Matanuska Glacier Sunset 1

Matanuska Glacier Sunset 1

Posted on

This image was created last week on the Matanuska Glacier in the Chugach National Forest in Alaska. I spent 2 nights photographing the glacier, and on the second night I caught a dramatic fiery sunset! If you followed along on my recent trip via Twitter/Facebook you might have seen some of my iPhone “sketches”, but nothing beats the “real deal” images from my Canon 5D mkII. Getting to this location on the tongue of the glacier was challenging. It involved crossing ankle-drowning silt and hopping over a few small crevasses. Once I found this precariously balanced rock for a foreground subject, I just waited for something magical to happen and it did.

Crystalline Hills Fall Reflection 1

Crystalline Hills Fall Reflection 1

Posted on

What can I say about Wrangell-St Elias National Park? I am spell-bound! It is America’s largest national park at 13.2 million acres, which is 6 times the size of Yellowstone. I did not see another photographer (or visitor!) during my entire trip. A week exploring the McCarthy Road area is not enough time, even with ideal photography conditions. I just scratched the surface. I had everything that a photographer could ask for: cobalt blue skies, brilliant golden aspen trees, crimson colored summits, mirror image reflection ponds, dramatic rainbows, and clouds the size of giant marshmallows. Above is a sample of my new images that I will be posting in the coming weeks.

I am currently in Anchorage waiting for my flight to Yakutat to visit my boat & winterize it. The weather forecast predicts unseasonably perfect conditions the next 2 days. Maybe my photo luck will continue?

Sierra Club Wilderness 2010 Cover

Sierra Club 2010 Wilderness Cover

Posted on

My above image, taken in Denali National Park in August 2006, is the cover photo of the 2010 Sierra Club Wilderness calendar! I’d visited this pond in 2005 but I never got this kind of light, or even saw the mountain. In 2006 I tried a few times to photograph Denali from this spot, but never got the mountain itself until my perseverance paid off with this dramatic and striking image. There are hundreds of ponds near the Wonder Lake campground and I’d walked by most of them, deciding that this was the nicest one that framed the mountain. It is  accessible via a strenuous 1 hour hike southwest of the campground. I missed the fall colors in Denali this year, but I am flying up to Anchorage on Monday to look for fall colors around the Chugach & Kenai for the next 10 days.  Wish me luck.

Lituya Bay Brown Bear

Alaskan Brown Bear in Lituya Bay

Posted on

I’ve been meaning to share this nice brown bear that I photographed during my visit in June to Lituya Bay on the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska. My buddy and I spent several hours following this gorgeous bear as it worked its way along the shore eating grass. We kept moving my inflatable to position ourselves to be able to shoot into the nicest sections of flowers, in case the bear happened to walk through them. I really like the eye contact that I got in this image. The bear was only about 15 meters away from us. I tried to keep my 15hp outboard engine idling, just in case the bear decided it did not want to be photographed. However, the engine died a few times, which made my nervous. Whenever I am around bears I am always surprised how disinterested they are in me. It is hard to convey that feeling to people who have never seen a bear in the wild. I used my Canon 5D mkII, 500mm f4 IS lens, at f4, 1/160 sec, at ISO 400. I was also hand-holding it, which gets hard with that big heavy lens.

One more note. I will be at Glazers Camera in Seattle this Saturday from 10-2 as part of their Gitzo Days promotion. I will be giving a free short presentation at 11. Please stop by and say hi.

