Tag: Photography

Alaska Airlines July 2010 Cover

Alaska Airlines July 2010 Cover

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I am pleased to share my latest cover image on Alaska Airlines. This is the 3rd time this year and the 2nd month in a row that they have selected one of my photographs for the cover of their in-flight magazine. I photographed this brown bear diving for a salmon when I visited the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary & Refuge in August 2006. My buddy & I were fortunate to be the only visitors the last week of August, so the ranger gave us a private tour. Even he said that he had never been to some of the areas that we hiked to. I had applied several years in a row for the lottery but never got a permit. Like most people, I had applied for the height of the salmon run and the bear congregation in July. This time I applied for the last week of the season and received a permit. So did 8 other people, but none of them showed up. I’ve was told that it is also easy to get a permit for the first week or two of the summer. So, keep those shoulder season dates in mind if you ever want to photograph brown bears and have McNeil River all to yourself.

Blahnukur Sunset 9

Blahnukur Sunset 9

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As my regular readers will note, I experienced mostly gloomy weather during my trip to Iceland. While the bad weather did nothing to overcome my Seasonal Affective Disorder, it did provide me with some incredible lighting conditions for landscape photography. The highlight of my trip was camping and shooting for 4 days at Landmannalaugar. I was disappointed that the colorful hills were covered in ash from the recent eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, but their was still plenty of spectacular scenery to shoot everywhere I looked. I explored the main hiking trails from the campground and became particularly enchanted with the geothermal steam vents at the base of Brennisteinsalda. I returned to this surreal location 2 nights in a row and was rewarded with this dramatic image when the clouds parted and the sun illuminated the summit of Blahnukur in golden light.

Barmur Sunset 5

Barmur Sunset 5

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Before I went to Iceland, I researched some of the locations that I intended to shoot, but had not paid that much attention to Landmannalaugar (pronounced Land-mann-a-loi-ger). This fantastic location, 4 hours from Rekjavik in the interior of Iceland, was a pleasant surprise. Fortunately, the 4WD road had just opened the week before my visit. After driving the final 40 off-road kilometers, two shallow river beds (with a rental car!) were the final obstacles between me and the scenic beauty that I was about to experience. I always try to get to a new location early enough to scout the area because I don’t like to be rushed, but it was definitely time to shoot once the car was parked. The sky was full of perfect cotton-candy clouds and the sun danced across the jaw-dropping scenery. I grabbed my camera gear and quickly set out to explore the river bed to the east of the campground. Within a half-hour of my arrival, I focused my attention on this composition to create this image.

Jokulsarlon Beach Sunset 2

Jokulsarlon Beach Sunset 2

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I’ve been intending to add some new images from my trip to Iceland, but have had a lot going on the last week. I was pretty underwhelmed by the photos that I’d seen of icebergs stranded on the beach in front of Jokulsarlon before my trip, so this location was not a priority for me to shoot. I scouted this location a few times in the middle of the night, but the clouds and light were terrible. I either did not shoot any pictures or deleted most of them once I got home. However, I created this surprisingly beautiful photograph at 12:30am on my last night at Jokulsarlon.  I love the color that the clouds reflected from the midnight sun. This translucent piece of ice made a nice foreground, as well as the repetition patterns of the larger icebergs behind it. This was also as dark as it got during my entire 15 day visit, which was great for shooting but not for sleeping.

Kaikoura Billboard

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Kaikoura Billboard

One of my underwater humpback whale images appears on billboards in New Zealand this month. (Anyone in NZ able to send me a picture?) When I first set out to make a living as a professional photographer, I initially found success selling fine-art prints through galleries & art shows. That business model ceased being effective with the down-turn in the economy, so I turned my focus to my website. Many of my modest sales now come from having good SEO. This sale is a perfect example. A design firm contacted me a few weeks ago after searching the web, offered me a reasonable usage rate, I emailed them the file, and they wire-transferred the money to me. How easy was that?

Atlantic Puffin 1

Atlantic Puffin 1

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This is my favorite Atlantic puffin image from my Iceland trip. I had wanted to do-over the puffins I shot on my first visit to Iceland 9 years ago. I was glad they were still around, though not in the same numbers I remembered. I only spent 1 night photographing them on the cliffs at Latrabjarg, but was fortunate the sky was clear at sunset which bathed the puffins in golden light. Just when I thought I would have the cliffs to myself, a tour group showed up. I can’t complain because I moved around enough to avoid the puffin-jams and still photographed some beautiful poses. The cliffs are between 50-100m high, so I got as close to the edge as I was comfortable, but people have fallen to their deaths by getting too close, including an unfortunate German tourist a week after my visit. My heart went out to his family when I heard the news. I’ve got many more puffin & Iceland images to share in the weeks ahead.

