Seward, Alaska.

This is my awesome little hometown during some nice weather last week!  Since I was flying in a helicopter with the doors off on my way to Bear Glacier, I thought I would grab a few photos of my favorite town.  I kinda like this photo as it shows not only the town, but the boat harbor and the trail up Mt. Marathon – two things that really help define this coastal community.  For those that don’t know, the 4th of July race up and down Mt. Marathon is the second oldest foot race in the United States, second to only the Boston Marathon – and a huge visitor draw to Seward each year.  Once upon a time I used to run the race, now I save the mileage on my knees for packing camera gear.

Wild lynx, Denali National Park, Alaska.

This is one of those moments in nature where you think, wow, I wonder what is going to happen next?  I had been sitting on the ground watching this young lynx hunt in the alders for about 20 minutes – I also saw a couple of snowshoe hares make a lucky escape when they saw it coming.  Then, without warning, it turned and began walking right towards me like a curious house cat.  The image above was captured with a 100-400 on a full frame camera.  Gosh, I could have had head shots if I still had my 600 and converter on!

So what happened next?  A vehicle of Park Service employees came around the corner – needless to say they were thrilled to see such a rare animal and when they pulled up and began photographing, the lynx turned around and went back to hunting in the alders.  The group of us were able to watch and photograph this young lynx for another 15 minutes – definitely a thrill!

Wild wolf, Denali National Park, Alaska.

Finally getting a chance to share some more of my photos from my trip to Denali earlier this month.  Look at the difference in the appearance of this beautiful wolf in two photos taken just 7 seconds apart.  The first one looks nice a friendly like a family pet, the second one…

Wild wolf yawns, Denali National Park, Alaska.

This wolf was passing by me at a fast pace – I didn’t think I had too many options except maybe a pan / blur when all of a sudden she stopped and laid down in some really sweet light!  The bottom photo was taken at f/13 thinking I would be panning, the top one was dialed down to f/4 so that I could limit the depth of field, and improve the background and foreground by blurring the distracting elements.

Ocras, Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska.

Last week, the day following my trip to the amazing Bear Glacier Lagoon, I went back into Kenai Fjords National Park for about a 12 hour boat trip – the highlight had to be the two hours we spent with a large pod of orcas, also known as killer whales.  I captured a lot of photos of them I liked, but this one with the mountains in the background was one of my favorites.

Bear Glacier Lagoon, Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska.

Can you see the kayaker?  I paddled around this massive iceberg to include Janine on the far side of the old tunnel to put the scale in perspective. She was well back from the arch and the iceberg, so that exaggerates the appearance of scale a bit, but it wasn’t safe getting any closer – but still, this thing was huge!

This amazing place is less then 15 miles from Seward – I have been trying to get in there for years and was finally able to this week, and all I could keep thinking was wow!  The icebergs are mammoth.  Hundreds of feet long, and maybe 50 feet tall – maybe more.  Truthfully, those are just wild guesses because I have no sense of scale out there.  The place is amazing!  The place is also crazy dangerous.  Icebergs would roll or break without warning – we watched 6 seals get thrown unexpectedly into the lagoon when a berg they were resting on rolled.  The 34 degree water coupled with the fact we were the only two people in the whole area just adds to the risk.

Gosh, I had more bear and puffin photos from Lake Clark National Park I was going to post, then we went to Denali, I still have a number of wolf photos from there I wanted to share, but now I have had a couple of great days in Kenai Fjords to share!  It has been nice to have a really productive couple of weeks since I really didn’t get too much photography done in the first half of the summer – I did get a ton of office work done, but being in the field is way funner!

Well I now have finalized my dates for next summers Alaska Bear and Puffin Photo Tour.  This past summer’s tour was a blast, and I have had a lot of requests for next year, so we have more then doubled our offering for next year.  We have already received several bookings for next years tour.

Here is a little video I made from this summers tour to give people a bit of an idea on what the photo tour is all about.  This is one of the reasons I purchased a Canon Rebel T2i.  This was my first attempt at putting together a video – I gotta admit, the learning curve is very steep!

Your Big Backyard magazine cover!

Here is another really cool recent cover – I hadn’t seen this magazine before, but it is a great one for kids produced by the National Wildlife Federation.  This particular issue is on desert wildlife and also includes this photo of an American Kestrel from Anza Borrego.

Kenai Fjords Tour boat, Resurrection Bay, Seward, Alaska.

We had our first break in the rain in about a month late last week, and I was able to take advantage of our brief bit of nice weather to do an aerial photo assignment for Kenai Fjords Tours.  I love photographing from a helicopter with the doors removed, it is such a rush.  I have been able to do it many times in Alaska for clients like the Alaska Railroad, National Park Service and the Forest Service, and have even chartered helicopters in Los Angeles and San Diego.

I think one of the things that makes it so much fun is the challenge – and that started with the comment the pilot made before we took off.  He said if I lean out the door and have my head phones blow off that they would get sucked into the tail rotor and we would crash and die.  OK, I think I can remember that now.

So between the thrill of looking straight down to the ground, and having to think that your life depends on not dropping head phones or a camera lens, you have so much more to think about.  The composition is constantly changing, as is the light, background, exposure and focus.  You need to coordinate with the captain and pilot, anticipate when I’ll have a open shooting window, watch to keep prop out of the scene, because it will show in photos even though you don’t see it in person, keep track of the background.  I think you get the idea  – lots of action and excitement, an hour can really “fly” by!

Polychrome Pass, Denali National Park, Alaska.

A polychrome sky over Polychrome Pass last weekend!

