good props and handouts and on this occasion I thought it would be good if I could find some photographs from the period to set the scene and give people a feel for what Arctic exploration during the period was really like. What I stumbled across was Freeze Frame a fantastic online repository of Historic Polar Images, 1845-1982 from the Scott Polar Research Institute.
The Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge holds a world-class collection of photographic negatives illustrating polar exploration from the nineteenth century onwards. Freeze Frame is the result of a two-year digitisation project that brings together photographs from both Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Here you can discover the polar regions through the eyes of those explorers and scientists who dared to go into the last great wildernesses on earth.
Detailed catalogue entries are provided for each image. All image captions are taken from original sources, where known. In digitising this resource the Scott Polar Research Institute has enabled browsing through the collection by date, expedition, or photographer, or by searching the content directly. Documents relating to the digitisation and web development process may be accessed via the project tab.
The Freeze Frame project is funded as part of the JISC digitisation programme and is hosted by the University of Cambridge .