Lamplugh Glacier Lupine 1

Lamplugh Glacier Lupine 1

Posted on

On my recent trip to Glacier Bay National Park, I returned with my boat to my favorite anchorage in the west arm of the bay at Reid Inlet to spend a few days exploring the beautiful scenery. One of my favorite photographic locations in the park is the Lamplugh Glacier. During my previous visits, I created some of my favorite landscape images on the moraine bar in front of the glacier at low tide. I have also seen photos of lupine in bloom with the glacier in the background, but had never been there at the right time to see it for myself. This time I was very fortunate that the lupine was going off! I spent one overcast afternoon patiently sitting with my camera set up and my finger on the remote trigger waiting for the wind blowing off of the glacier to stop. I was trying to shoot at something like f22, 1/6 sec, and ISO 200-400, but the wind just never completely died down to allow the flowers to sit still long enough for the picture I was after. (I have zero tolerance for wide angle flower shots with flower movement.) So, I came back the next day and was rewarded with a few long pauses in the wind that allowed me to create this beautiful photo.

Torch Bay Sea Otters 1

Torch Bay Sea Otters 1

Posted on

After spending 5 days in Lituya Bay, we headed back towards Cape Spencer and Elfin Cove in very calm sea conditions, but heavy overcast clouds. My cruising guidebook said that there were a lot of sea otters in Torch Bay, so since we were passing by we stopped to have a look. Normally, sea otters in Alaska disappear when they see you coming from 1/4 mile away. (This is probably a genetic trait of some kind from the few sea otters that survived the fur trade!) We found some super friendly/mentally challenged sea otters that let us follow them around for a few hours. I usually hand hold my 400mm f4 DO IS lens on the boat, but I had let another photographer borrow it. Instead, I had his 500mm f4 IS lens. This lens is not meant to be hand held for 3 hours. Dominik was kind enough to pilot the boat while I set up my tripod and gimble head on the back deck. I was also fortunate that my boat has an enclosed canvas back deck because it was raining while I was trying to shoot. This is one of my favorite images. The momma kept diving down to forage and when she returned to the surface she had to eat pretty fast before her baby came over and demanded its share. Kids are all the same, aren’t they?

Lituya Bay Sunset 1

Lituya Bay Sunset 1

Posted on

After trying to visit Lituya Bay the previous 2 summers, I was finally successful last week! My friend Dominik Modlinski joined me for a 12 day cruise that included the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park. My boat Serenity is a 22′ C-Dory, which is a pretty small boat for cruising in the Gulf of Alaska. I needed a perfect weather forecast to insure our safety, and this time we got it. After departing Juneau and cruising to Elfin Cove, we began the 60 mile journey up to Lituya Bay in calm seas, but low visibility. We joked that we were cruising on a lake, rather than the North Pacific Ocean. The National Weather Service didn’t predict any big storms, so I knew that we were going to be able to safely run up and back within a week.

Lituya Bay is a spectacular location that few people visit. It has a long dark history that culminates with the July 9, 1958 mega-tsunami that yielded the largest recorded wave in history. The wave was initiated by an 8.3 magnitude earthquake which caused the mountainside at the head of Crillon Inlet to collapse into the bay. The resulting “splash” sent a wall of water up the opposite mountainside to a height of 1,720 feet. As the wave turned and continued, it destroyed every tree in it’s path up to 100 feet about the water before exiting the bay.  Three fishing boats were anchored near La Chaussee Spit at the time, and only 1 boat and its crew survived.

The native Tlingit people were afraid of Lituya Bay. The pre-European Tlingits had a horror of death by drowning, which interrupts the soul’s cycle of cremation and rebirth, giving rise to baleful beings called Land Otter Men. Lituya Bay had many, and when angry they were known to shake the bay and flush it clean of living things. Russians of the Bering expedition found the bay in 1741, but lost 15 men there in the vicious seas. In 1786, the explorer La Pérouse also lost 21 of his men in the extreme tidal currents at the entrance to the bay. In 1853 or 1854, a great wave swept the bay and killed all of the native inhabitants. Other recorded waves came in 1899 and 1936, but by this time, no one lived in the bay any longer due to its fierce reputation.

