Rugged, remote and often beautiful, the island of South Georgia and surrounding South Atlantic teem with birdlife and sea mammals.
Fewer than 30 human residents share the landscape with them full time a combination of scientists, officials and staff at a seasonal whaling museum.
It was once very different, however, as the whaling industry used to have more than 2,000 workers, many from Tayside, crowding the island’s safe harbours as they caught and processed an estimated 1.6 million whales.
John Alexander, one of the last of the modern Dundee whalers, spent seven seasons working on giant floating factory ships and at Leith Harbour, South Georgia, as an electrician.
During that time he took many pictures that captured the trade at its height, before the community vanished almost overnight in the mid-1960s as whale numbers plummeted.
One of those images, of the Duke of Edinburgh on the island, has now been turned into a special issue stamp to commemorate the Queen becoming the longest reigning monarch in British history.
It is one of a number issued to celebrate the milestone issued by South Georgia and the Sandwich islands, together with Ascension Island, the Bahamas, the British Antarctic Territory, the Falkland Islands and Tristan da Cunha.
Mr Alexander, who lives in Broughty Ferry, said he was “thrilled” to see one of his pictures used on the stamp.
It shows Prince Philip meeting doctors at Leith Harbour, having visited the island aboard the Royal Yacht and is one of a number that he took as a young man enduring hardship to make his fortune.
John bought a camera the first time he went down to South Georgia to work as an electrician with Christian Salvesen, then Britain’s biggest whaling company.
He was employed at the factories at Leith Harbour from 1954 and then later on the floating factory ships until 1961.
From the start, he took photos to show friends and family back home in Dundee, but over time the images he took with his late friend Geoff Smethurst became an amazing record of the modern whaling industry.