As a member of the shore party in early 1911, Ponting helped set up the Terra Nova Expedition's Antarctic winter camp at Cape Evans, Ross Island.

Although the expedition came more than 20 years after the invention of photographic film, Ponting preferred high-quality images taken on glass plates.

In The Worst Journey in the World, expedition member Apsley Cherry-Garrard remembers: No officer nor seaman, however, could have had too many of Ponting's lectures, which gave us glimpses into many lands illustrated by his own inimitable slides.

Thus we lived every now and then for a short hour in Burmah, India or Japan, in scenes of trees and flowers and feminine charm which were the very antithesis of our present situation, and we were all the better for it.

As a middle-aged man, he was not expected to help pull supplies southward over the Ross Ice Shelf for the push to the South Pole.

After 14 months at Cape Evans, Ponting, along with eight other men, boarded the Terra Nova in February 1912 to return to civilization, arrange his inventory of more than 1,700 photographic plates, and shape a narrative of the expedition.

Ponting's cinematograph sequences, pieced out with magic lantern slides, were to have been a key element in the expedition's financial payback.

However, when the bodies of Scott and his companions were discovered in their tent on the Ross Ice Shelf in November 1912, their diaries and journals were also found.

These records described the explorers' final days while suffering from exposure and malnutrition, and their desperate effort to get to a depot of food and fuel that could have saved them.

Scott knew he was doomed, and used his final hours to write pleas to his countrymen to look after the welfare of the expedition's widows and survivors.

The gifts repaid the entire cost of the expedition, provided large annuities (carefully doled out by expedition status and rank) for the widows and survivors, and left a substantial surplus for eventual use as the startup endowment of the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), part of Cambridge University.

It was, however, used extensively in the press and exhibited at the Fine Art Society, Bond Street, shown in venues all over Britain and used in numerous lectures by Ponting and other expedition members (including at Buckingham Palace and the Royal Albert Hall).

[11] A few of the surviving expedition members grew envious of Ponting, thinking that he was profiting off the exhibition for monetary gain and fame.

[13] In addition to this, most of the money from Ponting's lectures went to paying off the debts from the expedition, as well as to the memorial fund that was established to aid the widows and dependents of the members who had perished.

[12] He published The Great White South, the photographic narrative of the expedition, in 1921 which was a popular success, and produced two films based upon his surviving cinematograph sequences, The Great White Silence (1924 - silent) and Ninety Degrees South (1933 - sound), the latter of which he collaborated with Evans, whom he had since made peace with.