2010 ICPA Poster

2010 International Conservation Photography Awards

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Tonight is the awards ceremony for the 2010 International Conservation Photography Awards at the UW’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. The exhibit opens to the general public tomorrow. My image of a Steller sea lion underwater won 2nd Place in the Underwater category. It is featured on most of the promotional materials, including this poster that is currently displayed all around Seattle. I also received an Honorable Mention in the Landscape category for my “Badwater Salt Crust Sunrise 1″ image from Death Valley National  Park. I am really looking forward to seeing some of my friends, like Stuart Westmorland & Sean Bagshaw, and meeting a number of photographers that I only know online, including Todd Mintz, Jim Patterson, & David M Cobb.

Jokulsarlon Icebergs Sunrise 1

Jokulsarlon Icebergs Sunrise 1

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My regular readers know that I just returned from my 2nd trip to the beautiful but stark country of Iceland. I had previously visited Iceland in 2001 when I was beginning my photography career but had not yet mastered the camera.  I had several regrets from that 1st trip, so it was nice to put them to rest. Shooting conditions where incredibly difficult due to the constant cloudy weather. Also, because it is summer in the Arctic, the sun barely dipped below the horizon between 12-3am. This made for long nights of shooting, which required me to sleep during the day. I started to appreciate the demanding schedule of vampires. One of the locations that I was determined to photograph was Jokulsarlon. This spectacular lagoon is choked with icebergs that have calved off of the Breidamerkurjokull glacier. Is is an abstract photographer’s dream. I created this atmospheric image when the sunrise light briefly illuminated the tops of the thin layer of clouds at 3am.

Alaska Airlines June 2010 Cover

Alaska Airlines June 2010 Cover

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I am pleased to share my latest publishing accomplishment. My “Paradise Wildflowers” image from Mount Rainier National Park is the June 2010 cover on Alaska Airlines! This is also my 2nd cover with them this year. This picture is my all-time most successful art print and has been licensed numerous times since I created it in 2003. Most of my regular readers will know that I shot all of my landscape images up until last year with a Pentax 67 system. One of the challenges of that system was that I had limited depth-of-field compared to a 35mm system. In order to overcome that limitation, I created this image with Toyo 4×5 view camera, a Rodenstock 65mm large format lens, and a Horseman 6×9 roll film back. (Did I lose you, yet?) With the large format camera, I tilted the lens so that the flowers would be close to the camera while keeping the summit of Mount Rainier in focus. I also used my Singh-Ray Warming Polarizer and 2-stop Hard Graduated Neutral Density filter with Fuji Velvia film. I think that the exposure was about 10 seconds at f32, which is a life-time when waiting for a slight breeze to stop rustling the wildflowers. Now when I photograph flower landscapes like this, I use my Canon 5DmkII with a wide-angle lens with camera settings more like f16, 1/4 second, and 200 ISO. Since this was the first image that I ever took with my 4×5, I was still learning how to use it that morning. I mentioned that I used a 6×9 roll film back. All of my images that I shot were the 6×9 format except for 1 frame that overlapped the frame before it. That image perfectly cropped itself in the camera to 6×7 which is my favorite photo that you see here.  Beginners luck?

Stovepipe Sand Dunes Sunset 4

Stovepipe Sand Dunes Sunset 4

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I haven’t been out shooting this last month, just home editing photos, updating my website, completing submissions, and taking care of my family. I think that a lot of people think that I am always gone, but that is not the case. I spend almost 40% of each year traveling, but that still means that I am in Seattle with my family over 60% of the year. Since I work at home, I don’t leave my neighborhood, let alone my house all that often. I have enjoyed my recent time at home, but I am looking forward to flying to Iceland this weekend and creating incredible images!

Since I don’t have any brand-spanking-new images to share, I decided to post this dramatic sunset image that I created last January in Death Valley National Park. While exploring the sand dunes north of Stovepipe Wells, I was drawn to photograph these delicate mud-sand textures. This was one of those sunsets where nothing exciting happened until 15 minutes after the sun went down and the clouds brilliantly lit up neon pink. I know better than to put away my camera gear while there is still light left in the sky. Dramatic images like this are my reward for sticking out an otherwise unproductive afternoon.