Alaska’s fascinating wild creatures
Paulet Island, just off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula hosts a giant colony of adelie penguins. The count varies year to year, but approximately 200,000 birds make for a notable population. They are constantly coming and going from the nesting sights to the sea, bringing food back to feed the growing chicks, often two…
The Black-browed Albatross, a sleek, beautiful and artfully soaring bird nests in giant numbers on the Falkland Islands (approximately 400,000 brids in total). The Falklands, or Islas Malvinas, depending on your political persuaision, lies about 2 days east (by boat) of the southern tip of Argentina. The islands are well vegetated, in contrast to the…
(Thanks to all of you who checked in on my blog while I was in Antarctica for a month. Postings were slim due to a busy schedule of work since my primary purpose was an expedition staff member. While this is primarily a blog about Alaska photography, I’ll be deviating to Antarctica over the next…
On the eve of Jan 6 we arrived at South Georgia Island after a few days of open ocean travel from the Falkland Islands. While artfully dodging a pathway through a beach littered with fur seals, elephant seals, and king penguins, my brain was in stimulus overload. This includes sight, sound, and smell. Two of…
I’m guilty of tight compositions. It’s a by-product of the school of thinking that frowns on cropping and feels that a single image needs to be self contained and compositionally defined when you push the shutter button. It’s a school of thought I no longer adhere to, but won’t get into that subject right now.…
I sold a photo for the second time recently, which prompts me to make a few comments about the potential life that lurks under some very seemingly dead digital captures. One day while driving the Dalton Highway in northern Alaska, I saw a bow hunter just a few yards off the road waiting for a…
Prior to 2009, the last time I went in search of mountain goats I carried a gun in my hands. That was 26 years ago. After climbing precipitous rocky cliffs for an entire day in pursuit of a billy, I almost gave up many times, thinking surely I would kill myself if I fell or…
Time to take a little bend in the road of still photography and explore some of the newly bundled features in today’s quickly evolving digital cameras-HD video. Since the inclusion of HD video in the Canon 5D Mark II, I’ve enjoyed playing around with it a bit, with an emphasis on “playing”. It is less…
Finding the all-round vehicle that suits multiple purposes, including photographic adventures, is not only difficult, but ultimately a compromise somewhere. I decided to own just one vehicle due to a proclivity towards minimalism (I’ll save breaking that rule for camera gear). In my search for a car there were a few important aspects I looked…
A few comments about photographing white subjects in white environments; in particular the issue of exposure and post production adjustments in Lightroom 2.5. Let me first state that I’ve always utilized an expose-to-the-right shooting style (you can explore that concept on luminous-landscape if you are unfamiliar with it). To summarize that briefly, it is a…