Technical notes
The author took all the images appearing in this book on a 35 mm Kodak Retina II camera, similar to, but much cheaper than, the Leica cameras that were sold in 1956. This format became the standard until the recent arrival of digital cameras.
He shot Kodachrome standard transparency positive film with an ASA rating of only 25, as well as Kodak Verachrome Pan black and white film with an ASA of 64. The Kodachrome of the day was quite remarkable and, other than a few minor adjustments to colour and the removal of dust spots, all these images are as photographed 50 years ago.
Having no formal training in photography,
Lee Martin was grateful for tips from Brian Brake, a famed New Zealand photographer working for Magnum and a former staff member of The New Zealand Herald. It was Brake who recommended the Retina camera.
Light is so even in the Antarctic that the photographs were usually shot with Kodachrome on f8 at 1/60 for normal light, and one stop up or down for varying conditions. Lee Martin generally used an ultra-violet clear filter when shooting colour, largely to keep the lens clean, and often used an infra-red or orange filter when shooting black and white for better contrast.
Lee Martin also had a Rolliflex, supplied by the trans-Antarctic expedition and, with this, shot dozens of black and white pictures that were issued to the worldwide media, through the New Zealand Press Association and Reuters. Many of the black and white photographs appearing in the official accounts of the expedition were also taken by Lee Martin using this camera, but none carried his by-line.

Acknowledgements
Firstly to my daughters and son who, far from becoming bored as I did after repeatedly seeing film-slide projections of these transparencies when they were young, kept nagging at me to dig them out from my files and ‘do something with them’.
Then to my friend Basil Williams, now living in Tucson, who, as a professional photojournalist and illustrator, persuaded me they were worth publishing. To Basil, this book is as much about the journalism of the era as it is about history. He encouraged me to send him some pictures and text so he could do a mock-up of what he thought would work.
Basil could see a book in the now-extinct style from the era of photo-magazine journalism and, using his experience working in the 1960s for Life magazine, edited, cropped and laid out my images to bring the best from some of the old, deteriorating transparencies. It was quite unusual for newspaper photographers in the 1950s to take colour, so history from the period can often be visually dull. Basil convinced me that a combination of text detailing such a historic event from a journalist’s viewpoint, together with some excellent pictures, would make a interesting book.
It then took another former colleague and mutual friend, Wayne Harman, now managing editor of The New Zealand Herald, to set the publishing wheels in motion.
I am also grateful to a former colleague in New York, Todd Prusan, who joined the conspiracy to persuade me to publish by introducing me to his own literary agents, PJ Mark in New York and Caspian Dennis in London.
To back up my own diaries and recollections, I have quoted briefly from the two official accounts of the expedition as well as from the accounts by Sir Edmund Hillary, Rear Admiral George Dufek and George Lowe.