With all this dark history on my mind, why then did I want to visit Lituya Bay you ask? I have always been an adventurer whether it was extreme alpine climbing or swimming in the deep blue with whales & sharks. I strive to visit places that are just a bit on the edge.  I am bored otherwise. While in Lituya Bay, I definitely felt a bit uneasy by the history of the place. I always felt the presence of the bay’s tragedies in my mind like a guillotine ready to drop at any unsuspecting moment. However, the pure beauty of the place and the incredible amount of wildlife that I saw while visiting convinced me that it is a primeaval paradise. These lupine in bloom along La Chaussee Spit at sunset one night are a testament to life’s eternal cycle of death and rebirth. Lituya Bay for me was a dream realized. I do not know if I will ever be fortunate enough to go back, but I hope to some day.

Fern Harbor Sea Otter 30

Fern Harbor Sea Otter 30

Posted on

I got my copy of the May issue of Alaska magazine the other day with this sea otter image featured on pages 20-21! I took this photo last July while spending a week near Taylor Bay on the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park. It was raining and terrible weather, but at least I was stuck in a secure anchorage called Fern Harbor. I spent several days in a row following this sea otter around the bay in my inflatable. In the shallow water, I could sea him foraging underneath my boat and anticipate where he was going to come back up to the surface to get this shot. It was a lot of fun.

Tracy Arm Harbor Seal 28

My Top 10 Favorite Photos of 2008, #7

Posted on

I first visited Tracy Arm Fjord in Southeast Alaska during the summer of 2007 with my friend and fellow photographer Florian Schulz and his wife Emil. We tried to photograph harbor seals and their pups resting on the floating icebergs without success. The seals would not let us get close to them since they were easily startled and saw us coming from far away in my bright red inflatable. All last winter I thought about how to photograph them and came up with the idea to cover my pontoons with white shower curtains to disguise my boat as an iceberg. In June, I returned to try my new plan and was successful! I initially tried to cover the entire boat and hide underneath the blind I created, but this did not seem to work, so I eventually only covered the pontoons, got down low in the boat, and slowly drifted towards the seals. My goal was to not disturb them in anyway, and most of the time I successfully drifted past sleeping seals that occasionally looked up. Most of the images I’ve seen of harbor seals on icebergs are taken from long distances from high angles on large tour boats. What I like most about the images I created was that I was down so close to the water. It makes me feel more like I am part of their world. I also really like the nice blue background of this image. I used my Canon 5D, 400 mm f4 DO IS lens, 1.4X tele-converter at f5.6 and 1/400 second.

Fern Harbor Sea Otter 14

My Top 10 Favorite Photos of 2008, #8

Posted on

I got rained on almost continuously for 15 days in July while waiting for a favorable weather window to make the dangerous run from Elfin Cove up the outer coast of Glacier Bay National Park to Lituya Bay. I never got the chance. The reality of motoring around in the North Pacific in 15’+ seas just did not interest me. While passing away the time, I got to spend a few days in one of my favorite locations, Taylor Bay near Cape Spencer. It is an area of unimaginable beauty and pure wilderness. Rugged sea stacks on the coast meet glaciers that come down to the sea surrounded by 12,000′ mountains. Unfortunately, the weather made it impossible to shoot any spectacular landscape scenes, but I did spend a few days photographing the most uninhibited sea otter that I have ever encountered. Usually, sea otters will not let me get within 100 yards of them before they dive down to escape. I have no idea how they were almost exterminated when they used to be hunted. They are just so incredibly shy. This male let me follow him around in the pouring rain in my inflatable. He would swim from one side of the bay to the other all the while diving down and eating everything that he could catch. Sea otters need to eat something like 25% of their body weight every day. Often, he would be visible in the shallow water directly underneath my boat, so I could watch him forage and anticipate where he was going to come back up to the surface to photograph him. This is my favorite image. He captured 2 crabs and brought them back to the surface to eat. I caught this comical expression with his mouth open while eating. This image was created using my Canon 5D, 400mm f4 DO IS lens at f4 and 1/500 second.