Early May along the Copper River Delta in southcentral Alaska is about the time that hundreds of thousands of little visitors show up for refueling on their migratory journey to Alaska’s food and light laden summer breeding grounds. Amongst many birds, the Western Sandpipers are the most abundant, sometimes congregating in giant flocks that weave…
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Mt McKinley, North America’s tallest mountain rises to 20, 320 ft, and dominates the Alaska range with its prominent face and ridges that capture light in an everchanging fashion. These are some images I’ve gathered over the years.
Enjoy a mixture of wildlife photos from Alaska’s lush southern coast to its icy northern shores, in all seasons. With the snow beginning to melt in Alaska’s interior, I’m getting excited about the upcoming photo ventures this summer.
For those photographers out there who have your camera equipment insured, you might appreciate this little bit of economic redemption. Back in 2009 I took a remote river trip in Alaska’s arctic which turned out to be a magnificent venture on many counts, and it included some equipment casualties. My Canon 5D Mark II and…
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This post is for the socially minded folk out there who have, or will appreciate Alaska’s rugged beauty via the Dalton Highway. More specifically, the region near Mt Sukakpak, which is in the vicinity of mile 204-208, north of Wiseman a few miles. That area is one of my favorite parts of the 400+ mile…
DetailsWith my rather large 30″ monitors, and the seeming tiny fonts in Lightroom, I was frustrated with not being able to see my caption and keywords well enough to mitigate a multitude of typos. Not to exclusively blame my poor typing on small fonts, but it makes a notable difference. So I thought I’d share…
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Ten years ago I was shooting assignments with a medium format camera and a Polaroid back, had recently changed my company name from Wide Angle Productions to AlaskaPhotoGraphics, started an infant website, and made the seemingly tenuous decision at the time, to hire an employee. Wow, how times have changed since then. Today, amongst many…
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I spent a few days in the White Mountains National Recreation Area a few weeks ago, just north of Fairbanks. On the final clear night, while hanging out with friends in the warm cabin and enjoying good food after a long day of skiing, the aurora appeared in the sky about midnight. The displays were…
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I dug these few paragraphs out of the drafts folder, having started writing it sometime around the start of the new year. That’s near the time the great task of reprocessing and re-editing my entire stock files began. It is a grinding process with burnout on the near border, but great strides have been made.…
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Through the process of converting from film to digital, there was a slow development of programs that handled the processing of RAW files. As software developed, the potential for extracting the maximum quality from a RAW file became more easily, and more quickly achieved. I remember dragging the temperature slider in the early version of…
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At the midway point through March, the daylight is flooding into Alaska’s interior. Further north, there is only a few more weeks of photographic opportunity for the aurora borealis. I hope to get out once or twice more, but by mid April the night sky is very bright up above the arctic circle, my favorite…
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I spent the last four days in the White Mountains National Recreational Area just north of Fairbanks. Its a trail system that strings together a series of little cabins that make for a magnificent ski, dogsled or snow machine trip. Most of the time was spent skiing and eating, with a tiny bit of aurora…
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I’ve been off the grid for a bit while venturing into Alaska’s arctic for a little aurora borealis photography. March can be a great month to shoot the aurora, but temperatures can be cold. It’s been a while since I picked up my camera, and there is a certain series of motions one needs to…
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In Alaska, the heart of the dog mushing season is now. Both the Yukon Quest and the Fur Rondy races are completed and the North American and Iditarod are beginning soon. I presume this timing was suited for a recent story in the American Profile, which is an insert magazine in newspapers across the country.…
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If you have ever traveled between Fairbanks and Delta Junction on a clear day, you’ve been under the spell of the Alaska range, which is visible in a spectacular array to the west of the road. Even some of the locals are not sure of the names of the prominent peaks, as their appearance changes…
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This magical pre-sunrise scene is one I have tried to photograph for a long time. After spending an exhaustively long day in the nearby Copper river, dipnetting and hauling 15 red salmon back to my vehicle with a backpack, I camped at a turnout that overlooks Willow lake (a landscape photographer will always camp by…
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Need I say more?
Since the previous post revealed a pretty severe scene of a moose cow and calf. I thought that it was time to post a happier story, which I encountered when going through my archives today. I posted this a long time ago on an old blog, but am revising it here with larger photos. It’s…
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I recently sold a photo from the most popular series of pictures and subsequent blog post of 2010. The image was chosen for the cover of a small magazine doing an article on the issue of wildlife management and predator control. The subject was the attack of a wolf pack on a moose calf, and…
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In the previous post I briefly discussed the general workspace and method I use to edit a folder of images in Lightroom. I began with 3,700 pictures from a shoot in Denali park, and after my first round of edits, followed by a second pass, I narrowed it down to 368 keepers. That’s about 10%,…
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As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’m sifting through 40,000 image files and getting them ready to be posted to a new website platform for stock photography sales. It is a daunting task, but progress continues. The process includes deleting old, outdated files, limiting redundancy, and applying a full-level processing endeavor to all files,…
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I’m curious, does anyone else out there have more than 24 USB cables in their drawer? I hope not. The time has come for a thorough overhaul of my computer parts drawer. It is both a disgusting and delightful process–to thin down to the essential and needed items–the disgusting part being how soon our world…
DetailsIts time to do some major “office cleaning” and in response to changing times, I’m changing a little bit of my direction and therefore have some photo gear for sale. Most of it is lighting equipment, but I have some other miscellaneous items as well. If you are local in Fairbanks, email me if you…
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As I’m immersed in the rather daunting task of culling, re-editing, re-processing, dust-stamping, keyword fixing–and on and on–of my entire Alaska archives of 40,000 image files, two 30 inch monitors come in handy. Mouse click reduction is one end goal, and screen real estate can limit those clicks especially in the specific task of scanning…
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