Last week while we were in Denali the photo blog passed the 4 year mark!  In August 2006, it started very slow, but now it continues to steadily grow, and I’m grateful to all the people who follow our travels!  The blog now averages 2,500 unique visitors a day, plus some 800 who subscribe via the RSS feed or email, and another 800 or so who follow via Facebook, and even more via Twitter.  Although these numbers pale in comparison with our main photo website, they are still very significant and growing, and I wanted to take a minute to say thanks!

Dall Sheep, Denali National Park, Alaska.

Another photo from last weeks trip to Denali.

Sunset over the Teklanika River valley, Denali National Park, Alaska.

This was a wonderful, long lasting sunset last Friday night in Denali!

For those of you familiar with the movie or the book Into the Wild (Great book and movie by the way) this is the river that Chris McCandless wasn’t able to cross  to escape from the bus – this spot is maybe 15 miles upstream from his location.

A couple of bull moose in front of Mt McKinley, Denali National Park, Alaska.

It seems weird to call it Mt McKinley since no one, including myself ever calls it that in conversation, but I guess that is the official name.

Anyone who has hiked on tundra can tell you how hard and slow it is to move on such soft, uneven ground.  Well, now I can tell you it is even harder to run on the tundra, especially in Xtra tuffs boots, but that is what I had to do to keep “The Mountain” directly behind these massive moose.  They would take 10 steps to the right, I would have to take 50!

I knew the moose would still be in velvet during this trip.  That initially was disappointing, but in hindsight it did make exposing for them much easier as I didn’t have to worry about blowing out the exposure on the racks which is so easy to do.

Normally I would use a two or 3 stop hard edge graduated neutral density filter here, but I had left mine back in the truck.  So I auto bracketed exposure, and I used Photo shop to manually combine two images captured two stops apart after I returned to the office.

Wild lynx, Denali National Park, Alaska.

I love these rare animals!  The crazy hare population boom in Denali has definitely crashed, and from all I have read, the lynx population will follow a similar trend with a year lag – so I thought this might be one of my best chances to get more photos of a lynx at least for many years to come – so I was thrilled to spend about a half hour with two of them in Denali last week.  I have a similar image with it looking right at me, but I think I prefer this version with it looking off into the brush.

I had an awesome trip to Denali.  Along with lynx, I had wonderful close up experiences with wolves at least every day, saw huge moose, great sheep, bears, nice sunsets and sunrises, and even had the mountain out a couple of times!

Grizzly bear sow and cub, Denali National Park, Alaska.

This is a photo from my trip to Denali earlier this summer.  It was a great trip -lots of bears and wolves, two of my favorites as you probably know by now.

I pre-scheduled this as I headed out the door early yesterday morning to make the long drive back up there for more photography.  I’m not taking a laptop, so this will be the last post until Tuesday.

Former Alaska Senator Ted-Stevens weighing salmon at the Seward Silver Salmon Derby, Seward, Alaska.

This photo dates back to 1998 – a couple years before I became a professional photographer.  I walked down to check out the Silver Salmon Derby action with my camera and flash, and was surprised to see Senator Ted Stevens weighing salmon as a volunteer.  It wasn’t a figurehead kind of role for show, he was actually handling the salmon just like myself and all the other people who would volunteer there during the week – no media, photographers or film crews in sight.

I thought it was pretty cool to see one of the most powerful people in the United States volunteering at our little town’s  salmon derby – I had to get a photo.  When he saw me positioning myself for the photo, he turned and pretended to throw a salmon at me – that is the photo above.  He stopped at the last second holding on to the fish – gave me a quick smile, then proceeded to go about his business.

When I read about his passing yesterday I thought about this moment – dusted off and scanned the old slide and decided I would post it here.  Rest in peace Senator Stevens.

A Brown bear sow, Lake Clark National Park, Alaska.

I actually did photograph other bears besides cute little playful cubs!  Not  a lot, but a few.

I rarely place my subject in the dead center of the frame like this, but here I felt like it just “worked”.

Cover - Endless Vacation Magazine

It is an honor to have an image on the cover of Endless Vacation – a large travel magazine based in Mexico, so I thought I would do a little shameless self promotion blog post to share the news.

Las Vegas – this has got to be the polar opposite of photographing brown bears in a remote Alaska camp!

Brown bear cub, Lake Clark National Park, Alaska.

This little cub might look like he has a headache, but after watching him off and on for the last 4 days, I can say he has a pretty fun life of climbing logs, playing with sticks, playing with mom, nursing and eating – I don’t think he has a headache!

I just returned from my 4 day Alaska bear and puffin photo tour and I had a blast!   I knew we would have lots of bears – males, sows, cute cubs and even puffin, but I didn’t know I would have such a fun group.  Great stories and lots of laughs, it was really a fun time!

I will be offering two, 4 day tours with a limit of 6 people each next year around August 6 through the 12 with the possibility of doing the entire time for someone who would like more time with the bears.  Stay tuned for more details in the upcoming weeks.

Richard, Mike, Irene, Pam, Wilson and myself and the end of a fun tour.

Brown bear cub tries to "summit" large log, Lake Clark National Park, Alaska.

This little guy sure had fun climbing and playing on this giant log, and we sure had fun watching him!

Brown bear cub standing on his hind legs, Lake Clark National Park, Alaska.

Yesterday (Sunday) afternoon I began my Alaska bear and puffin photo tour and in just the first afternoon it has already been an awesome trip!  Great group of people and lots of bears!  Sow with cubs, males – all real close, we even hand a sow nurse a young cub right in front of us!  Gotta keep it short, hopefully I will have time for another quick post while I’m over here this week, otherwise we I get back to Seward later this week.

Nursing brown bear cub, Lake Clark National Park, Alaska.